The Review of Contemporary Fiction

A Larger Sense of Harvey by Dimitri Anastasopoulos
David Madden

Dimitri Anastasopoulos. A Larger Sense of Harvey. Mammoth, 2001. 413 pp. Paper: $18.00.

A Larger Sense of Harvey is a challenging, multilayered-structurally and thematically-first novel. The work is a book of parts: selections from journals and documents amassed from a lifetime’s work by Harvey Rocketsch, a seemingly insignificant journalist from Russia who suddenly finds himself in a research project of international intrigue. From his earliest days, Harvey has lived most fully in his imagination and in the language he manipulates to express it. His connection with the empirical is tenuous, though he lives by an aesthetic of inclusiveness-whatever is felt, seen, experienced (down to the most minute ticks or bodily functions), or thought-that defines his identity and his prose. He is commissioned to work on langoo-adj, a new age Esperanto, designed to cut the imprecision, overabstraction, and profligacy of words that engender unclean reasoning. During this work he falls into a love triangle with Bete, coordinator of the project, and Ambrose, his translator, mentor, and alter ego. The densely coiled relationship between the two men forms the center of the novel and its narrative concerns with identity and language as a medium of expression. À la Kinbote in Nabokov’s Pale Fire, Ambrose has so thoroughly interposed himself between Harvey and the reader that one is never sure of the authorship of any passage, and the novel even begins with a preface acknowledging the indecipherability of authorial identity. The novel is as postmodern as it sounds, a deconstructive delight (or nightmare), with each incident undone by its parallel or opposite. For this reason the novel is a bit too clever. Its very aesthetic of inclusiveness leads to sections that are simply diffuse and poorly focused. There is no question that Anastasopoulos is a talented writer who has read widely and possesses a fertile imagination; it will be interesting to see where his career takes him. [David Madden]


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The Review of Contemporary Fiction A Larger Sense of Harvey by Dimitri Anastasopoulos David Madden Dimitri Anastasopoulos. A Larger Sense of Harvey. Mammoth, 2001. 413 pp. Paper: $18.00. A Larger Sense of Harvey is a challenging, multilayered-structurally and thematically-first novel. The work is a book of parts: selections from journals and documents amassed from a lifetime’s work by Harvey Rocketsch, a seemingly insignificant journalist from Russia who suddenly finds himself in a research project of international intrigue. From his earliest days, Harvey has lived most fully in his imagination and in the language he manipulates to express it. His connection with the empirical is tenuous, though he lives by an aesthetic of inclusiveness-whatever is felt, seen, experienced (down to the most minute ticks or bodily functions), or thought-that defines his identity and his prose. He is commissioned to work on langoo-adj, a new age Esperanto, designed to cut the imprecision, overabstraction, and profligacy of words that engender unclean reasoning. During this work he falls into a love triangle with Bete, coordinator of the project, and Ambrose, his translator, mentor, and alter ego. The densely coiled relationship between the two men forms the center of the novel and its narrative concerns with identity and language as a medium of expression. À la Kinbote in Nabokov’s Pale Fire, Ambrose has so thoroughly interposed himself between Harvey and the reader that one is never sure of the authorship of any passage, and the novel even begins with a preface acknowledging the indecipherability of authorial identity. The novel is as postmodern as it sounds, a deconstructive delight (or nightmare), with each incident undone by its parallel or opposite. For this reason the novel is a bit too clever. Its very aesthetic of inclusiveness leads to sections that are simply diffuse and poorly focused. There is no question that Anastasopoulos is a talented writer who has read widely and possesses a fertile imagination; it will be interesting to see where his career takes him. [David Madden]

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