Baker's tale of a romantically yearning poet is a sequel to The Anthologist, but charms as a stand-alone love story
Mark Lawson - The Guardian,
Illustration by clifford harper/agraphia.co.uk
The fiction of Nicholson Baker, after 10 books, divides fairly neatly between two categories: the wacko and (to borrow from Philip Roth's Portnoy's Complaint) the whack-off.
In the first group are eccentric, obsessive monologues packed with pedantic domestic detail: his debut, The Mezzanine, in which a man spends the entire book buying a sandwich, and A Box of Matches, which records the Baker-like author's waking thoughts during a month. The second set contains works that probe and penetrate the membrane between literature and pornography: House of Holes, The Fermata and the phone-sex duologue Vox, which, as one of the love gifts that President Clinton sent to Monica Lewinsky, made the writer literally a footnote in the Starr Report into allegations of White House impropriety.
Baker's 10th novel, Travelling Sprinkler, belongs with those books in which the brain, rather than the penis, seems to be the organising organ. It's a sequel to an earlier work, The Anthologist, although the British publisher makes no mention of this, presumably fearing sales lost to those who believe it necessary to have read the predecessor.
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Note:
Published by Profile Books and distributed in NZ and Aust by Allen & Unwin.
NZ pub. date 1 July - RRP $26.99
In the first group are eccentric, obsessive monologues packed with pedantic domestic detail: his debut, The Mezzanine, in which a man spends the entire book buying a sandwich, and A Box of Matches, which records the Baker-like author's waking thoughts during a month. The second set contains works that probe and penetrate the membrane between literature and pornography: House of Holes, The Fermata and the phone-sex duologue Vox, which, as one of the love gifts that President Clinton sent to Monica Lewinsky, made the writer literally a footnote in the Starr Report into allegations of White House impropriety.Baker's 10th novel, Travelling Sprinkler, belongs with those books in which the brain, rather than the penis, seems to be the organising organ. It's a sequel to an earlier work, The Anthologist, although the British publisher makes no mention of this, presumably fearing sales lost to those who believe it necessary to have read the predecessor.
More
Note:
Published by Profile Books and distributed in NZ and Aust by Allen & Unwin.
NZ pub. date 1 July - RRP $26.99
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