| Title | : | Impossible Object |
| Author | : | |
| Rating | : | |
| ISBN | : | 1564784657 |
| ISBN-10 | : | 9781564784650 |
| Language | : | English |
| Format Type | : | Paperback |
| Number of Pages | : | 219 |
| Publication | : | First published September 1, 1968 |
| Awards | : | Booker Prize (1969) |
In these closing lines from Impossible Object, one has embodied both Nicholas Mosley's subject of love and imagination, as well as his unmatched lyric style. In eight carefully connected stories that are joined by introspective interludes on related subjects, the author pursues the notion, through the lives of a couple seen by different narrators, that "those who like unhappy ends can have them, and those who don't will have to look for them."
The impossible object of the title, "the triangle that can exist in two dimensions but not in three," is a controlling symbol for the impossibility of realizing the good life unless one recognizes the impossibility of attaining it: only then can it be possible to realize it, through a kind of renunciation, especially in "a sophisticated, corrupt, chaotic world." Such a provocative theme, comic or tragic by turns, was met by critics in 1968 as brilliant, insightful, intense, and moving, but especially original.
Impossible Object Reviews
-
Impossible Object of the title is human life… And the book is a tragic comedy of living…
The crusades were a proper time in which to observe human nature – the pursuit of holiness for the sake of money, the use of torture for the sake of identity, a time of passionate care and commitment. Those who distributed pain were politicians; those who profited, saints. Either way life was not easy; unless you died young, which was recommended.
And the book is a tragic comedy of loving… And as the zeitgeist dictated the book is delightfully psychedelic…They were in love. They seemed a definition of this term – like dinosaurs of extinction. Love is out of date now because it is annoying to others; exposure causes embarrassment.
Existential concepts are bountiful… Smart reminiscences and allusions are plentiful…What had made Nietzsche say that he had murdered God was, the police alleged, a visit he had made to a brothel in Bonn twenty years earlier. There he had caught syphilis, did not marry, and went insane…
I remembered a fairy story by Oscar Wilde in which Narcissus looks into his pool and asks the water what it thinks of him; and the water answers that it sees its own reflection in his eyes…
I was reading Suetonius. In Suetonius, men and women do little except murder one another.
All’s fair in love and war – that’s life. -
I have always known life is impossible. Stories are symbols in which impossibilities are held.
Love is Noise.
The impossibility of life. The impossibility of love.
Love is silence.
In love you’re human.
In love you possess magical powers.
In love you shelter yourself.
In love, you expose yourself.
You open a book, read the first few lines and instantly become aware about the promise of beauty the words carry within them. This feeling is immediately followed by the sadness at the thought of reaching the last page, reading the last word and finally closing the book. Roses. The last word of Impossible Object. A lovely goodbye. An excruciatingly beautiful read.
A labyrinthine reality is captured when one tries to define something incomprehensible or something impossible. You’re aware about the existence of a definite entry and an exit but the journey, the ‘going through’, the suffering, the enjoyment rarely comes into our grasp in its entirety. Still one keeps on trying and can only wish to come close to the perfection which Nicholas Mosley has achieved with this book. He introduces you to a dimensionless world which is held together by myriad impossibilities flourishing in random lives under the mystic shadows casted by different phases of love.
Love is water surrounded by air. Out of timelessness you create an eternal present.
Mosley has created Impossible Object out of such timelessness. With small vignettes of fiction crafted out of historical myths and forming a connection with the contemporary world, he has explored the subject of love, of women and men in love, and ingeniously described how good as well bad are an innate part of this universal notion which is probably known to us since the beginning of time. In the beginning there was love. Through eight interconnected stories, some respecting a coherent pattern and some dancing on their individual tunes, a reader is constantly challenged to make sense of Mosley’s art while assuring oneself that being conventional is simply not his style and yet whatever he’s doing with words is beyond astonishing.
Relationships are dicey wherein the gender roles undergo a perpetual change and the balance between love and power shifts with the occurrence of unlikely circumstances. You associate your faculty of feeling emotions, of acting and reacting following the actions and reactions of other person and realize that irrespective of what you have perceived till now about the permanence of few things are actually suffering from a fatal vulnerability. You’re capable of inflicting pain. You’re capable of getting hurt. You’re a merchant of unhappy endings. You’re a believer of miracles.
Even when there is no hope, you go on trying. This is a good occupation. There are sometimes miracles.
With stories of others, our story happens side by side. Thousand thoughts culminate into one reality and years of blurry past culminates into a new reincarnation. In all this, something remains out of reach, like harmless thoughts of the present, ready to metamorphose into unforgivable regrets of the future. Such is love. Such is life.When God arrived in the Argentine he had his forged papers and remodelled nose and just the clothes he stood up in and nothing else...He lay out on the beach all day and watched the girls playing volley-ball. He read his obituaries.
This book was published in 1968 and reading it in 2013 made me appreciate it a lot more since Mosley reminded me of my favorite books and writers. Apart from being a splendid example of metafiction, there is a strong reflection of
Wittgenstein's Mistress in dreamy musings of characters, there is a poetic touch of Woolf’s prose in the italic sentences, there are endearing repetitions which Javier Marías so effortlessly pulls off in his works and there is the presence of Italo Calvino’s sense of acute observation in describing the intangibility of human emotions. So here’s a writer, who must have been a brilliant student and later on become an influential teacher of literature, of words, of art.
Lucky are those who have read him and luckier are those who are yet to discover him.
We live in fantasies like wet shells: sometimes the sea comes in with the sound of the universe. Soon it would destroy us.
-
Gasping for air.
My dilated pupils losing focus, the letters of the last sentence starting to dance, they become blurred while I keep staring at the last page. It can not be, can it?
I rush back through the pages. Let’s read it all again. Looking for connections, trying to make sense out of this surrealistic random stream of consciousness.
Because this is what this novel is, right? Some out of sequence snapshots of the everyday tragedies in our domestic lives.
Round two.
My glance has fallen prey under that last sentence once again. Her low voice sounds clear. He warned her from the beginning. It isn’t our fault that everything works in opposites.
Can it be? The overwhelming certainty.
Eight fragile and brutal stories about the choices we make to be with someone, to abandon ourselves to that fate, not minding what punishments might be in store for having succumbed to our sinful desires, to have given our animal instinct free rein.
Each section appears separated by short dream-logic interludes on related subjects echoing powerfully with repeated symbolism, violent and sensual scenes mixed with philosophical questions, embracing also history and myth.
Told by constantly shifting unreliable narrators, mainly male voices except for the last section which is told from the feminine point of view, all voices tangle in metafictional form as the narrators are mostly writers often working on stories that treat the events in the novel.
This piece of experimental fiction evades comprehension and inclusion at first, the repeated details in different contexts or their slightly changed variations add confusion to this broken narrative, challenging the reader, making him doubt, moving him constantly back and forth in the story, all the while making him wonder what it is exactly that he is reading.
Stories within stories dealing with jealousy, bickering, boredom, negotiations, ecstasies and the destructive power of love and its contradictory demands and impossibilities.
And although the text oozes with lyricism and acumen, the real pleasure comes mostly in retrospect. By the empowering force of that ending, by everything coming full circle, the pieces of the puzzle finally fitting together.
The wholeness of such fractured views, the effort of understanding the whole three- dimensional image, enabling us to see the other side of ourselves, to acknowledge our alter ego and accepting that happiness can only be reached when one recognizes the impossibility of attaining it..
Tragically beautiful like Mozart’s “Lacrimosa”.
There are some things worth suffering for. Sometimes miracles occur.
”Impossible Object” is a living proof of the impact literature can have in us, in the way we can embrace the plural picture of human life. Books are like visionary hollows, which mirror our own inverted images, which show us the way we are doubled by others, which make us complete.
There is something our retinas can’t take in, perhaps we need mirrors or perhaps it takes art to give us some picture of the teeming reality that we partake of.
The object is that life is impossible; one cuts out fabrication and creates reality. A mirror is held to the back of the head and one’s hand has to move the opposite way from what was intenteded. page 188 -
I have a terrible compulsion to do as much hurt as I can while I can. I think this is what love is, an attempt to get what you can't and then to destroy it. There's a shred of sanity left which tells you what's happening; but this doesn't help, it only means you can't escape it.
A beginning with unformed conclusions and a ringing hollowness of all the spaces that have not been filled. The narrative is beautiful but splintered, with boundaries that would perpetually remain distant and undefined. There are recurrences and interlinking that rouse that comforting sensation of familiarity and recollection. The feeling of identifying and rescuing familiar objects in a speedy dissolution. What has been retrieved is the recognizable: the impossibility of love, its inherent complexity, its inability to be static and to survive in the precincts of desire, permanence, and purity. In love, some long for order amidst the chaos, some crave the ephemeral ecstasy. Love can be bashful, wraith-like, receding. It can be brutal, wounded, unforgiving. And there is pretense and art required; for its sustenance and for the making of impossibilities.
It isn’t our fault that everything works in opposites.
History and myth are awakened in these vignettes of quotidian conflicts of domesticity and parenting; in the fears, blame, and guilt. The opposites have been drawn to shape, in the observations and in the act of being observed. To hold the uneven, unyielding rims of something that is shapeless, dimensionless. The beautiful but coarse remnant of its fragility. The stories of men and women sheltered and exposed in love. They revoke something after it has been so delicately affirmed. There are ruptures in the self, between intellect and sensuality, freedom and restraint, illusions and reality. Their love contains the seeds of its own destruction. It has the desire to hurt, kill, and subsume. In love, they have their strategies. They prey on each other’s vulnerabilities. They inflict pain; to destroy themselves and save themselves. There is fight and there is surrender; there is such doubleness of it, such impossibility. And when reality takes the place of illusions, the present seeks shelter in the memory of the love, its unexpected intrusions, its withdrawals.
It was at these times that I did see what he meant about love being contained in some sort of impossibility, that we only possessed it when it was impossible.
-
The Object is to Get the Best of Both Worlds
I wanted to write you something impossible.
It occurs to me there are many alternative strategies you can employ to read this novel (which was first published in 1968, not that there's any inkling of the Summer of Love). So let’s start.
Imagine a spider web. There are several ways you can approach a spider web. You can encounter it unseen, unexpectedly, and recoil. You can detect it shining radiantly in the spring morning sun and admire it. You can return later, having forgotten it, and become entangled. “Impossible Object” is an exquisitely spun metafiction, not unlike a spider web. Having finished it, having the latter parts inform the earlier parts retroactively, you want to return to the beginning and start again. You want to get entangled. Let’s start again.
The novel is a post-modern sequel to Virginia Woolf’s “To the Lighthouse” in which a latterday Ramsay family embarks on a boat ride, without procrastination, but with tragic consequences. Let’s start again.
The novel is an impossible object written for a loved one and for us: “I wanted to write you something impossible, like a staircase climbing a spiral to come out where it started or a cube with a vertical line at the back overlapping a horizontal one in front. These cannot exist in three dimensions but can be drawn in two;by cutting out one dimension a fourth is created. The object is that life is impossible; one cuts out fabrication and creates reality. A mirror is held to the back of the head and one's hand has to move the opposite way from what was intended.” Let’s start again.
There are eight stories. With no effort at the truth, I’m going to give four of the characters names (for they are not all named). Nick is an unmarried writer. Harry is married to Elizabeth, but is having an adulterous affair with Natalie. Much of their affair occurs in a pub near the British Museum, which is frequented by Nick, while he is researching a biography on Nietzsche. Harry might be a conductor, a writer or the owner of a pirate radio station. Natalie might be a flautist or a poet.
Nick ends up writing voyeuristic stories about Harry and Natalie. Harry ends up writing a story about Nick. Natalie writes a story about Harry. However, there is a sneeking suspicion that Nick is Harry (“You can’t exist! Or you’re myself. You see how this is impossible!”), and that the stories about Harry and Natalie are narrated by Nick, so that Harry can write about himself in the third person. Or are they written by Nick, so that he can write about himself in the third person? Or did one person write all of the stories? And was that person, let's face it, Nicholas Mosley? Let’s start again.
This is the story of a love affair, not to be confused with the 1950 film by Michaelangelo Antonioni. Let’s start again. This is the story of a love story, not to be confused with a 1973 film by John Frankenheimer called “Story of a Love Story”, or is it? It is after all based on the novel and a script by Nicholas Mosley. Let’s start again.
You can read all of this and conclude, “That’s impossible”. The temptation is to cut out the fabrication and be left with the reality. In Frankenheimer’s script conferences, people said, “But look here, Nicholas, when all is said and done, what we have here is just a good straightforward love story!” The temptation is to say, “Love should be simple; truth should be all-of-a-piece. But if in fact they are not – then it is the temptation that causes delusion. Look around you: are not humans either tip-toeing along, or flat on the ground underneath, a tightrope?” Let’s start again.
Mosley wrote the novel when he was 44. Nick travels to Turin to research the city where Nietzsche went mad. He (Nietzsche) was 44 at the time. Nick also has an affair with an Alberto Moravia-styled Italian woman named Hippolyta, who seems to be as voluptuous as Nietzsche’s muse, Lou Andreas-Salomé.
Harry, on the other hand, is obsessed by a young woman with black hair who is at the same time mythical like Cleopatra. She too “had the sensuality of opposites – the youth and experience, the leanness and voluptuousness, which invited both protection and sadism.” Let’s start again.
There is no life without opposites. Love is cursed by opposites: “There is perhaps no love without power…You cannot force them, you can only let them grow… But love is total… It runs you...You can’t expect miracles. You trust.”
Love makes us desire the impossible. Harry wanted to “maintain the ecstasy.” Yet, Natalie, being practical, wanted “a life that was whole, that would have a future and not be impossible.”
Between them, Mosley is trying to convince us that all life is impossible; it’s shaped by fabrications; but we have to excise or exorcise them, in our thought processes and behaviour, in the way we approach them, in the hope that what emerges is reality. Somehow, “the object is to get the best of both worlds.”
Still, there isn't necessarily a happy ending. In fact, there's a soul-destroying ending that is so prolonged and powerful in its impact that it makes you forget this is a Post-modern Fiction. This is how it would be if the novel had a happy ending: Two dancers would come in front of the curtain and hold hands.
Impossible Cube
"Cube with Magic Ribbons" (1957) by M. C. Escher
SOUNDTRACK:
J.S. Bach - "Flute Concerto in g-minor"
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KoU90_...
Master Musicians of Joujouka
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uGMbZN...
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=20x1OZ...
Rolling Stones - "Continental Drift"
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f3slxN...
Rolling Stones - "Can You Hear The Music?"
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4ABO4I...
“And those who were seen dancing were thought to be insane by those who could not hear the music”: Friedrich Nietzsche
Nicholas Mosley - "Writing Life Pt 4"
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=60GWbb... -
Style is lyrical yet explosive, Implosive. Inexplicable. Now that I've solved that let's move on.
I don't read other reviews first fearing I will be influenced by them. After writing my own review I often realize I should have. This is a particularly difficult book for me to write about since I was adrift through much of it. I laid out numerous dots across the living room floor seeing if I could connect any. I don't feel comfortable being adrift yet these are the books I am drawn to. This is my reading world and introduced myself to Mosley who I believe was sitting there waiting for me, or not.
The first chapter or part is so cringe-crawled, tightened with suspense where the house could easily have burnt down around me, a newsperson's microphone thrust in front of me while I sat reading, and I would have shot a hand up before the national audience, pleading for just two more minutes to finish. The rest of the book swirls eloquently through the numerous shadings, predicaments, expressions, of the voluminous varieties of love. Each story is fascinating. This is the word I would call his style, the contents of each story. Held together in the unity of a novel through repetition of objects, events, cunning yet simple. Characters appear, vanish, reappear. The same or similar events told in different points of view. Mine never being asked for or consulted in any way. That was good because as much as I was enjoyably drifting in the enriched eloquence of style I often had nod idea who was saying what, when. Yet, I felt Mosley somehow was in charge providing an unknowable direction; providing, like a good father, protection and a sort of safety for his readers. Even when temperatures dropped and tornadoes whipped the land his sure style, unforgiving form, and structure never wavered.
What endures, even through an ending so breathtaking that I don't believe it can be read out loud, is the theme of impossibility. What we seek is love. Love is what we long for. What is comprised of longing is prone to being built on a fortress of imagination. This is the path to a heavenly life of ecstasy. The contract gets cancelled when the longed for is reached and reality begins its replacement of imagination. Not the end of things. You hand the gatekeeper staunched at the path's opening your ticket to ride. He turns it over twice, calls a woman coworker to consult and the verdict is the ticket is insufficient. Don't even ask. The explanation, mixed with paradox and fluffs of cotton candy, is that imagination is necessary to pass through the gate.
Where I put on my life-jacket, tightened it secure, was the gradual revealing that I was not sure who was writing the story. Which character within the story wrote what that I was reading, themselves included as a character? Never was there the sense of nestled dolls within dolls. Too easy. I would have tossed the life-jacket aside. Was there a character writing the entire story within the story? Had Mosley slipped into the story and wrote it from within? About himself drifting through his different interior parts It is possible he may still be in there only to gain the ability to slip back out through further writing. I feel a responsibility of further reading his work to help him. A readers job may never be done...hopefully. -
There is a danger, or at least a temptation, on a social=networking=site, to be stalkerish. It is very easy to do. It is the design of the place, isn’t it? And perhaps a little dose of narcissism is necessary to curb that tendency. I mean the situation in which we are attempting, as amateur readers, to pick and choose books based on what other amateur readers have to say. Acknowledged that some of us are in fact not amateur readers. But how do we discern what will be for our preference based upon another’s word unless we know the preferences of that other person? In part we deal with this temptation to stalk by calling other amateur readers “Friends”.
This is not a very nice first paragraph for a Review of a very nice book. But isn’t that the temptation too when one is an amateur reader, to write up what occurs to one immediately upon completing a book, rather than writing about the book, ‘objectively’, if we can use that word correctly? Again, a temptation ; this time to go narcissistic a little too quickly and proverbially, ‘too far’. Because a little narcissism is necessary ; if only that others may more easily bear our proximity, we look into a mirror now and again.
Get on with it please. I have a preference for reading a certain kind of book ; (“kind of book” should always be understood in the plural). I also have the good taste to recognize what is worthy of one’s attention and what is not worthy of one’s attention. Impossible Object is worth your time. I suspect that many of Mosley’s books will be worth your time ; and more importantly, your attention. But it didn’t quite make me sing as it has made others sing. They clearly have good taste ; and they prefer something like Impossible Object ; I should too, I really should.
The structure here is very nicely done and the kind of thing we need more of ; superficially it resembles McElroy’s Smuggler’s Bible, consisting of several seemingly independent stories sewn together with inter-chapter flights into other territory, and in rather sharp contrast to the seemingly realist chapters. And Mosley writes about the writing of those stories with a hand lighter and more delicate than John Barth could only dream of doing. So all that formal stuff that is gleeful for a person like myself is in place. What went wrong? Nothing went wrong.
Nothing went wrong. It’s very likely one of those rare birds, a perfect novel. Great Gatsby might be one too, but I won’t spend any more of my time with it. I much prefer a perfect novel in the Coover mold ; but mostly I need all that extra flab which creates the ‘certain length’ and the ‘something wrong with it’ portions of the definition of the novel. And also I need a prose which gets more bendy like McElroy’s ; or, in fact like Mosley does quite well in those inter-chapter vignettes. But the chapters themselves were simple, delicate stories about ordinary love (which, as the cliche goes, is never ordinary) ; here too I prefer the violence of love which Nabokov wrote of in his famous book over the everydayness of micro-realism. Again, preference -- not taste.
Conclusion? Prefer the preferences of those who sing Impossible Object over my slight statement of... well, I do have a number of other Mosley books which I am still excited about reading. -
Mosley is so much more than a fascist’s son—a novelist and critic and historian too. As part of the five-book Catastrophe Practice series, culminating in his opus Hopeful Monsters, this short novel stands apart from the cows. Split into a series of first-person narratives that read at first like a sequence of unrelated short stories, the chapters slowly interweave their characters, plotlines, and peculiarities. As stand-alone stories, these chapters are stylistically exceptional. Mosley writes in a poetical and philosophical register, rarely tipping over into the pompous woolgathering of other English writers of the period, saved by the precision and beauty of his prose. For a sturdier poke around this work from Proustitute, see this
review from Proustitute. -
"Everything in woman is a riddle, and everything in woman
hath one solution —it is called pregnancy." --Nietzsche,
Thus Spake Zarathustra, p68
Or not.
In the Philosophical Department Store there is a whole section dedicated to Impossible Objects, ranging from ones which the imagination is incapable of even representing, to ones whose existence cannot be rationally supported by the logic of this universe, to ones that are impossible because they are composed of an internal contradiction. An example of the second one
is a symbol for the last variety that Impossible Object addresses, mostly regarding objects of desire, as when love provokes a desire to know entirely and thus possess entirely the whole of another, which we can't even do with ourselves.
This book is composed of eight interrelated stories, separated by italicized increasingly surreal musings on history, God, Nietzsche, narration, and love.
I don't know how grounded in fact it is, but among American Jews there is lore about how in the chaotic aftermath of WWII Jewish collaborators with the Nazis got quick beak adjustments from plastic surgeons and disappeared to South America, usually Argentina or Brazil. The strange and ambiguous italicized narrator puts God in a similar situation, retiring underground after Nietzsche helped fake his death: "When God arrived in the Argentine he had his forged papers and remodeled nose and just the clothes he stood up in and nothing else." Is this the "god" of the story's world ducking out on omniscience duty, abandoning us to fend for ourselves constructing meaning or finding unity? Beats me.
One of the Nietzschean themes alluded to in the italicized interstices is that of Eternal Recurrence, pitched most colorfully in
The Gay Science (no, not that kind of gay--unfortunately):"What, if some day or night a demon were to steal after you into your loneliest loneliness and say to you: 'This life as you now live it and have lived it, you will have to live once more and innumerable times more; and there will be nothing new in it, but every pain and every joy and every thought and sigh and everything unutterably small or great in your life will have to return to you, all in the same succession and sequence -- even this spider and this moonlight between the trees, and even this moment and I myself. The eternal hourglass of existence is turned upside down again and again, and you with it, speck of dust!' Would you not throw yourself down and gnash your teeth and curse the demon who spoke thus? Or have you once experienced a tremendous moment when you would have answered him: 'You are a god and never have I heard anything more divine'? If this thought gained possession of you, it would change you as you are, or perhaps crush you." [p 341]
The latter reaction is considered the rare one, while the former is a more common source of anxiety, if not about the literal truth of recurrence then the idea that nothing is new. The anxiety about eternal recurrence comes, in my opinion, from our internalizing expectations (or desires) for both novelty and authenticity and indeed the division of authenticity into one kind which is conflated with novelty (so it's not just a copy of something "already done") and another kind conflated with accepted norms and tested truths (so it's not just "made up"). Why else must things become passe? Why must there be fashions? Why must movements, styles, schools, and approaches be revamped, rebooted, replaced, but eventually returned to? All fine and dandy if we're talking about clothes or art, altogether different if we are talking about human relations, human sensations, and human feeling, expecting a simultaneous originality and universality, unique novelty and timeless authenticity.
This bifurcated notion of authenticity mirrors that of desire: if the opposite of desire is seen as satiation, the object of desire must promise satisfaction and yet forever withhold it; it must sustain an untenable contradiction. It must be an impossible object. Are you bored? I am. Let's get to the stories:
1. "Family Game" A tragic event occurs in the dark basement of the household of Husband One and Wife One.
2. "Intelligent People" Wife Two and Husband Two wake up together in a bed full of silent simmering resentments that motivate complex strategies of injury and reconciliation (but mostly injury) disguised as the most petty details of morning routine.
3. "Hummingbird" Infidelity is the theme as we return to Couple One, now on vacation in North Africa. Hypocrisy and gender double-standards are(n't) confronted.
4. "Public House" Husband One and Wife Two have clandestine meetings in a pub. The authenticity of their public demonstrations of love is undermined by being narrated as over-determined and self-consciously dramatized. Then Husband Two comes in and catches and confronts Wife Two and then later Husband One brings in Wife One and admits going there with Wife Two. All this becomes memories recalled from a leap into the future. So who is the narrator? He is Husband One writing about himself in a distanced third-person, so the phoniness he was imparting to the couple was in part reflexive. Much in the story contradicts this interpretation, but there is authoritative evidence for it.
5. "A Journey into the Mind" Husband One, working on a biography of Nietzsche, visits Rome and becomes involved with his married benefactor Hippolyta. They have stylized conversations, communicating in odd aphorisms and biographical non-sequitur. On their way to Torino where Nietzsche lost his mind they stop in Pisa where Hippolyta changes her mind and goes home and Husband One runs into his former lover, Wife Two.
6. "Suicide" Husband One despairs between visits from Wife Two and his own wife, Wife One, while working on some of the italicized text and possibly other stories in this book.
7. "Life After Death" Husband One, somewhat delirious, is menaced by what may be police or goons working for Husband Two, as Husband One and Wife Two seek refuge in one another, discover what they are capable of doing to protect each other, but then doubt they'd do it again.
8. "The Sea" Husband One and Wife Two have a spectacularly bad vacation, during which we learn that the tragedy in "Family Game" (1) did not actually happen, but elsewhere in the book there are hints that this chapter (8) did not really end badly but was a fictional "unhappy ending" he wrote for her because she preferred them, thinking it better "to have your heart cut out like an Aztec rather than suffer the prevarications of Spaniards," which leaves it unclear as to whether that negates this story's negation of the tragedy in "Family Game" (1) but at this point what happened in the basement has long ceased to matter.
Hoping to get a sense of how Nietzsche's ideas influenced the writing of this book,
I found him interviewed by John O'Brien at the Dalkey Archive site where he explicitly laid out all the relations and identities as I've described them above, as much as I'd like to take credit for doing all that myself. The interview was far more helpful on this count than it was regarding Nietzsche. Normally I don't resort to authorial intent arguments but there you go.
In the same interview Mosley said"The key problem here... This was obviously a difficult idea to pull off, but did seem to be a true literary equivalent of the impossible image: a representation of the fact that human beings seem inevitably to construct impossibilities and tragedies (such is their nature) but that when they recognize this (from some further viewpoint) they in some sense are absolved from the predicament. So—-the impossible predicament, in three dimensions, becomes possible if you can stand back (into a fourth) and represent it in art (in two)." [my bold]
Yep. All you have to do is withhold names and present contradictory information. Unfortunately, this reader finds all that only a skosh more respectable than the old ...or was it all just a dream? ending. That would be utterly forgivable (to me) if the sentence-level writing had been more to my tastes, or if the philosophy hinted at by reference had resounded with more of the drama(s), or if it had been funny, or if thinking about these obscured interrelations of the stories hadn't revealed scenarios that seem a little like they hadn't been thought out by the author. In the quote above he makes the idea of "the girl 'liking unhappy endings'," seem very much like an afterthought. This, coupled with being separated by several chapters, makes it easier to understand how one could miss the startling hostility manifest if we imagine the truth, reconstructed, as Husband A says to his lover, Wife Two:
Later in the same interview Mosley expresses a few regrets about In context, he makes that sound more humane. Is it? What or whom is "absolved" by that?
I fear this book's parts are worth more than their sum. I appreciate that Mosley was allowing the ambiguity of the connections between the stories to mimic the unknowable/unsayable elements of frustrated love, but how is this ambiguity achieved? By not naming characters and by dropping hints that are not supported by narrative structure (and, in fact, contradicted), by teasing us with the possibility that there is some mysterious unity to the stories but making it impossible to discover with any meaningful certainty (without reading his explanation, anyway). I didn't care for this, my least favorite means of invoking ambiguity in service to my least favorite of its effects. This was especially grating when the concept of the Impossible Object was occasionally reduced to having one's (or, his) cake and eating it too (wife and mistress).
I did like several things in this book, thus the 3 stars ("I liked it"). The dark game in the first story is very tense and compelling, and makes up for that narrator's often awkward and puzzling metaphors and similes.
The second section "Morning in the Life of Intelligent People" is a fantastic dissection of a couple's petty enmities, vulnerabilities, and the strike-and-parry dance embedded within banal domesticity. That story is definitely worth reading on its own.
"The Public House" I found most intriguing philosophically as it is the one which most potently approaches the idea of authenticity of desire made tenuous by the anxiety of recurrence, reducing its expression to a sort of performance about itself.
I also enjoyed the sixth italicized surrealism section about the automated president doing away with the necessity for the assassinated one, but how that fit into the whole is a mystery to me. -
I wanted to write you something impossible, like a staircase climbing a spiral to come out where it started or a cube with a vertical line at the back overlapping a horizontal one in front. These cannot exist in three dimensions but can be drawn in two; by cutting out one dimension a fourth is created. The object is that life is impossible; one cuts out fabrication and creates reality. A mirror is held to the back of the head and one's hand has to move the opposite way from what was intended.
It's important to remember that writers are magicians. Their art always starts with deception. In this way, writing is closely related to love. In the last section of the book, the author--Mosley--who happens to be a master magician, weaves an allegory about a princess and a woodcutter. But the magician--Mosley--casts his spell over his tale and reveals them as the witch and magician they really were. Thus another romance starts with deception and ends in the deception of art. For we find out later--too late?--that the magician--woodcutter--and the witch--princess--are both on stage, performing a ridiculous tableau."What is the point of being a witch and a magician," said the magician, "if we cannot become something different?"
Meanwhile back in the "real"/main story, the female lover disagrees:I knew that he always thought that life could be refashioned and go on, but I thought that it should not. There are some things for which one cannot be forgiven.
But the magician--Mosley, in this case--does believe in this refashioning. His mode of magicianship has always been this art of transformation--rabbits out of hats, if you will--the metaphor and the simile, and he has never been shy about either.p16: She sat with her hands between her legs; like mimosa.
And he's written his novel around this heavy-handed sleight of hand: story after story, the interlocking mechanism is at first unclear--maybe a connection is made by a similar comparison of a face to Cleopatra's, or a mention of a seaside town. At first the pieces do not add up, like a jigsaw puzzle in which you have focused too much on one problematic piece. By the end, you see that all the pieces do indeed fit, but the problem is now that they fit in too well, like a staircase that has connected itself back to its origin, making a convincing but impossible whole.
p14: She had a soft mouth which birds could peck crumbs off.
p215: Beyond the waves their heads kept appearing and disappearing like oil."Nietzsche said that everything goes round and round ... He said that everything eternally recurs; or rather that we should act as if everything did." My wife said "Why?" ... I said "Because this is the only way in which life is bearable." My wife looked disinterested. I said "As if everything that we do were such that we were going to go on doing it for ever."
This is a theme in the book. The male idea of being able to repeat something over and over, and the female idea that some things cannot. Thus Mosley--magician-- repeats the age-old, almost impossible theme of love. Can it or can it not be repeated? Likewise can love be repeated or only the disposable actions of love. The idea of acting comes in often, artifice:We had been sitting in the pub in London one day and I had asked--Then what is our point?--and he had said in his voice that suddenly became like an actor--To maintain ecstasy. (p. 208, emphasis mine)
And the idea of a point. If the point is ecstasy, then love is just artifice, like writing. A set of mirrors to trick ourselves into thinking we are constantly at its height:What I did not like was that for him life seemed to depend on complexity and flux: and this was not quite real, it was stimulated.
This is a carefully constructed, cynically dosed conception of love, art, and war (if they are not the same thing) that may or may not have anything to do with reality. But I highly recommend you read it anyway. -
How is this book not considered a classic? Why has it been buried in relative obscurity?
As close to perfection as one can get with a novel. Beautiful. -
I read this book for two reasons, partly as part of my long term project to read as many Booker shortlisted books as possible, and secondly because ever since reading his magnum opus
Hopeful Monsters I have found Mosley an intriguing and unpredictable writer.
This book was on the first ever Booker shortlist in 1969, and in some respects it is very much a book of its time (some of the narrators thoughts are a little jarring to the modern politically correct ear), while in others it seems bold and innovative, not least as a reminder that the novel in the form of linked short stories is nothing new.
This one is clearly conceived as a unified whole, as the stories combine to form a deliberately unreliable portrait of a writer (who is married with three children and involved in an affair with a younger married woman) and some of his works, which appear to be based on experience but written from other characters' perspectives, and though linked there are also contradictions between the stories. Between the stories there are short linking passages that often add to the confusion. Several of the stories are set in Morocco, and another in Italy.
The theme that unifies them all is a sense of the impossibility of love and its internal contradictions, but also the relationship between truth and fiction. -
A miniature tour de force!
I was reminded of that (in)famous Jane Austen quip : "little bit (two Inches wide) of Ivory on which I work with so fine a Brush."- because what Mosley has achieved in these 219 slim pages,a lesser writer would perhaps take a thousand pages & still not come near it!
Perfectly synchronised in structure & content,this book takes a refreshingly clear-eyed,unsentimental look at that most mushy of subjects- Love.
God is dead & there has been nothing to replace Him- those primeval instincts- violence/war & love have fallen short because unlike the figures in the myths & histories of yore, modern lovers play it safe- they are "ashamed" of this need like the narrator of The Family Game, content to indulge his fantasies in the darkness of the cellar because here is the crux:
"When you fall in love you don't want to get what you want, or how could you be in love with it?"
Treat love as an "impossibility" in order to maintain "ecstasy" but the chaos that's implicit in love; that one so dreads,always catches up.
This is a very deliberately written,immaculate metafiction. Here are Eight* interlinked realistic stories which are then given an overarching frame by the SOC driven whimsical musings in the philosophy-myth-history rich interludes. This book deserves a repeat reading. My favs are-the very cynical, 'A Morning in the Life of Intelligent People',the oh-so-meta-meta 'Public House',& the only tale told from a female perspective,the heartbreaking one 'The Sea'- outstanding stories!
* That number is significant in terms of this particular book- the sign of eight denoting an endless loop,circularity,and the constantly referred Nietzschean recurrence- the theme of love played out endlessly in various setting,via different points-of-view,never really reaching a definite conclusion,forever remaining an impossible object.
* * *
"I did not want commitment.(...)love is helplessness,and man is accustomed to power.(...)power is when you care about nothing,when you walk forward smiling like a mad archaic statue. Love comes into the world with consciousness,with a connection between pain and growth & miracles. This was what I wanted and did not want."
"I have a terrible compulsion to do as much hurt as I can while I can. I think this is what love is, an attempt to get what you can't and then to destroy it. There's a shred of sanity left which tells you what's happening; but this doesn't help, it only means you can't escape it."
My fav Gr review of Impossible Object
http://www.goodreads.com/review/show/... -
Masterfully constructed, beautifully written, profoundly thought. A bona-fide masterpiece that I found impossible to put down, right up to the devastating, perfectly controlled, conclusion.
-
Impossible Object very nearly won the first Booker Prize in 1969. Two of the judges - including the renowned literary critic
Frank Kermode - favoured it, but were "
soon silenced" by the others - it seems a particularly impossible one objected.
I waited a long time to get hold of a copy. It is an old book so I was in no hurry, but it intrigued me the way the library copy I was waiting for was continuously out on loan for several years - apparently someone was constantly renewing it, unable to let go. Why? It's not a long book. Finally it turned up - and, having read it, I think I understand why the previous borrower held on to it for so long. It's brilliant, but impossible.
"I wanted to write you something impossible," we are told at the end, "like a staircase climbing a spiral to come out where it started or a cube with a vertical line at the back overlapping a horizontal one in front. These cannot exist in three dimensions but can be drawn in two; by cutting out one dimension a fourth is created. The object is that life is impossible; one cuts out fabrication and creates reality."
It's a fascinating observation: some things that can be drawn in two dimensions are impossible in three. Like an Escher stairway; a triangle whose inside becomes its outside; or love.
Impossible Object mainly comprises eight short stories, one of which - A Morning in the Life of Intelligent People - is an extraordinary, bravura depiction of the internal monologues of a married couple who, from the moment they wake up, are trying to second guess each other - like chess players locked in a battle of attrition, anticipating their opponents' every move. In their mental calculations breakfast becomes a battlefield, and eggs grenades. After the husband leaves for work, his wife digs out some old love letters and reads this:"I have a terrible compulsion to do as much hurt as I can while I can. I think this is what love is, an attempt to get what you can't and then to destroy it. There's a shred of sanity left which tells you what's happening; but this doesn't help, it only means you can't escape it."
Love: impossible to live with; impossible to live without - making life impossible either way? As another writer/character, in another story (A Journey Into The Mind) puts it:"All life is impossible; you hope for reality."
Published in 1968, this is meta-fiction that makes
Paul Auster's career look like one long game of catch-up. It's the sort of book you have to read more than once. The first time in puzzlement, the second in awe. The writing is full of classical allusions, philosophy, and some eye-popping sentences:"My sons were embarrassed.
They went downstairs like ambulance men."
In
The Left Hand of Darkness, published the following year,
Ursula Le Guin said that "
the only thing that makes life possible is permanent, intolerable uncertainty: not knowing what comes next." This reader certainly had no idea what would come next in Impossible Object, nor how it related to what had gone before. As the book progressed the stories became more entangled: the writer of one story becomes a character in another, while the narrator of the other seems to be a character in the first.
In Public House, a writer spends several lunchtimes eavesdropping on the assignations of a man and a woman who are having an affair, and who each narrate later stories. In Life After Death the man arrives home to find three men waiting outside his flat looking for the woman. Are they police? He fears she has murdered her husband. Then in The Sea, she describes the events of a holiday in North Africa previously glimpsed in Public House. Like the game of hide and seek in a dark cellar in the first story, Family Game, it doesn't end well. But which is the story, and which is the story-within-a-story? Which ending is true? Is reality the impossible object of fiction?
I said "This is a fairy story. None of it is quite real."
She said "Do you think you're God?"
I wanted to review something impossible. Like a book full of stories that are subsumed by other stories within them. The object is that this is impossible; one cuts out certainty and creates circularity."Nietzsche said that everything goes round and round; have I told you this before?"
"He said that everything eternally recurs; or rather, that we should act as if everything did."
"As if everything we do were such that we were going to go on doing it for ever."
Does any of this make sense? Does love? Does life?"All life is a struggle; then you come to the end of it."
It's brilliant, but impossible. -
Shiza. Another live one.
The Buddhist monk asks, ‘What is the opposite of death?’ and the layperson almost certainly answers most certainly, ‘Life.’ at which point the monk explains what only then seems obvious: ‘The opposite of death is birth.’ Life, we are here told more overtly, is the impossible object. While it has these seeming ends that we desperately speculate will trick its subject through dimension (like the impossible connections of an MC Escher drawing), we don’t really know what it is or what its opposite could be. Thus we reach into the dark with our art:
“I wanted to write you something impossible, like a staircase climbing a spiral to come out where it started…”
This book, among themes of repetition vs. infinity, free-will vs. fate, fiction vs. reality, etc., begins with a tragedy, and continues through a series of male narrated failure-of love stories, until the last, female narrated story, where the few thin connective threads reveal (or claim) that the first tragedy was only an embellishment of “his”, i.e. a fiction; all of which comprises a powerful insinuation that the tragedy of this last story is not a fiction. Or, that it is.
When shortly before this devastating blow she observes,
“He had this idea that fate did what it wanted with you anyway, so your only freedom was to acknowledge this.”
this observation comes to seem a little more true than what, shortly after this final tragedy, she thinks,
“In death I will find the purity I have always wanted.”
It is as if the tragedy that compels her to say this, that which seems to have reached impossibly beyond the safety of fiction, goes even further. It is as if even if this tragedy is also a fiction, it nevertheless points to another that is not, to the capital-t Tragedy which is our assumption that death, for being the opposite of this impossible object, is a refuge from the impossibility; as if our tragedy is to consider death as we do the closing of a book, as a means to turn away from the pain, which, ironically, allows us to live in such a way that we again and again willingly make that turn by which we maddeningly make “a spiral to come out where it started.”
“The spaces between us were confused; there was a light separating and connecting us. I thought–There are people in the unconscious who stand like this: I am frightened of something so powerful and empty.”
“I thought–we can no longer be shocked; we find ourselves on corners, beneath windows, and we do not know how we got there. But we would rather be there than anywhere else.”
This is a book which avails to those who dig of both its flaws and perfections. Perhaps it’s our desire for the perfect novel and every novel’s impossibility to deliver perfection that makes it such an apt art form for the impossible object of life.
“For our debt is that of the diamond to the dirt–of incalculable dependency and hatred.”
“We are all the processes of God’s digestion.” -
Joyce's Ulysses casts a long shadow on 20th century literature, as evidenced in this late-60's collection of interlinked short stories. The thread throughout is the "impossible object" of romantic love - its delicacy, vulnerability, and ultimately, the impossibility of sustaining love amidst the realities of the everyday world.
Why mention Ulysses? This book is segmented into 17 sections - 8 short stories separated and book-ended by nine italicized, interstitial passages, which don't quite correspond to the main stories, but somehow seem to be related in feeling, if not theme. The first 7 stories are written by a male narrator, and the last by the unnamed female protagonist, whose story "The Sea" functions a bit like Molly Bloom's soliloquy.
I wouldn't go so far to say that Mosley was somehow channeling Ulysses, but I would say that the book follows the ancient trail of the pursuit of love, fidelity, safety, and the corresponding fears of infidelity, cuckoldry, and deception. Helen/Menelaus/Paris, Penelope/Odysseus/The Suitors, Gertrude/Hamlet/Claudius, Molly/Boylan/Leopold - the infamous love triangles that seem to make romantic love a truly impossible object to obtain.
In this book, though, we see only the "cheaters" side of the equation - in this case, the married writer and his married lover. Both have children and both try to create some sort of hybrid "third family" in addition to the two homes their affair has broken up.
In the end, I have to call this a bleak book, but also, an honest book, and one which pulls no punches in analyzing the dirty truths and details of modern marriage and all that is involved in the pursuit of romantic love outside of the marriage bond. -
When you fall in love you don't want to get what you want, or how could you be in love with it?
Do we love out of narcissism? Masochism? Do we truly desire the one for whom we claim we would willingly lay down our life, or is there a more selfish motive at work? Why do we continually place ourselves in vulnerable positions, time and time again—and is not loving one of the most vulnerable of all positions?—despite the lacerations, the recollections, and the bodily wounds that would have it otherwise?
There are so many myths and stories about love, about desire; from oral histories to legends, from folktales to tragedies, from songs to visual art—love is the most aestheticized topic, and, because of this, is the "impossible object," as Nicholas Mosley phrases it. As a fetishized, internalized, and always externalized force, love is something from which we can never make any concrete sense no matter how hard we try. And yet try and try we do.
Why is there this compulsion, then? And why is another book about love, like Mosley's Impossible Object, a warranted undertaking? As with all questions concerning love, there are no easy answers to these questions, nor are there to many others that arise when thinking about the complex matrices involving love, desire, sex, and both physical and psychological violence.
What is difficult, though, is to speak of love outside the realm of cliché and the many mythopoetic images that come to mind when we talk about love. Mosley is able to invent a language all his own here, one that is truly a feat in that it combines immense technical skill in the art of poetics: relying on repetition, recurring images (the narrator, or one of the narrators, is rather obsessed with Nietzsche's ides of recurrence), and motifs and redolent rhythms that meander out and then return back with such ease into prose that is a gem to the ears if read aloud. There is nothing sentimental about love here whatsoever: this is humanity and all of our stories laid bare, rough as if left exposed on a rock in the heat of an unblinking day with carrion circling overhead as if in some Greek myth.
No review can do this book justice: in fact, this has to be the finest book I've read in years, hands down. I was floored over and over again, and not only do I feel as lacerated as we all do when opening ourselves up to the idea of loving again, after immense loss or pain or anguish, but I also readily look forward with enthusiasm to another encounter with Mosley's work very, very soon. An impeccable, impeccable novel. -
So long, 1968. No one misses you.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zUrqU...
The writing is lovely. The stories are beautifully entwined. But it can't be ignored that the Impossible Object is not just life, not just love, but women. Women are objects in this book.
"men wanted to see women as goddesses or prostitutes because these are men's own projections and they have to find objects to accept them or else their own nature becomes unbearable"
"I had wanted to go to the south alone, because when travelling in Arab countries there is always an impression of an adventure round some corner, an image of a black-eyed girl with her face half covered in a doorway . . . I wondered if . . . we would go through a doorway to an inner courtyard with a fountain. I thought--Desires are chained to their opposites as if to a rock; to be suffered or wait for vultures."
Women aren't objects only to Mosley, but to all of 1968 Western white male culture. And the casual misogyny is upsetting. The racism is upsetting. So how do I rate this?? Tell me, please.
***
I don't know if I can continue on with this. The writing is wonderful, technically, but the content? Sheesh.
Mr. Mostyn, inundated, felt a battle lost but still believed he could win the war. His masculine weapon was endurance; also a mind that could analyse more profoundly their complex motives. He began caressing her; but from a distance, as if she were a puppet. This was one of his pleasures. He put a hand down and found her legs tight shut: looked up and smiled at her brightly. He knew she might want him to take her by force, but then he would expose himself: also, he did not know if he could. He would be safer, as always, in martyrdom. It was she who would appear to be frigid, and would feel guilty. So he let his hand lie on her and gazed tragically at the bedspread. Mrs. Mostyn felt him drifting away, so opened her legs slightly. She did not want him to go because then he would seem martyred, and she would feel guilty. As soon as she opened her legs he rolled on top of her and entered her. -
One of the best books I have ever read! It was like having a private chat with Love itself. Mosley is a magician. Breathtakingly beautiful!
-
Imagine a European arthouse film from, say, 1967 shot with muted violence among eucalyptus trees and haggard beach in a wintry Morocco of the mind - spare and detached with jump cuts and "central" figures decentered and alienated by awkward camera angles and urban, lonely spaces. Perhaps the film is part of the countercultural whirlwind of late '60s Britain directed by a young Nic Roeg and starring Stanley Baker and Julie Christie. Perhaps. Of course, one Mosley novel was adapted for the screen by Harold Pinter and directed by American expat Joseph Losey. And it did indeed star Stanley Baker...
Mosley's novel is very visual, but in a sobering, dry arthouse sense. However, is that a bad thing? Not to this reader. The novel's anti-linear form ties it to an avant garde literary moment which was beginning to take on the cinematic influence of Antonioni and its new methods of defamiliarization. The tone and feel are distinctly English even though some of the conspicuously absurdist interpolating passages recall the erudite barminess of Donald Barthelme. The middle class, bourgeois setting of difficult love, occasionally pungent lyricism and muddled existentialism recalls [the North American again] novelists John Cheever and James Salter. Taut, yet rippling at its most lucid.
The text, although conventional in subject matter - the idea of an impossible love or affair - is buffeted by a mobile, wholly suggestive structure which the reader has certain liberties to infer and unpick. In this conspicuously po-mo formatting Mosley resembles his English literary contemporary, BS Johnson: yet it is the intertwining of these multiple modes - realist yet self-consciously aware or fearful of an over-reliance on naturalism - which allows Mosley to have his cake and eat it. The postmodern mobility of the text which defies easy psychological linearity encourages the willing reader to disengage from any facile identification - which might be another impossibility which the novel illuminates - whilst still being drawn in, under or down by some covert, ineffable human spell.
Mosley's central motif is the complex workings of opposites and paradoxes as related to love and romance. The continual reiteration of this leitmotif can get tiresome. The text is a little dated by what might be an unwitting essentialism on Mosley's part - the narrator spends an uncomfortable amount of time making comments about what women expect from men, and vice versa. In the modern era of gender fluidity, these "Freudian" or pop psychological elements add an unsubtle frisson which marrs the often nimble and dangerous turns Mosley's lyricism commits to.
Overall, for the suggestive, mobile quality of the novel's structure and academic erudition of its breather passages, I rate this highly. It doesn't feel overly postmodern or experimental and I guess that is in its favour - it unmoors it from being merely part of a literary fad. And the final chapter, The Sea, [the only from a female perspective which helps to release the text as a whole from a potentially parodic state of fevered masculinity] from the Julie Christie perspective is dark, spry and haunting - it leaves a black taste in the ear. -
This might be the best book I've read in the last year. Hell, it might be one of the best books I've ever read. The structure is perfect: stories written by characters inside the real story, all revolving around the impossible object (love). The style is beautiful. amazingly beautiful. Some lines I found:
There was the shop where we used
to buy bread and milk : wire fencing like a tennis court. Lights
dropped like seeds into pools. She used to stand on tip-toe to kiss me. We kept things difficult to maintain this meaning; ecstasy.
The Pantheon is a shell
with a hole in its roof; the sound of the sea comes through.
WALKING THROUGH STREETS LATE at night I saw a crack in the sky and a red arm coming through with the fist clenched like a foetus.
The Institute in Turin is an enormous work of charity where
suffering people from all over Europe come to live and die and
be mad ; an organisation not so much to change human nature
as to come to terms with it, to try to cure it of course with all
the best equipment and technology but ultimately to recognise
that this is impossible ; to show that suffering has to be used in
order to make life bearable.
The spaces between us were
confused; there was a light separating and connecting us. I thought—There are people in the unconscious who stand like this: I am frightened of something so powerful and empty. She seemed to absorb all the light around and turn it to gold.
The waves beyond were taller than she; like the steps of
a building in an earthquake. She walked into the water and
turned her back and fell into a wave
She waited three-quarters of an hour and then went out.
She had looked at the door often. I had not spoken to her. I
think she was too sad. Grief is private, because so exposed.
I did not really want to hear the couple talk. The impression
that I had of them was that of a silent film. I liked the self
absorption and fluttering of eyes and the long pauses; the
impression of white horses rushing across deserts
God, what an amazing book. -
I wanted to write you something impossible, like a staircase climbing a spiral to come out where it started or a cube with a vertical line at the back overlapping a horizontal one in front. These cannot exist in three dimensions but can be drawn in two; by cutting out one dimension a fourth is created. The object is that life is impossible; one cuts out fabrication and creates reality. A mirror is held to the back of the head and one's hand has to move the opposite way from what was intended.
Obviously the above quote is important – it’s right there in the title of the book, and it’s quoted, in part, in the back copy of all the Dalkey editions of the book. I want to briefly discuss the quote in relation to the book, but first I need to touch on the structure of the novel.
The book is broken into named stories / vignettes / whatever you want to call them, that are separated by untitled sections, presented entirely in italics, which become increasingly odd and surrealistic throughout the book, until the final two italicized sections. The authorship of these sections is important to the above quote, and to the book as a whole. The first italicized section is, by reference in the first named story “Family Game”, written by the main male character (and narrator of Family Game). In Family Game, a reference is made to God getting away to Argentine on forged papers, which is then the subject of the second italicized section. This second section is then linked to the third section – about Nietzsche – where a reference is made that it is Nietzsche that bought God’s tickets to Argentine. So there is a thread throughout these three initial sections that link the authorship to the main – unnamed throughout – male character (which I’m just going to shorthand as MMC from now on) of the book. And yet, in a later story – Suicide – a reference is made to the MMC working on a biography of Nietzsche, to which the MMC responds, “No, that’s in another reincarnation.” Which is an odd renunciation by the MMC, and is all the more odd when you incorporate the theme of recurrence that shows up in the second to last italicized sections, this idea of living your life a certain way, as if you would have to “keep on doing it forever”, and is then further complicated in the fifth story (A Journey into the Mind) where the MMC is clearly interested in (and possibly researching) Nietzsche. I’m not trying to make any sort of big sweeping statement about the larger structure of the novel here – I’m simply trying to bring up that these italicized sections have less than clear textual genesis, and the quote at the top of this review comes from the very last italicized section.
So – when the book says “I wanted to write you something impossible”, who is the “I” that is speaking, who is the “you” who is spoken to? Is it Mosley himself speaking to reader – he has, in interviews, acknowledged the autobiographical nature of some of this book – or is this still the MMC writing? And if so, is he referencing the sections in italics throughout the book, or is he now referencing the book itself?
I’m spending a lot of time on this one tiny thing, and I’m doing it for two main reasons. First, the question of authorship is huge in this book – the fourth story, Public House, brings in the first main question around authorship in the book, which then continues directly into the A Journey into the Mind story, and has tendrils extended throughout the book, as it anchors the last story, The Sea, into a specific chronological place in the novel, which forces the order of at least half the stories into a certain order – and it’s only through the convoluted (impossible) authorship that this is arrived at, and the order of these stories is really important, especially once you hit the end of the novel. Secondly, I spend so much time on all the above, because it’s only a tiny little facet of this book and I basically read the book twice in a row to really appreciate how much is really being done here, and how perfectly executed and placed this entire book really is.
Okay, enough about all that.
As referenced in the quote above, an impossible object is something that can be drawn in two dimensions, but cannot exist in three (think Escher’s triangle). It is something that exists only in theory, not in actuality. It is “the impossibility of realizing the good life unless one recognizes the impossibility of attaining it”. There is a cynical thread through one of the stories where love itself is the impossible object. But, above all, the book itself is put together in such a way where it is, itself, the impossible object. It is structurally thrilling in a way rarely seen, and it only grows in stature the more one revisits it.
Putting all that aside, this book is perfectly willing to be read conventionally, and is an amazing read while just scraping the surface – Mosley is an incredible writer, and his word choice, characterization, and narrative pacing are never less than stellar throughout.
I’ve managed to say a lot of here without saying much about the book itself – which is completely intentional – but hopefully have said enough to convey just how exciting of a read this book really is. It is an amazing example of how literature can be experimental and eschew conventional narrative structure, while still telling a story that will break your heart. And yet, if the reader wants to search for it, the book also contains the possibility of a “happy ending” – and to find it is the correct answer, and to shun it is the correct answer. Which is impossible, but that’s the only way this book wants it. -
An extraordinary novel of male/female relationships, which expresses emotional complexity with unexpected similes, suddenly shifting perspectives and non sequiturs that reveal characters' viewpoints in startling ways, like haikus. Dense and allusive, the novel is grounded concretely in the world by its imagery; yet its metaphors open space for contemplation, and the author's surprising, original use of constantly changing viewpoint to describe relationships pays off again and again, as, just when the novel seems utterly lost in chaos, it coalesces into new depths of emotion. Grounded in Nietzsche and classic Roman poetry, this book is nevertheless utterly postmodern in its narrative structure, and it describes feelings that I've felt but never been able to articulate before with my conscious mind. A great book.
-
Painful and disappointing...
-
mind-bending collection of beautifully written stories that fit together in an ephemeral way
feels both logical and not, building to a big climax that may shatter you
fevered love and feral insanity twist around each other
not hard to read and yet hard to put your finger exactly on this experimental UK novel from 1968
recommended -
Mosley's prose flows like poetry and abounds with some of the most beautiful and horrifying metaphors. Love and war are central themes throughout the book. The short stories are all connected (sometimes in absurd ways). The stories are short, but the material is densely packed, but you will find yourself rewarded if you put some time into this book.
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excruciating love stories where you know the answer if you have ever felt the delicious and addictive thrills of romantic love and affection and all the timelessness that entails, till it doesn;t and your gut seizes, your heart feels stomped, and you never believed in love anyway. cuase it was all an illusion anyway. till the next time.
these fictional vignettes of the title as related to humans in love is also a great way to take your mosley philosophy with some sugary yumness if you don;t have time for slime mold
The Uses of Slime Mould: Essays of Four Decades or monsters
Hopeful Monsters but believe me when i say nicholas mosley is one of the best british writers you'll ever be kicked in the guts by. eh hm. -
Though IMPOSSIBLE OBJECT is the first Nicholas Mosley novel I have read, Joseph Losey's ACCIDENT (1967), whose screenplay was adapted by Harold Pinter from the Mosley novel of the same name, has long been one of my very favourite English films. ACCIDENT belongs to a particular species of art film focusing on the more pernicious tendencies of male desire and the ways in which its female objects can be compromised, despoiled, or outright ravaged by the predations of nominally civilized men. Another of my favourite films of this particular quasi-genre is Luis Buñuel's THAT OBSCURE OBJECT OF DESIRE, a masterpiece whose title, strikingly similar to IMPOSSIBLE OBJECT, the Mosley novel whose publication predates it by some nine years, is perhaps the title--for any work of art, ever-- I most adore. If THAT OBSCURE OBJECT OF DESIRE is primarily about the slavishly obsessed bourgeois man driven to frayed distraction by the shapeshifting woman who refuses to be contained and dominated, IMPOSSIBLE OBJECT is a far more reverent and expansive work, an equal opportunity affair, in which the terrain of amorous exchange itself is fundamentally conditioned by the impossibility of congruence and sustained, untroubled alliance. This is a novel whose fastidious construction and internalized mode of self-relating is revealed progressively, with great care and redoubtable craft, so that reader ends up bequeathed with a vicarious sense of participating in building something while simultaneously locating his or herself within it, as if within some impossible cathedral enjoyed for the duration of its construction. The novel is essentially comprised of titled vignettes separated by untitled italicized interludes. The basic form is somewhat reminiscent of Virginia Woolf's THE WAVES, a novel from which it differs notably in many particulars, but with which its shares a sense of comprehensive God's-eye-view self-containment and a devotion to exploring untapped potentialities inherent to the novel form. The vignettes at first very much seem like self-standing works of short fiction. This impression is consolidated by the fact that the second vignette goes about business very differently from the first, in a manner that will not subsequently be replicated. The second vignette is actually the only vignette that is written in the third-person omniscient. The rest are written in the first person. All but the final are written in the first person voice of a man. In fact, it gradually becomes clear to us that it is two men who are narrating most of the titled vignettes. Um, well, not quite. The men are writers. We also become aware retroactively that some of what we have read would appear be first person fiction written by the men and featuring literary avatar versions of themselves entangled in made-up stories. The way these distinct pieces relate to one another is progressively elucidated and complicated. The core theme of the novel has already been explicated and is more or less pronounced in the title. "Love is impossible for the people in it," writes Mosley, "but not for the stranger." Or later: "I thought--I have always known life is impossible. Stories are symbols in which impossibility is held." I was compelled to contemplate the Buddhist concept of samsara and the idea that desire is endless regenerative desire and dissatisfaction, attainment ever deferred, human enterprise a confounding sequence of frustrations and cataclysms. The novel serves as the gaze of the stranger. The idea that it becomes a venue where "impossibility is held" suggests something suspended in amber, or perhaps in a museum, outside of time, available for reflection and disembodied scrutiny. At one point one of Mosley's narrators explicitly says of love the thing I most believe of it, the thing that separates it from desire: love is something we do rather than something we feel. What we feel is multiple, contradictory, and all too often productive of suffering, and what we do, when we love, at our best we seek to do devotedly, but all too often we fumble recklessly and make a mess of it. We make a mess of love because we are fallible, insecure, pulled too many directions at once, and bombarded by life. Mosley presents literary creation as a practice capable of transcending the earthly toil over which it casts its net. It is through form that we have access to the divine component of creation, and IMPOSSIBLE OBJECT is not only a triumph of form, it foregrounds the process by which form asserts itself, placing the reader in an exulted position. Mosley walks you through how art redeems suffering and attains celestial transport. If the novel is above all else about the impossibility of earth-bound harmony, part of the way it establishes its form and mode of self-relation is through methodical thematic masonry. Many subjects and fixations appear and reappear, trafficked between narrators, colouring the interludes: Nietzsche; the crusades; the Etruscans; Rome; games; witches; Cleopatra and the Egyptian profile. Echoes and reverberations. As befits a cathedral. IMPOSSIBLE OBJECT is a fine-tuned novel made for the avid archeologist. I read quickly in impassioned fascination, but it is clear that much could be accomplished by spending years digging around in it. I also imagine a Swiss watch you might contemplate taking apart to study if it were not already such an exquisite shimmering jewel of a thing.
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Poetic and cruel. Great line: "Cleanliness is next to godliness: they are both the killing of microbes." May make you irritable/suicidal.
