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Original Title:	Mantissa
ISBN:	0316290270 (ISBN13: 9780316290272)
Edition Language:	English

Mantissa

John Fowles

Paperback | Pages: 208 pages

Rating: 3.2 | 2083 Users | 91 Reviews

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I love John Fowles' other novels like The Magus but there is a reason I had never heard of this book before stumbling across it at a used bookstore. This is like a meta-novel, reflecting on the muses and post-modernism, and I think probably only interesting to John in the moment he mused on muses, and not for long after.

The self-aware characters!

"She looks at him over her glasses. 'I'm supposed to be a twentieth-century woman, Miles. By definition I'm in despair.'"

The self-referential descriptions of writing!

"Our oblique and tentative dialogue counterpointed by those vistas of thousands of detumescent vegetable penises."

(Well, bonus points for the use of detumescent.)

Musings on literary movements!

"The reflective novel is sixty years dead, Erato. What do you think modernism was about? Let alone post-modernism. Even the dumbest students know it's a reflexive medium now, not a reflective one."

Critiques of literature!

"Serious modern fiction has only one subject: the difficulty of writing serious modern fiction. First, it has fully accepted that it is only fiction, can only be fiction, will never be anything but fiction, and therefore has no business at all tampering with real life or reality.... The natural consequence of this is that writing about fiction has become a far more important manner than writing fiction itself. It's one of the best ways you can tell the true novelist nowadays. He's not going to waste his time over the messy garage-mechanic drudge of assembling stories and characters on paper."

Self-awareness of what this very book is trying to do!

"Obviously [the novelist] has at some point to write something, just to show how irrelevant and unnecessary the actual writing part of it is."

And the usual Fowles misogyny, which comes across as far more clever in a character than spelled out here:

"Then be a woman, and enjoy it. But don't try to think in addition. Just accept that that's the way the biological cards have fallen. You can't have a male brain and intellect as well as a mania for being the universal girlfriend."

Yeah.... ugh. Stay away.

Present Containing Books Mantissa

Title	:	Mantissa
Author	:	John Fowles
Book Format	:	Paperback
Book Edition	:	First Edition
Pages	:	Pages: 208 pages
Published	:	August 4th 1997 by Back Bay Books (first published 1982)
Categories	:	Fiction. Literature. European Literature. British Literature. Classics. Novels. Literary Fiction. 20th Century

Rating Containing Books Mantissa

Ratings: 3.2 From 2083 Users | 91 Reviews

Criticize Containing Books Mantissa

It's okay but it's really a bit too playful and whimsical for my tastes to be honest. Probably the kind of book only an established author would be able to get into print. I don't think it'd change anyone's life.

This book might appear to anyone seeking 'light summer fiction' as a truly oulipoesque wank for its near-omphaloskeptic, semi-schizophrenic dialogue with the author's muse. Even the muse (Erata) tells him "In my entire four thousand years I've never met such arrogance." Imagine a chess master playing himself at the game and writing about it. Fowles wonderfully self-critiques his own insecurities and shortcomings (both subtly and boldly) as a novelist, a "surrealistic preamble" as his muse calls

My 4th Fowles and such a different experience than all others. He has such a beautiful way of connecting words and an incredibly chameleonic writing style. My favorite, flow wise, was the first part. Liked some ideas from the other sections as well, but overall they often felt too pretentious.

So confused by this book. Started strong: Man awakes in a hospital with memory loss with a female Doctor who says his only cure is sexual stimulation via her and a nurse. Then it descends into meta-chaos and endless pages of conflicting and testing dialogue between the two leads, ending with very little understanding or likability for either of them, especially the female, but I think that's more the author being anti-feminist in execution.

This is the furiously powerful mind of Fowles scrutinising the form and subject and process of his novels, his instincts as an artist, and himself within the strange 'walls' of fiction. It is critical, unflattering, amusing, fascinating and demanding. I found it a joyful, easy read, but unless one is a serious writer or student of literature the qualities of this book may be difficult to fathom. It is enormously focused, and seems a microscopic study of the cerebral and creative powers which

I love John Fowles' other novels like The Magus but there is a reason I had never heard of this book before stumbling across it at a used bookstore. This is like a meta-novel, reflecting on the muses and post-modernism, and I think probably only interesting to John in the moment he mused on muses, and not for long after. The self-aware characters!"She looks at him over her glasses. 'I'm supposed to be a twentieth-century woman, Miles. By definition I'm in despair.'"The self-referential

while clever, it was writing at its most self indulgent, and that can alienate the reader. i enjoy a book that pulls the rug out from under me to a point, but an author can only do that so many times before trust is lost and you don't care about the characters anymore. plus i'm not big into the breaking the fourth wall trend that swept the arts in the 80's. i like the fourth wall where it is, it's why i read fiction!