The Age of Wire and String
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- ¥2,000
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- ¥2,000
発行者による作品情報
In The Age of Wire and String Ben Marcus welds together a new reality from the scrapheap of the past. Dogs, birds, horses, automobiles and the weather are some of the recycled elements in Marcus's first collection - part fiction, part handbook - as familiar objects take on markedly unfamiliar meanings. Gradually, this makeshift world, in its defiance of the laws of physics and language, finds a foundation in its own implausibility, as Marcus produces new feelings and sensations - both comic and disturbing - in the definitive guide to an unpredictable yet exhilarating plane of existence.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
In these 41 fictions (most are only a page or two), Marcus guides us through the postmodern wreckage of our homes and social customs. Deformed structures call for deformed expressions; using a form pioneered by Gertrude Stein, the book's eight sections pull the everyday (``Food''; ``The House''; ``Persons'') through the looking-glass of language, coining new terms as necessary. The result is the combination of gorgeous, sensuous realism and disjointed action that has been coming together in the leading avant-garde journal Conjunctions, where Marcus is an editor. In these pages, which by turns read like a technical manual and like lyric poetry, one's wife and toaster can be connected on the same circuit, and ``only the lawns feeding upward afford the angels an exit.'' Marcus's clear eye for the suburban sublime allows his definitions--of the structures and categories we impose on ourselves, of the people in his life and of hidden ``natural'' phenomena--to resonate in a way that is much richer than, say, Douglas Coupland's inventories of pop culture. The shockingly abstract terms Marcus uses to describe our intimate selves (``the condition of corpse is achieved with a lotion, usually'') mock our attempts to understand and explain away our bodies and the things that happen to them. This debut collection may just succeed in sneaking prose-poetry to a wider, younger audience.
