Where Three Roads Meet
Novellas
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- $13.99
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- $13.99
Publisher Description
From the National Book Award winner, three linked novellas that “will stretch your mind, challenge your thoughts, and bend your reality” (Charlotte Observer).
John Barth, “one of the greatest novelists of our time” (Washington Post Book World) and “the master of experimental fiction” (Details), presents a lively triad of tales that delight in the many possibilities of language and its users.
The first novella, “Tell Me,” explores a callow undergraduate’s initiation into the mysteries of sex, death, and the Heroic Cycle. The second, “I’ve Been Told,” traces no less than the history of storytelling and examines innocence and modernity, ignorance and self-consciousness. And the three elderly sisters of “As I Was Saying . . . ” record an oral history of their youthful muse-like services to (and servicing of) a subsequently notorious and now mysteriously vanished novelist.
Sexy, humorous, and brimming with Barth’s deep intelligence and playful irreverence, Where Three Roads Meet “employs all of his familiar devices—alliteration, shifts in diction and time, puns—to tease and titillate, while at the same time articulate—obliquely, sadly, angrily, gloriously—a farewell to language and its objects: us” (Publishers Weekly, starred review).
“Barth is markedly intelligent about language and often very funny.” —The New York Times
“Perhaps the most prodigally gifted comic novelist writing in English today.” —Newsweek
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Teller, tale, torrid (and torpid) inspiration: Barth's 17th book brings these three narrative "roads" together inimitably, and thrice. It employs all of his familiar devices alliteration, shifts in diction and time, puns ("Leda lays egg, Egg hatches Helen, Helen lays Paris, Paris lays waste to Troy") to tease and titillate, while at the same time articulate obliquely, sadly, angrily, gloriously a farewell to language and its objects: us. The first of three lightly linked novellas, "Tell Me," introduces the three Freds: Alfred, Winifred and Wilfred, post-WWII collegemates who play jazz together, talk frankly and joustingly into the night, and form two alternating pas de deux. One particular set of exchanges sets the course of Wilfred's career; the whole story is a look back by him, a near lifetime later, at the before and after of that moment. The second piece, "I've Been Told," presents a hero's tale that speaks in the first person (the story itself is the narrator) "that story c'est moi guys, and here's how I go, now that I've got myself cranked up and more or less under way" and puns endlessly. (It also has Freds). The third, "As I Was Saying," uses the title's participle to riff on writing's eroticism: its three sisters, unreliable narrators all, use a Krapp's Last Tape type conceit to tell of the sexual maelstrom of their adult lives, within which an infamous, Barthian novelist (Manfred F. Dickson Sr.) wrote. Wrote?The story ends in a mix of the past, present and future progressive: "As I was saying..."
