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A Novel Written Solely in Questions
Am reading Padgett Powell’s The Interrogative Mood: A Novel? right now and it’s actually very good, in spite of (or because of) its appalling constraint.
And Rick Moody’s review thereof is a good read as well:
Yes, it’s true. Padgett Powell’s new “novel” is a highly allusive prose work composed entirely of questions. Many reviewers of this book, I suspect, will attempt to admonish the questioner with further questions, wondering at the gumption of the thing. But it might be useful instead to answer some of the questions posed. In this regard I have chosen questions at random, at intervals of about twenty pages, in the hopes of giving the flavor of the whole, while, at the same time, attempting some context for this offhanded, witty, original, and altogether unique book.
Q: Are your emotions pure?
A: This very first inquiry in The Interrogative Mood suggests . . .
And now a question of my own: Can anyone think of a novel that attempted to do this previously? Seems like there must be one somewhere in the annals of literature . . .
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Recommended Books DeLillo's major work before White Noise is probably his most underrated novel. Its all right here--the politics of paranoia, terrorism, the unnamable--set in an evocative, timeless Greece.
The most bizarre Abe novel I've yet read, which is indeed saying something. About a subclass of Japanese men who go around wearing boxes from the waist up (and then use them as domiciles in the evening), the book is also an experiment in perspective shifts, a highly unstable, metafictional first-person narrative, and an exploration of voyeurism, consumerism, and aberrant sexuality.
Charting the path to three gunshots--the one that killed filmmaker Theo Van Gogh, the one that disabled his Islamic extremist assassin, Mohammed Bouyeri, and the one that led to Vincent Van Gogh’s one hundred years earlier--Olsen tells three separate stories that resonate with one another on numerous levels: the logic of extremism, the role of the dissident in Dutch society, the limits of tolerance, the purpose of the artist, the feeling of the most important five minutes of your life. Read my interview with the author.
Creatively structured, well-executed epic novel of rural South Africa from 1950 - 2000. Takes on a lot and lives up to it magnificently. Highly recommended.
A book that's an interview about the book you're supposedly holding in your hands. Creative, potent, and full of life. Just what metafiction should be. Read my post on it.
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Marketing the Bolano
Graphs, Maps, Trees
The Names by Don DeLillo (1982)
The Box Man by Kobo Abe (1973, English 1974)
Head in Flames by Lance Olsen (2009)
Agaat by Marlene van Niekerk (2006, English 2010)
The Weather Fifteen Years Ago by Wolf Haas (2006, English 2009)
Gilbert Sorrentino did it way back in 2000 with his novel Gold Fools–a pastiche of boys’ adventure novels. Every sentence was a question. Great book. If I recall he had a story from quite a bit earlier that was sort of a forerunner of this, before he expanded it into a novel.
Mexican author Gustavo Sainz also wrote a novel -La muchacha que tenía la culpa de todo- only using questions back in 1995.
There’s a couple more- Padgett mentioned one from the 70s last night at his reading (though I can’t remember the title, of course). He’s reading at the Brooklyn Public Library tonight if anyone’s in NY. He’s a great reader, totally deadpan and irrevelant in the best way.
Not exactly a novel, Ron Silliman’s Sunset Debris, the forty-page middle section of his longpoem The Age of Huts, is all questions. Originally published some time in the late 1970s, it was reprinted as part of the “Compleat” Age of Huts in 2007. Silliman’s continuation of the Age of Huts, The Alphabet, was reviewed in the Conversation Quarterly.
What abot Max Frisch Fragebogen (Questionnaire)?