Download Mantissa Free Audio Books

Mention About Books Mantissa

Title	:	Mantissa
Author	:	John Fowles
Book Format	:	Paperback
Book Edition	:	Deluxe 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

Mantissa

John Fowles

Paperback | Pages: 208 pages

Rating: 3.2 | 2083 Users | 91 Reviews

Description During Books Mantissa

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.

Itemize Books As Mantissa

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

Rating About Books Mantissa

Ratings: 3.2 From 2083 Users | 91 Reviews

Judge About Books Mantissa

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

This novel is kind of the opposite of the novel that I review right after it, and all of them have some various similarities. We begin with a man waking into consciousness, and even gender, identity, and other features we clearly map onto consciousness are not there yet. Instead, its pure presence. As he comes to, he recalls many things about existence and reality, but not features of his own mind or history.He realizes hes in some kind of medical facility and being attended to by a doctor who

One of the most turgid pieces of shit I've ever read. Bloated with self-importance and self-referential in the most smug way possible. Actual literal masturbation over his own characters and prose.

MANTISSAAuthor John Fowles quotes the OED in defining a mantissa as .an addition of comparatively small importance, especially to a literary effort or discourse. I would say that was a correct judgment of the book. This is a short novel (~200 pages), composed of an argument between Miles Green, alias John Fowles, and Erato, Greek goddess of amorous poetry and other small works, concern the depiction of women in his writings.The book opens with Green immobilized on a bed in a padded room. Green

Fowles self-parody; his most comic novel (although there aren't many belly-laughs). The protagonist immediately finds himself in a padded cell in some sort of asylum. It quickly becomes apparent that the entire scenario is a metaphor for Fowles' mind, the writing of his novels, and his response to literary criticism. Mantissa also reveals much about Fowles' writing process and literary outlook. Fowles admitted it was a bagatelle, a mere side-note novel (hence the title), but I found the book

John Fowles' The Magus is my favourite book but for I did not find Mantissa an enjoyable book. My knowledge of Greek Mythology and the Muses is very limited, as is my knowledge of modernism, post-modernism and theory of literature. Thus, I may have missed many of the points he was trying to put across. In some parts I enjoyed his verbal jousting and sparring with his two characters, but eventually I tired of being yanked back into reality and the theory of the modern novel. As I said before, I

"Mantissa" means essentially an unnecessary verbal addendum. Mildly amusing, mildly erotic, mildly neurotic. It mostly seems like the work of a dirty old man treading water, mildly undecided between putting sex or love, or some combination of the two, at the sole apex of life, while suspecting those same impulses for trapping him in boring dialogues and marriages. I thought his suggestion to this imaginary woman that she try working as a reviewer was ugly and uncalled for.Fowles had