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Glyph (pub. 1999) is written by a genius baby so reminiscent of the fetus narrator in Nutshell (2016) that I wondered if Ian McEwan (Nutshell) borrowed from this book. But that's where the similarity ends.
A couple of chapters into this book, I found myself exhausted from constant leaping—couch to computer to look up poststructural philosophy, Latin, German, French, obscure historic bits, etc. I was almost ready to admit I'm not well educated enough to read this satire—about academic thought and expression versus passion, existential despair, and a longing for truth—when the story got good. So finally I simply accepted that I'm not well educated enough (just like so many of the adults who are bollixed by narrator genius baby Ralph in this wild abduction caper) and I read the darned story, allowing facts and meaning to fly over my head with impunity.
It turns out that's not a bad way to read this dense but unaccountably fast book. The story was always inventive, sometimes very funny, and sometimes sad—as in the other two Everett books that I've read, there is a longing to find the beginning of truth that I relate to on a heart level. Even though this book feels like an exercise about intellectualism that gets in its own way (unless you are an academic philosopher, philologist, art historian, and mathematician), and even though the references and a lot of the genius wordplay were beyond my scope, it moves me.
I read Glyph because I became so enamored with Percival Everett's work after reading So Much Blue and I Am Not Sidney Poitier that I wanted to read everything he has written. And I am still enamored by his imagination, his storytelling, and his longing for an illusory beginning of truth. On to the next book!
A couple of chapters into this book, I found myself exhausted from constant leaping—couch to computer to look up poststructural philosophy, Latin, German, French, obscure historic bits, etc. I was almost ready to admit I'm not well educated enough to read this satire—about academic thought and expression versus passion, existential despair, and a longing for truth—when the story got good. So finally I simply accepted that I'm not well educated enough (just like so many of the adults who are bollixed by narrator genius baby Ralph in this wild abduction caper) and I read the darned story, allowing facts and meaning to fly over my head with impunity.
It turns out that's not a bad way to read this dense but unaccountably fast book. The story was always inventive, sometimes very funny, and sometimes sad—as in the other two Everett books that I've read, there is a longing to find the beginning of truth that I relate to on a heart level. Even though this book feels like an exercise about intellectualism that gets in its own way (unless you are an academic philosopher, philologist, art historian, and mathematician), and even though the references and a lot of the genius wordplay were beyond my scope, it moves me.
I read Glyph because I became so enamored with Percival Everett's work after reading So Much Blue and I Am Not Sidney Poitier that I wanted to read everything he has written. And I am still enamored by his imagination, his storytelling, and his longing for an illusory beginning of truth. On to the next book!