Alphabetical Africa

by Walter Abish

Overview

“Walter Abish has dovetailed his novel within a Procrustean scheme that has the terrifying and irrefutable logic of the alphabet. Alphabetical Africa is in the line of writers such as Raymond Roussel, Raymond Queneau, Georges Perec and Harry Mathews, who have used constrictive forms to penetrate the space on the other side of poetry.” — John Ashbery

Alphabetical Africa, Walter Abish's delightful first novel, is an extraordinary linguistic tour de force, high comedy set in an imaginary dark continent that expands and contracts with ineluctable precision, as one by one the author adds the letters of the alphabet to his book, and then subtracts them. While the "geoglyphic" African landscape forms and crumbles, it is, among other things, attacked by an army of driver ants, invaded by Zanzibar, painted orange by the transvestite Queen Quat of Tanzania, and becomes a hunting ground for a pair of murderous jewel thieves tracking down their nymphomaniac moll.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780811205337
Publisher:	New Directions Publishing Corporation
Publication date:	01/17/1974
Series:	New Directions Book Series
Pages:	164
Product dimensions:	5.20(w) x 8.00(h) x 0.50(d)

About the Author

Walter Abish was born in Vienna in 1931. After moving to the United States in 1957, he taught at several universities in the US, served on the International PEN board, and won Guggenheim and MacArthur fellowships. He lives in New York City.

What People are Saying About This

John Ashberry

Alphabetical Africa is in the line of writers such as Raymond Roussel, Raymound Queneau, George Teorgesterec, and Harry Matthews, who have used constrictive forms to penetrate the space on the other side of poetry.

Editorial Reviews

"A novel of erotic obsession, in which language itself has received the transferred charge of feeling."

The New York Times Book Review - Richard Howard

"Walter Abish has dovetailed his novel within a Procrustean scheme that has the terrifying and irrefutable logic of the alphabet. Alphabetical Africa is in the line of writers such as Raymond Roussel, Raymond Queneau, Georges Perec, and Harry Mathews, who have used constrictive forms to penetrate the space on the other side of poetry."

John Ashbery

"One could make comparisons with, say, William Gass on one side – high priest and bon viveur in ‘the sweet country of the word’ – and Donald Barthelme on the other. But it should be made clear that Abish has his own way of deconstructing conventional narrative modes and, at the same time, getting something distinctly said about life, consciousness, and word, in contemporary America."

Granta - Tony Tanner