ALPHABETICAL AFRICA

Book ID/图书代码： 03900014B73257

English Summary/英文概要： “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.

Chinese Summary/中文概要： 沃特•阿比什把他的小说贴合在了一个普洛克路斯忒斯的模式中，该模式有着字母表般可怕，无可驳辩的逻辑。本书就像雷蒙德•罗素、雷蒙德•坤娜、乔治•佩雷西和哈利•马修的一般，这些人都用简洁的方式蔓延到了诗的另一境界。

《非洲轶闻》，沃特•阿比什精彩的处女作，有着超常的逻辑性，这出喜剧发生在一片想象中的黑暗大陆上，其扩张和削弱都颇具规律性，就像作者把字母按顺序一个个添到书里，再一个个的去掉。在一队烈蚁侵扰下，桑给巴尔的非洲地质印痕形成又崩溃，又被坦桑尼亚异装癖的皮疹皇后染成橘色，成为了一对残忍的珠宝大盗追寻他们色情狂情妇的猎场。(LNL)

Awards/获奖情况：Alliterative Analogies, assertively assembled, appear aplenty, appropriately, apt and artful, absorbing attention ad infinitum. This could be a fitting summary of Abish’s stunningly "now" novel, written almost a quarter of a century ago with a linguistic device concocted between Kabbala and alliteration. Chapter 1 is composed with words beginning only with the letter A, Chapter 2 with A and B and so on until chapter 27, when Z first, then chapter by chapter all other letters, are progressively subtracted. In spite of a scheme tracing back to the beginning of written literature, the novel tells of deeds and characters so surprisingly contemporary, they may have been culled from today’s headlines: polysexually inclined thugs hide in Africa after a crime spree, with the Author in pursuit of the woman who betrayed them. Chasing after the thugs from country to country, we are introduced to a ruler queen transvestite, war and genocide, corrupted burocrats and soldiers, rampant corruption in a landscape still in hot air, where sparsely assembled people wollow in African Indolence. All is narrated with poetic detachment, in a dimension between joke and dream that implies social, political and historical commentary with what appears linguistical accidentality: it is just that the words were limited by my artifice, reader, the Author seems to smile. No harm intended. Perhaps: the scenario may have seemed so far fetched in 1974, to have been deemed the product of unabridged fantasy. Great art, when unhindered, relates to the whole of time, in all tenses.

About the Author/作者介绍：

Format:TRADE PAPERBACK

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Complex/Traditional Chinese/繁体中文：AVAILABLE

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