The Solitary Twin

by Harry Mathews

Overview

Harry Mathews’s last novel is one of his most accessible—and perhaps one of his best

Harry Mathews's brilliant final work, The Solitary Twin, is an engaging mystery that simultaneously considers the art of storytelling. When identical twins arrive at an unnamed fishing port, they become the focus of the residents' attention and gossip. The stories they tell about the young men uncover a dizzying web of connections, revealing passion, sex, and murder. Fates are surprisingly intertwined, and the result is a moving, often hilarious, novel that questions our assumptions about life and literature.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780811227544
Publisher:	New Directions Publishing Corporation
Publication date:	03/27/2018
Edition description:	New Edition
Pages:	160
Product dimensions:	5.10(w) x 7.70(h) x 0.50(d)

About the Author

Harry Mathews (1930–2017) was born in New York. A founding editor of the literary journal Locus Solus, he wrote novels, poetry, short fiction, essays, and translations from the French. His many books include Cigarettes (1987), The Sinking of the Odradek Stadium (1999), and The Human Country (2002).

Editorial Reviews

01/15/2018
A psychologist and a publisher join forces to untangle the secret behind the “obstinate separation” between two identical twins in this jaunty novel from the lauded experimentalist Mathews (1930–2017). Berenice and Andreas fall in love immediately upon meeting in the “extenuated fishing village of immemorial origin” where they have each arrived, seeking to befriend the town’s most famous residents. Locals Geoffrey and Margot Hyde agree to help, introducing Berenice and Andreas to a woman who claims to be sleeping with both twins, but even her aid isn’t enough to convince the twins to agree to be interviewed. Thwarted, the couple settles into a routine of telling stories over dinner with the Hydes. The stories expose hidden ties between the participants, and Mathews joins in the fun, with the third-person narrator being unmasked as Berenice herself (what was first “a kind of journal” she explains, has “unexpectedly changing into a memoir”). As the novel circles closer to the grand reveal promised by its title, Mathews toys with the reader’s “desire to resolve the irresolute, to conclude the incomplete, to have the crooked made straight.” The result is an undeniably clever parting shot from one of contemporary literature’s most playfully challenging writers. (Mar.)

Publishers Weekly

"Comic extravaganza that plays mockingly with every device of fiction."

Washington Post Book World

"The Solitary Twin is the perfect endnote for Harry Mathews and a superb point of entry for new readers, encapsulating his lifelong commitment to formal invention while simply being an excellent novel in its own right."

BOMB Magazine - J.W. McCormack

"Posthumous books almost always feel half-formed, coincidental, unpublished for a reason....The Solitary Twin, however, may well be the last great surprise Mathews pulled out of his deep bag of tricks. It is funny, perplexing, consistent and unusual, with all the characteristic Mathews obsessions. It may also be one of the best places to start enjoying his work."

The New York Times Book Review

"Like Roubaud and Perec, Mathews engineers a funhouse labyrinth in which guise disfigures guise and the logic that reigns is that of representation."

Village Voice

"A fascinating, discursive swan song that celebrates the power of stories."

La Times - Tyler Malone

"An imagination and an ingenuity that are often just astonishing."

Harper's

"One of the most remarkable prose stylists presently writing in English."

San Francisco Chronicle

2018-01-23
Atmospheric study by the late avant-garde writer Mathews (My Life in the CIA, 2005, etc.), the first American member of the French Oulipo cooperative.A seaside village, its inhabitants a mix of the moneyed, the intellectual, and the seafaring working class. The first to appear in Mathews' slender tale are Berenice Tinker and Andreas Boeyens, who trade arch quips and aperçus ("Do you not drink sourpuss martinis to ‘mortify a taste for vintages'?"). A few sentences in, Berenice allows that she's seen John that day, John being one of the Beatles-named twins, the other Paul, who have turned up in town and are setting tongues to wagging: they live on opposite sides of the village, and though they share a taste for pale ale and black cigars, they have not much else in common, from their modes of dress to their religious leanings and lines of work, one mercantile, the other blue-collar. Tellingly, our narrator tells us, "They were in fact never seen together and apparently avoided all commerce with one another." It does not occur to some of the villagers to wonder why this should be so until late in the game, though others remark from the start that there's something just a little bit off in the twins' relationship: "I find their behavior more than a little upsetting," says one well-heeled denizen, but only because the two apparently have so little to do with each other. Well, there's a reason for all that. Mathews' story, with flashing hints of bedroom farce and Hitchcock-ian thriller alike, takes a few twists, sometimes digressing into interior yarns that seem to lose the thread until just the right moment; it's a structural marvel, the product of a master at work. The novel is also perhaps the most accessible of Mathews' later books, especially as it careens toward an end that is more reminiscent of Patricia Highsmith than Georges Perec.A smart, beguiling work elegantly written and with just the right leavening of sex—and violence.

Kirkus Reviews