By Edmund White (1973)
I’ve just finished White’s first book, Forgetting Elena – this is the book that Nabokov called “remarkable”.
It is something else. An apparent amnesiac, who doesn’t even know his own name, plays out several days on an idyllic island, attempting to piece together his identity in a sort of utopian society ruled by infinite shades of etiquette.
It combines dreamy psychedelia with really precise poetic language:
Herbert’s closing words โฆ arose as unexpectedly out of the drift of his argument as a human arm out of the waves at night
It is quite dense and heavy going, and I did wonder if there would be any kind of resolution.
But the last few pages make the whole thing work: it’s not that it ties everything up, but rather it reveals a extraordinary structure that was always there. Very Kafka and Borges-esque, but with a maximalism that makes it easy to see why Nabokov rated it.
As an aside, the Amazon reviews are pretty funny. My particular favourites: “Pretentious tripe or a great masterpiece” (five stars); “Awful (two stars)”.