Barthelme's Syllabus

1. It's encouraging to see I've read a number of the books on the list.

2. It's discouraging to realize that even if I were to read them all, I'd still not be Donald Barthelme.

No. 1: The Feverhead

1. Jacket copy: "The Feverhead is written in the form of letters between a couple of not-all-that-bright Austrians. Their correspondence is doomed to failure, nearly every letter crosses in the post and yet they succeed in their quest: the search for a perfect thermometer (and a serial murderer). In fact they both independently discover the secret of the universe in a remote spot thousands of miles from their intended (and different) destinations. Bauer’s comedy of errors is enacted by an unusual cast that includes microscopic schoolgirls, ambiguously sexed nuns, incompetent detectives, two ultimately bad poets, living steam engines and a venerable three-eyed sea-captain whose two bodies remain exactly 3.5 metres apart, not to mention: ULF."

2. Captain Ox: Captain Ox is a single man divided between two bodies. I'll allow that he could be a symbol, but what explanation is there for the scene in which one of him is kidnapped by monks (at the instigation of a transvestite nun) while both of him is entering a brothel?

3. "Language, you wretch," being the title of a poem by Wolfgang Bauer, in which he curses language:

... you aren't even old
you Moloch
you Mafia
encountered in every shithole
preventing us from really seeing
dreaming, eating, walking, and fucking
wherever one looks, there's your fat arse
on my coat
on my pants
you voyeur, even in pitch darkness
you infrared-eyed peeping Tom
even in the depth of the Mariana Trench you still stutter
Fish! Fish! Fish!

[Translated by Martin Esslin]