Cartesian Sonata and Other Novellas

-- "Cartesian Sonata" is one of those works of postmodern fiction that you'd be hard-pressed to say, with any authority, what it's really about...unless you read the flyleaf provided by the publisher. -- According to which, in the first of the four novellas collected here, Gass has re-imagined the philosophy of Decartes with God as a befuddled writer, his wife as Mind in the form of a modern-day Cassandra.....etc etc. -- Really? So that's what it was about? Who'd ever guess? How, for that matter, did the person who wrote the copy, unless it was Gass himself, pulling our leg just a little bit. -- Philosophical allusions do indeed abound in "Cartesian Sonata"--the collection and each of the novellas that comprise it--but to fix a pat and reductive interpretation on these stories is misleading...and a mistake. -- What are they about? In general, they are about how we interpret/misinterpret the world around us and try to gain some degree of mastery and control over it through signs, symbols, and objects. -- In this sense, using Descartes as a touchstone is perhaps of some help. Is there anything we know for certain? If so, how so? "I think therefore I am." Maybe. But the further we stray from that citadel of "I" the less clear everything becomes. -- A woman harboring a possibly lethal obsession with the poetry and the private lives of Elizabeth Bishop and Marianne Moore. A traveling accountant who finds "salvation" in a scrupulously appointed bed and breakfast. A man who's devoted his life to the mastery of petty vengeance in theory and practice. The dysfunctional marriage of a dying psychic and an insurance salesman. -- Gass riffs off these unlikely scenarios with a great deal of wit, erudition, and imagination. He's a fantastic prose stylist, the kind that some readers will find unreadable precisely because he's so good; he stretches, twists, and redesigns the language into what amounts to a prose rollercoaster. And he's funny--very funny in a way that makes literature even of scatology. --If you're looking for stories in which "a+b+c+d" happens and ends neatly wrapped up in "e," "Cartesian Sonata" is probably going to grate on your nerves and seem a pretentious bag of Gass signifying not much at all. --But if you can appreciate the sort of writing that finds a justification for its existence in the beauty of the writing itself, that apprehends reality in the musing about what its nature might be, and that seems to delight in the rush and exhilaration of expression, as if our despair were somehow mitigated by how well we can sing it, then "Cartesian Sonata" may well be music to your ears.

a stunning realization of the Cartesian halves: the mind (on the one side); the flesh (on the other). All of the Gassian exploration of the marrow of language, metaphor and the life of lyricism is here. But so is his visceral presentation of the flesh, bones and fragile surfaces of the body of one Ella Bend. With the halves (thinking; therefore, being) folding and unfolding into and away from each other. The smell of earth, the abuses of existence, the pull of poetry: its all there. One of the best things I've ever read.