Mawrdew Czgowchwz

This has been one of my favorite comic novels ever since I first bought it in 1976. I re-read it twice. (The only other books that I regularly re-read are : "The Hamlet" by Wm. Faulkner, "Death on the Installment Plan" by Louis-Ferdinand Celine, "The Magnificent Ambersons" by Booth Tarkington, the screenplays by Preston Sturges, "Virgil Thomson" by Virgil Thomson, "The Symphonies of Havergal Brian" by Malcolm Macdonald, "The Annotated Gilbert and Sullivan" edited by Ian Bradley, "The Treasure of the Sierra Madre" by B. Traven, "Men Against the State : the Expositors Of Individualist Anarchism in America, 1827-1908" by James J. Martin, and "Topper" by Thorne Smith). I lived 26 years in Newport, Rhode Island, so the fact that this novel's climactic hurricane occurs at a music festival in the island town of Neaport was a special treat. P.S. It had been about 15 years since my last re-reading, and my opinion has somewhat changed. The characters now strike me as cartoonish. There are not enough simple sentences to provide relief from the relentless stream of overblown language (P.G. Wodehouse does this sort of thing better, and he confines his efforts at self-consciously pompous verbiage to dialogue, not to every sentence -- simple sentences are few and far between in "Mawrdew"). Nevertheless, I still enjoy the many patches of manic exuberance. If I were were writing a new review, I would probably drop the rating down to 4 stars instead of my original 5 stars.

It's lovely to have this brilliant novel back in print, easily the best novel on the opera milieu ever published. But it's the maximalist prose that is the true star here--half Firbank, half Joyce, as Wayne Koestenbaum points out in his excellent introduction. I envy anyone reading this for the first time.

This book is not for everyone. The prose style is dense, there are far too many characters, and the novel requires at least a passing knowledge of opera. However, the cattyness of the observations, the rhythmns of the sentences and their unexpected twists and turns, make for delightful reading. A sample of the prose is the best introduction."While His Scarlet Eminence and Msgr. Finneagle sat playing their esoteric version of Monopoly, the custom-crafted board for which could be seen to represent the several circles of Dante's Inferno, Purgatorio, and Paradiso, as well as the ground plan for the entire Vatican, both the above-ground palaces' apartments, closets, and chapels, and those labyrinthine catacomb reaches where Darkest Rumor is said on good authority to repose in thrilling reptile fashion. His Scarlet Eminence snickered in pixyish glee, having caught his opponent in the square of the seventh circle of hell (with four hotels). Monsignor trembled (livid), bankrupt of plenary indulgence."Should you find this amusing and well-written, you'll love this book. If not, you'd best pass.