Alphabetical Africa
by:
Walter Abish (author)
Alphabetical Africa, Walter Abish's delightful first novel, is an extraordinary linguistic tour de force, high comedy set in an imaginary dark continent that expands and contracts with ineluctable precision, as one by one the author adds the letters of the alphabet to his book, and then subtracts...
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Alphabetical Africa, Walter Abish's delightful first novel, is an extraordinary linguistic tour de force, high comedy set in an imaginary dark continent that expands and contracts with ineluctable precision, as one by one the author adds the letters of the alphabet to his book, and then subtracts them. While the 'geoglyphic' African landscape forms and crumbles, it is, among other things, attacked by an army of driver ants, invaded by Zanzibar, painted orange by the transvestite Queen Quat of Tanzania, and becomes a hunting ground for a pair of murderous jewel thieves tracking down their nymphomaniac moll.
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Format: ebook
ISBN:
9780811205337 (0811205339)
ASIN: 9780811205337
Publish date: 28-05-1974
Publisher: New Directions Publishing Corporation
Pages no: 152
Edition language: English
A peek on first paragraph:"Ages ago, Alex, Allen and Alva arrived at Antibes and Alva allowing all, allowing anyone, against Alex's admonition, against Allen's angry assertion: another African amusement...anyhow, as all argued, an awesome African army assembled and arduously advanced against an Afri...
Years ago I wrote a paper on Alphabetical Africa that asserted, in part, that the "story" struggled to express itself through the alphabetical artifice, some evidence of which was to be found in the erroneous use of words beginning with disallowed letters. Someone who knew Abish mentioned this to hi...
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