Wormholes: Essays and Occasional Writings - Softcover

Fowles, John

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0099272725 ISBN 13: 9780099272724

Publisher: Vintage Classics, 1999

Synopsis

Here, for the first time, is a riveting collection of Fowles's fugitive and intensely personal writings composed sinced 1963, ranging from essays and literary criticism to commentaries, autobiographical statements, memoirs and musings. Wormholes is a delicious sampling of the various matters that have plagued, preoccupied, or delighted Fowles throughout his life; it is a rich mine of essays as art and a `geography' of the mind of one of the twentieth century's greatest novelists.

About this title

Review:

John Fowles calls his essays "little bits of what I am" and declares--rather than fears--himself "only too well aware that there are many they will not please. "The 30 pieces collected in Wormholes display this enigmatic author's concerns (above all with the natural world), disdain (for passing artistic and critical fashions and various other 20th- century "manias") and crankiness. Pity the tidy suburban gardener who comes upon the following generalization: "In America, freedom from crabgrass becomes a test of social acceptability; the man with the best roses walks six inches taller." Fowles knows he's going to push people's buttons, and clearly enjoys doing so. Yet he's serious when it comes to personal and public responsibility. He's also dead right in thinking that natural life needs privacy, untidiness, and its fair share of insects. From the first entry, "I Write Therefore I Am"--as much a tirade against the so-called literary world as it is a love letter to literature--Fowles is confrontational, casual and astoundingly learned. He's also highly amusing. Witness the opening squib of "Gather Ye Starlets" (1965): "I had better confess at once that I am writing about a subject with which I have never slept; and nothing, as Genet has five or six hundred times reminded us, is quite so immoral as total innocence." Readers have long delighted in Fowles's philosophical fiction because he makes thinking a great game, and his essays openly engage--and outrage--in similar fashion. Wormholes may well be the best intellectual and emotional biography we will ever have of the man who created such modern classics as The Magus and The French Lieutenant's Woman.

Review:

"A splendidly uplifting book" (Richard Mabey)

"Anyone familiar with books such as The French Lieutenant's Woman and The Magus will already know that Fowles is a perceptive and intelligent writer, but this collection shows him to be as fascinating and entertaining in his non-fiction as he is in his novels. Indeed, Wormholes is something of an embarassment of riches, there are so many marvellous things in here" (Hampstead & Highgate Express)

"John Fowles is a magnificent novelist who has written two masterpieces but who has a reluctance to give precise endings to his stories... In the wise and beautifully written essays and biographical pieces of Wormholes he indicates why this is so" (Daily Telegraph)

About this edition

• Publisher: Vintage Classics
• Publication date: 1999
• ISBN 10: 0099272725
• ISBN 13: 9780099272724
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 512
• Editor: Relf Jan