Volume 3, Number 8 · December 3, 1964
Throwing up Absurd
By Robert M. Adams
Last Exit To Brooklyn
by Hubert Selby Jr.
Grove, 304 pp., $5.00
Nova Express
by William S. Burroughs
Grove, 187 pp., $5.00
The Invention of Morel
(and other stories from La Trama Celeste) by Adolfo Bioy Casares
University of Texas, 327 pp., $5.00
Us He Devours
by James B. Hall
New Directions-San Francisco Review, 185 pp., $2.25 (paper)
A simple question comes out of reading this miscellaneous batch of very contemporary fiction: what is a book for? This sounds like a rhetorical query preliminary to belaboring some book that doesn't fit in with the reviewer's notion of what a book should be; but perhaps to it can be asked for its own sake. What is a book for? To be read, of course. And by 'reading' we used to mean an active process of taking apart and putting together, an exercise of imaginative sympathy and critical distance, which might go on for some time. Indeed, a book's ability to reveal new facets and subtleties, when looked at for some time from different points of view, used to be taken as a measure of its merit. Reading involved, of necessity, re-reading and re-thinking.
Review, 2081 words
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