Jason schwartz labor9/1/2023 ![]() It is correct, I hope, to remove knives from left to right, and the glasses last. The heart decays on a polite white plate. The scars on the doors are a better measure, however, like hatpins, and like the disposition of copper pots at five o’clock.Ī calf’s head, divided, accounts for the gnats. Other insects are even less congenial, given the habits of the household. There are bees, meddlesome botflies, betsy bugs, common wasps, destructive termites, and swarming hornets. As such, Schwartz is able to collate in John the Posthumous a fine baroque art piece on domesticity, marriage, and betrayal.įor example, at one point insects-rather than the much-discussed adultery or cuckoldry-threaten to ravage the very structure of a home. Schwartz’s words have the precision of a poet’s, but his prose is the compositional work of an accomplished collagist. Yet digression and assemblage might be the important artistic techniques here. In experimental writing like Schwartz’s, sentences are the paramount element. ![]() He writes in detail about geographical names, folklore, household fires, war history, tableware, weapons, beds, coffins, embalming, and biblical text. architecture, etymology, entomology, and ornithology. Throughout the novella Schwartz centers on several specific subjects, e.g. He was a French king who lived for a mere five days in November 1316. To wit, readers might be interested to know that John the Posthumous-he of the excellent title to this book-was indeed an actual person. Schwartz, meanwhile, seamlessly combines the real and the invented. Elsewhere the writing is taut, which when combined with macabre subject matter creates a perceivable tension and anxiety. His language can be poetic, sometimes hypnotic. Schwartz’s prose is obsessive and repetitive, often with in-sentence contradictions or qualifications. Old-fashioned words and jargon are frequently used but rarely interfere with the rhythm or direction-such as it is-of this dark, peculiar novella. ![]() (“The word adultery does not, in fact, derive from cry-just as you had suspected-and the town, I will concede, suitably antique, and quiet now, stands in lieu of another town.”) Only on occasion does the first-person narrator insert himself into the text. Sometimes those facts turn out to be fabricated. Paragraphs contain declarative sentences that state arcane facts. Readers who admired those stories will certainly appreciate John the Posthumous, and may have already read sections of the book that were previously published in print and online literary journals.īut what to say about Schwartz’s latest? Well, it’s a novella-sort of. Like A German Picturesque, John the Posthumous is experimental fiction and it is similar in style to Schwartz’s earlier work. Jason Schwartz’s second book arrives more than a decade after Knopf published his first-the short story collection A German Picturesque-in 1998.
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