A review by paulcowdell
Cigarettes by Harry Mathews

4.0

This was probably a 3.5 for me. It's not my favourite Mathews by a long way, lacking the capricious spring of The Sinking of the Odradek Stadium, say, and being much more in the nature of a Work of Literary Fiction (which is one of the most damning insults I can level against any book). Mathews's approach to construction, however (as with all of the Oulipians) means that even such an end result is driven in a way it's generally not by the Creative Writing Studies crowds. This reads like a geometrically organised take on the 19th century triple-decker or mid-20th century modernist novels of social intrigue, and the resultant collapsing in on themselves of the Chinese boxes of plots is hugely satisfying. In a way that's my biggest gripe against the Oulipians: when they work at their best (Perec's big novels), or even somewhere slightly below that (here) they often produce novels that are way better than they have any right to be.