Picked up Christine Brooke-Rose’s 1984 postmodern novel Amalgamemnon and the Grove Press collection of Three Exemplary Novels by Miguel de Unamuno the other day. Those three exemplary novels are Marquis of Lubria; Two Mothers; and Nothing Less Than a Man, in translation by Angel Flores. It’s an older edition; Grove Press’s contemporary copy offers the following:
In Two Mothers, the demonic will of a woman runs amok in a whirlwind of maternal power, and in The Marquis of Lumbria, another unforgettable heroine steers a violent course through the dense sea of tradition. By contrast, Nothing Less Than a Man, Unamuno’s most forceful piece of writing, focuses on a truly Nietzchean hero, a man who embodies human will deprived of spiritual strength.
And here’s a bit on Brooke-Rose’s Amalgamemnon from Susie E. Hawkins’ essay “Innovation/History/Politics: Reading Christine Brooke-Rose’s Amalgamemnon” from the Spring 1991 issue of Contemporary Literature:
While the title signals possible mythic revisions of Aeschylus’s play Agamemnon, such anticipations on the reader’s part prove to be utterly unfounded. To begin with, there is no “story” as such, there are no “characters,” no “plot,” no “conflict,” and certainly no “climax.” In addition, the fiction is cast entirely in the future and conditional tenses with a few imperatives and subjunctives thrown in. Although Amalgamemnon exhibits few remnants of a traditional narrative desire for unity, presence, psychological accuracy, closure, and so forth, it does do what most innovative writing should do: it challenges the audience in terms of accustomed modes of perception, interpretation, and reading strategies – in short, challenges readerly ideology. In part, this text enacts such a challenge by performing itself, by “being about” language, by being a performance. The text becomes a space in which a cacophony of voices, or discursive amplifications, or babble, or little stories – whichever term best suits — enact their own sounding.
Biblioklept 