Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #31021 in Books
• Published on: 2004-06-04
• Original language: English
• Binding: Hardcover
• 1 pages

Synopsis
This collection contains B.S. Johnson's critically acclaimed novels - "Alberto Angelo", "Trawl" and "House Mother Normal - A Geriatric Comedy".

Customer Reviews

Poor design, republish books separately, The Omnibus is horrid!
BS Johnson seems to be having a renaissance at the moment, which is about time. I first came across an old 1984 copy of House Mother Normal in a London Waterstones over a decade ago. That shop had loads of old books still at the original price, so my novel was only £3.50. Eventually someone cottoned on and changed the prices, but I bought a lot of now out of print books, finding writers like Raymond Roussel and Machado Assis (both writers also recently receiving new and revised printings).
I loved this novel, soon tracking down Christie Malry's Own Double-Entry, but House Mother Normal is still my favourite, a study of a group of people in a geriatric home written in an almost Oulipian manner, the layout (as in many of his works) being an important element of the novel.

Also in print is "The Unfortunates", a book of loose pages in a box, I recommend you find this too.

The design of this book is frankly awful. It appears to justify the price of a £14.99 paperback reprint set of novels, they give it a dust jacket. Add to that, the cover design is dull and unattractive doesn't help. It does faithfully follow the typesetting of the originals (even the holes are still there!), but I'm sure Johnson would not have liked the omnibus idea, three books in one is cumbersome and unwieldily. These books are not part of a trilogy, so don't really belong together like this. if you have the money and patience to buy the books separately, I'd recommend doing so...

When I first read house Mother Normal, I thought this was the way novels should be written, forget the 'experimental' label. I still think this, the text on the page, the image of text is almost as important as what the words express. Letters need to move on a page! Image, style and design of a work of fiction seems frowned upon as pretentiousness in England. Perhaps the distrust of something foreign or different, perhaps because it seems to cover deficiencies in the writing. Whatever the reason it seems a shame we don't have more novels like House Mother Normal.

Other books you MAY like:

Samuel Beckett- Any really, Johnson greatly admired Beckett. Try the trilogy of novels: Molloy, Malone Dies and The Unnamable (published as an omnibus too!)

Alasdair Gray- Any but I'd recommend Lanark: Life in Four Books. Someone else who thought the presentation of the text is important.

The OULIPO Condependium, and it's associated writers like Georges Perec, Marcel Benebou and Harry Mathews. Atlas press do a great selection of European translations of experimental fiction. Raymond Queneau has a lot in good translation, although much may be out of print.

Richard Brautigan, who also has a biography (by his daughter). I recommend my favourites: In Watermelon Sugar and The Hawkline Monster: A Gothic Western.

Gilbert Sorrentino- Any (there's a lot to choose from).

Flann O'Brien- Any.

Little to do with BS Johnson, but I'm going to recommend him anyway: Roland Topor and his novels "The Tenant" and "Joko's Anniversary". I just like them, none come with holes or loose pages I'm afraid. In the same vein I also recommend Stefan Themerson too.

Ann Quinn- You may like the novels, I can't say I did, perhaps I was in the wrong mood at the time. If you like mad women authors try Unica Zurn first.

Tristram Shandy- The novel, not the film, although I'm told the film is good (I better go add it to my Amazon wishlist).

McSweeney's Quartery. You may like this, to be honest I didn't and cancelled my order, favouring it's superior sister magazine "The Believer". But it does have an Oulipo magazine coming up soon.

Finally, obviously, "Like a Fiery Elephant" by Jonathan Coe, the critically adored biography of Johnson, hopefully inspiring publishers to reprint more of Johnsons work.

an excellent publication
I can't remember, to be honest, how I came to BS Johnson, but when I found this Omnibus, it was too wonderful to resist. (The book design is gorgeous, by the way.) Having not read any of his other works before these three, I was initially worried that his experimental style might prove a hard slog. Fortunately, I was wrong - all three of these novels are not only fascinating works of 'experimental' fiction, they are remarkably easy reading. Sure, they're not overloaded with plot, and there's little here for the students of the Dan Brown school of writing, but anyone with an interest in 20th century English-language literature will find much to enjoy/admire here.

'Albert Angelo' is a good introduction to Johnson, with a few quirks but a fairly straightforward storyline. The section that juxtaposes our narrator's thoughts with his words is very well done, and the cut-out (contrary to the other reviewer here, it seemed in the right place to me - but of course I've not seen any other editions) works a treat. The ending is, well, read it yourself...

'Trawl' was in my opinion the least-compelling of the three here. Not bad, mind you, but I just found less interesting either in content or form than the two either side. Still worth reading, though, for some lovely writing.

'House Mother Normal' is an astonishing idea - the same night at an old people's home, told by seven residents (in descending order of lucidity) and the house mother. Each of the eight characters is allocated 21 pages, all of which match up with the other seven chapters - so when two characters are conversing, you read one character's thoughts & dialogue in one chapter, and the corresponding responses in another - all typeset on the page to show where they're each speaking. There's little story, but the form & character studies of 'House Mother Normal' make it one of most interesting books I've read in a long time. And, as one of the other reviewers noted, a pretty quick read since the typography style means that there's not that many words on each page.

I've also bought - but not yet read - 'Christie Malry's Own Double Entry', also beautifully published by Picador. But it seems as if his other three novels are all out of print. I only hope that some enterprising publisher sees the market for another run through each of them...

Part the First: Albert Angelo
I was surprised to get through the first book in the B.S. Johnson omnibus, his second novel Albert Angelo (1964), in a day. But then it is only 180 pages long, and his liking for typographical idiosyncracy means that pages are sometimes half-filled - or less - with text; and the writing is clear and clean for the most part; and it's not like there's any complexity of plot.

Albert - despite the title of the book it's never clear if that's his forename or surname or both - is an architect in the same way that Dawn from The Office is a children's illustrator. At 28 years old, he is making ends meet while he designs buildings ("Sounds a bit useless to me, mate. What's the use of designing buildings if no-one's ever going to build them?") by working as a supply teacher in a series of rough London schools - in his current stint he is replacing a teacher who committed suicide. The book describes a series of toiling lessons at the school, where the emphasis is more on crowd control than filling young minds with golden nuggets of knowledge, while Albert dwells on his lost love, Jenny (Johnson in an authorial intervention tells us later: "a name I rather like even though I intended it originally to be involved in a rather coarse pun, Jenny Taylor, Jenny Taylor") and the one happy memory he has of her, of a holiday in the west of Ireland.

And that's it. On page 167 Johnson breaks in: "f*** all this lying look what im really trying to write about is writing ... Im trying to say something not tell a story telling stories is telling lies and I want to tell the truth about me about my experience about my truth about my truth to reality about sitting here writing" and gives us about 10 pages of this before tying up the plot of the novel, such as it is, with a nasty, brutal and short coda. Albert, he tells us, is him, the writer who cannot survive by his writing - even the lost love and the rest of it is from memory with a few names changed.

It's hard to say whether this is a clever literary subversion or a crap cop-out. Did Johnson plan to have himself enter the novel at this stage all along, or did he just run out of things to say and want to end it suddenly? Would it have made any difference in any event, and how could we tell? It's a toss-up which side to come down on, because while a lot of the book engenders pleasure and sympathy with Johnson - the fine writing in the early stages, the genuine feel of reality in some of the classroom scenes (I particularly liked the roll call for some reason), some of the typographical trickery like splitting the page into two columns and putting the exterior dialogue down the left hand side of the page and simultaneously Albert's inner thoughts down the right hand side - other elements are more likely to bring out a 'tch!' than an 'ahh!', like Johnson's showy determination to get in every form of narrative, from first-, third- and even second-person ("A boy comes running through the door up to you and says that someone is hurt") through dialogue and interior monologue to poetry and Molesworth-style unreconstructed kids' speech - to some of the more novel typographics like cutting a hole in two of the pages to enable the reader to see through to a future event ("To dismiss such techniques as gimmicks, or to refuse to take them seriously, is crassly to miss the point," Johnson tells us primly).

All in all though it's a breeze to read for the most part - unlike Johnson's heroes Beckett and Joyce - and the prose, when he lets it settle down in one place for long enough, is supple and memorable. So although it's not surprising that Albert Angelo had until now been out of print for decades, it was, I think, worth getting back.

(Oh, and it's from this book that the title of Jonathan Coe's biography of Johnson comes, when one of the pupils in the school writes in an essay "What I think of Mr Albert", He walks like a firy elephant [sic].)