Product Description

"The object of life is impossible; one cuts out fabrication and creates reality. A mirror is held to the back of the head and one's hand has to move the opposite way from what was intended." In these closing lines from Impossible Object, one has embodied both Nicholas Mosley s subject of love and imagination, as well as his unmatched lyric style. In eight carefully connected stories that are joined by introspective interludes on related subjects, the author pursues the notion, through the lives of a couple seen by different narrators, that "those who like unhappy ends can have them, and those who don't will have to look for them." The impossible object of the title, "the triangle that can exist in two dimensions but not in three," is a controlling symbol for the impossibility of realizing the good life unless one recognizes the impossibility of attaining it: only then can it be possible to realize it, through a kind of renunciation, especially in "a sophisticated, corrupt, chaotic world." Such a provocative theme, comic or tragic by turns, was met by critics in 1968 as brilliant, insightful, intense, and moving, but especially original.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #787745 in Books
• Published on: 2006-12-15
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 219 pages

Review
"Mosley must be one of the most compelling writers in the English language today." --Joyce Carol Oates

"Mosley's very special talent is for describing the sensations experienced within a cocoon of dismay and terror." --Sunday Times

About the Author
Nicholas Mosley as born in London on June 25, 1923 and was educated at Eton and Oxford. He served in Italy during World War II, and published his first novel, Spaces of the Dark, in 1951. Since then, he has published sixteen works of fiction, including the novels Accident, Impossible Object, and Hopeful Monsters, winner of the 1990 Whitbread Award. Mosley is also the author of several works of nonfiction, most notably the autobiography Efforts at Truth and a biography of his father, Sir Oswald Mosley, entitled Rules of the Game/Beyond the Pale. He currently resides in London, where he is working on a nonfiction study of war and peace.