Mantissa
Condition: SECONDHAND
This is a secondhand book. The jacket image is a photograph of the exact copy we have in stock. This image shows the condition of this book. Further condition remarks are below.
Condition remarks:
Book: Good
Jacket: Chipped and worn with some minor damage
Pages: Good
What happens when a novelist loses his memory — and his muse refuses to let him forget her? Mantissa is John Fowles's audaciously playful and cerebral novel, set almost entirely within the confines of a man's mind, where a nameless protagonist awakens in a hospital room with complete amnesia, only to find himself locked in an increasingly surreal and erotic battle of wills with a shape-shifting woman who may be his therapist, his creation, or the very spirit of inspiration itself. Part psychological puzzle, part philosophical farce, the novel operates as a brilliant piece of metafiction that dismantles the boundary between author and character, reality and fantasy, with wit as sharp as a scalpel. Fowles, best known for The French Lieutenant's Woman and The Magus, here strips his narrative down to its bare essentials — two characters, one room, and an infinite regression of competing fictions — to argue that the creative act is itself a form of desire, possession, and surrender. Mantissa is as much a meditation on the nature of storytelling as it is a darkly comic battle of the sexes, written with the erudition and mischievous intelligence that define Fowles at his most experimental. Readers who dare to enter this hall of mirrors will find themselves questioning who, ultimately, holds the pen.
Author: John Fowles
Format: Hardback
Genre: Modern fiction
Condition remarks:
Book: Good
Jacket: Chipped and worn with some minor damage
Pages: Good
What happens when a novelist loses his memory — and his muse refuses to let him forget her? Mantissa is John Fowles's audaciously playful and cerebral novel, set almost entirely within the confines of a man's mind, where a nameless protagonist awakens in a hospital room with complete amnesia, only to find himself locked in an increasingly surreal and erotic battle of wills with a shape-shifting woman who may be his therapist, his creation, or the very spirit of inspiration itself. Part psychological puzzle, part philosophical farce, the novel operates as a brilliant piece of metafiction that dismantles the boundary between author and character, reality and fantasy, with wit as sharp as a scalpel. Fowles, best known for The French Lieutenant's Woman and The Magus, here strips his narrative down to its bare essentials — two characters, one room, and an infinite regression of competing fictions — to argue that the creative act is itself a form of desire, possession, and surrender. Mantissa is as much a meditation on the nature of storytelling as it is a darkly comic battle of the sexes, written with the erudition and mischievous intelligence that define Fowles at his most experimental. Readers who dare to enter this hall of mirrors will find themselves questioning who, ultimately, holds the pen.