DownloadThe Portobello Bookshop Gift Guide 2024

The Conversions

Harry Matthews author Harry Mathews author

Format:Paperback

Publisher:Dalkey Archive Press

Published:16th Oct '97

Currently unavailable, our supplier has not provided us a restock date

The Conversions cover

A wild goose chase through a remarkably unusual world, The Conversions invites both reader and protagonist to participate in a quest for answers to an elusive game.

At a dinner party hosted by a wealthy New Yorker, a guest receives a gold adze, the coveted prize in a worm race. When the man dies the next day, he bequeaths, according to a stipulation in his will, the bulk of his fortune to the adze's possessor, provided he answer three mysterious questions relating to the artifact's history. In his search the owner encounters a menagerie of eccentric personalities: an ancient revolutionary in a Parisian prison, a ludicrous pair of gibberish-speaking brothers, and customs officials who spend their time reading contraband materials. He soon finds himself immersed in the centuries-long history of a persecuted religious sect and in an odyssey that begins in a forgotten fog-covered town in Scotland and ends on the ocean floor off the cost of an uncharted French island. A wild goose chase through a remarkably unusual world, The Conversions invites both reader and protagonist to participate in a quest for answers to an elusive game.

"Exquisitely stitched narratives, and [a] sense of wonderverging on aweat the world's regal strangeness... inspires [Mathews's] novels... Extraordinary imagination... Told with the strictest economy, without extraneous justification or explanation." -- Times Literary Supplement "The tragi-comedy of human ingenuity, which insists upon interpreting the facts of experience even when they are senseless, baffling, or banal... a remarkable extension and exploration of the odd fictional devices invented by Raymond Roussel." -- Edmund White, New York Times

ISBN: 9781564781666

Dimensions: 216mm x 139mm x 14mm

Weight: 244g

192 pages