I'm slow sometimes: it was not until page 37 that I finally rumbled Griffiths. The book begins by purporting to be a novel about Marco Polo, reminiscing during his imprisonment to an Italian writer, Rustichello, who, it soon becomes clear, is both an unreliable amanuensis and an unreliable narrator, using the traveller's narrative merely as an excuse for his own self-indulgent flights of authorial fancy. But during the third "beginning again" of this convoluted pseudo-narrative, with its interminably ambling sentences and obsessive self-congratulatory lingering on momentary observations, the anachronistic mention of a camera prompted a sudden enlightenment. The book is not about Marco Polo, nor about Rustichello. Griffiths is using the fictional writer's unreliable scribing merely as an excuse for his own self-indulgent flights of authorial fancy. All the historical scenario is an extravagantly painted facade: behind the mirage of Griffiths pretending to write about Rustichello, pretending to write about Marco Polo, sits Griffiths writing about Griffiths.

Having achieved this realization, I don't really see the point of continuing to read the book: "What isn't known instantly isn't worth knowing" (p. 141). Certainly, at least, I shall not bother to read it sequentially, though I may dip in to some of the later sections for some of the shorter and more amusing renditions of Zen koans or mock-historical narratives a la Jorge Luis Borges, while avoiding the pointless pieces of collage such as the extract from the 1986 San Francisco telephone directory. The author gets approbatory comments from such lights of the firmament as Hilary Mantel and Rowan Williams, so I did wonder whether I was just too dense to appreciate the book, but I found a review by Carolyn See in the L.A. Times which made me feel a bit better.

MB 19-xi-2021

https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1990-07-16-vw-47-story.html ( )