I enjoyed The Journalist more--both are semi-Oulipian works. Some of the word games are hard to follow, and not for the casual reader. The general plot was engaging, with plenty of quirky characters and story tangents that are a credit to Mathews. ( )

I enjoyed The Journalist more--both are semi-Oulipian works. Some of the word games are hard to follow, and not for the casual reader. The general plot was engaging, with plenty of quirky characters and story tangents that are a credit to Mathews. ( )

A mild goose chase
At a wealthy New Yorker's mansion the narrator is gifted a golden axe after winning a worm race - yes a worm race! The next morning the eccentric host mysteriously carks it, and according to his Last Will & Testament the person who is in possession of the antique axe gets the bulk of the rich guy's fortune, providing he/she can answer three riddles relating to the artefact's history.
This is how The Conversions by Harry Mathews begins, and it's a strange almost awkward tale, written in a chilled, concise style infused with wordplay and allusion.
The elegant (some might think "dry") storytelling follows the narrator's globetrotting antics as he attempts to provide answers to the three riddles.
The result is a sophisticated rigmarole of red herrings and odd encounters which seems to seesaw between the fascinating and the banal. Worth exploring if you have a fondness for peculiar fiction. ( )

"The Conversions" is an object lesson in the dangers of emulation. It is based on Raymond Roussel, and some pages and images are very close to his work -- they could be mistaken for Roussel if they were presented without context -- but at the same time it is very far from him, and even in a certain sense, as far from Roussel as it is possible to get.

In the "Paris Review" interview, Mathews says he "didn’t use [Roussel's] methods specifically, but mine were similar in that they were based on relationships between words, often puns" -- which is the method Roussel describes in "How I Wrote Certain of My Books." Mathews also offers this, as a generalization: "The whole thing is based on misunderstanding language." (tinyurl.com/6d2m862)

"The Conversions" is a series of short chapters, each with a story involving a puzzle. Some are descriptions of machines, exactly as in Roussel; others are translations of texts, or stories told by people the narrator visits. Each chapter is different in style, historical references, and in the kind of puzzle. Mathews is closest to Roussel when he describes machines, like the undersea clock that incorporates a miraculous acid held in place by magnets (pp. 164-71), the wasps who "scorch" bacteria, producing a cure for an epidemic (p. 51), or the painter's machine that supposedly produces unusual colors (p. 119-28).

Mathews is more scholarly than Roussel, and he plays with Latin puns (pp. 110-18), German prose (there is a chapter in German, pp. 172-80), and French. He also knows more about some historical questions than Roussel may have -- especially medieval, Renaissance, and Baroque music, including a chapter on Orlando di Lasso. But those differences aside, much of the material in "The Conversions" could have been imagined by Roussel 40 years before Mathews's book.

But he is very far from Roussel in two crucial particulars.

First, he presents the solutions to each puzzle, or the impossibility of a solution, in each chapter together with the puzzle. In "Impressions of Africa," all the strange performances and machines are described in the first half of the book, and then "explained" in the second half, but the "explanations" prove to be as enigmatic as the expositions, and the overall "explanation" (that the performers are captives of the African king) doesn't come close to serving the ordinary function of an explanation, which is to dispel any sense of mystery or irrationality in the setting. But in "The Conversions," each chapter concludes with the narrator's summary. Most chapters yield a small insight, and the narrator continues on to the next puzzle, exactly as in a murder mystery. Roussel defers explanation, so that each new episode in "Impressions of Africa," "New Impressions of Africa," and "Locus Solus" accumulates a perverse and increasingly inexplicable--and for some, intolerable--opacity. Mathews writes more like a murder mystery writer, bringing readers along with partial solutions, promising clarity at the end.

Second, Mathews ends by declaring the puzzle is insoluble. He does this abruptly, but there are also clues that the book as a whole will not resolve. For me, the strongest of those is the throwaway comment, toward the end of the chapter on the painter's machine, that the mechanism doesn't actually produce unusual colors for the artist, but was "only a means of supplying him with material for the exercise of his talent" --exactly in the way the puzzles serve the book "The Conversion" rather than the truth of the narrative in "The Conversion" (p. 127). In the "Paris Review" interview, Mathews says:

"The ends of my books are also designed in a way that subverts any illusion that what you have become involved in is anything but the book itself. In The Conversions, as you approach the end of the book, you get to a part where the narrator doesn’t understand the last of three riddles. The whole quest falls apart. What happens next? You turn the page and are greeted with nine pages of German. This infuriated people."

This is very far from Roussel, for whom it would be irrational and misguided to admit, in the book, that the puzzles and mysteries are only there to serve the art of fiction. It's the exact opposite: Roussel writes from the other side of the mirror, as if everything he is saying is in earnest, and the created world he presents is utterly true. That is the crucial move that ensures enigma, as Michel Foucault observed in "Death and the Labyrinth."

So: as an object lesson in the dangers of emulation, "The Conversions" shows that the temptation to copy, or surpass, the effects of a writer can miss the forest for the trees. In Roussel, the trees are fascinating and strange, but nowhere near as strange as the forest, which remains as silent and free of "explanation" as a real forest. In Mathews, the forest is literature, and the rules that produce his text, even if they are "from Mars" as Perec said, are all in the service of compelling writing. Roussel had no idea about writing in that sense, because he was too deeply deluded. ( )

2,5 stars
Most of the book is about the protagonist’s investigation to decipher a riddle posed in the first chapters. Details of his point-to-point research are presented in lenghty passages and in such density that sometimes it feels like playing various parts of encyclopedia on fast forward, which tends to be involving in a strange way.

Some reviewers compare The Conversions to several other ‘experimental’ works, most notably The Crying of lot 49 , which is somewhat similar in style and plot. Indeed, Mathews uses entropy as a narrative device, a trait attributed to Pynchon, and he does this quite nicely. It’s fairly clear however, that this proliferation of excessively rich, often erudite descriptions and deeply buried allusions might be going more or less nowhere . Maybe that’s what should be expected of a story which begins with a worm race…

That early enigma-setting chapter is actually a good sample of what’s ahead: it’s quirky, overloaded with bizarre detail, and a bit too trippy to be taken simply as it is. Compared to If On a Winter's Night a Traveler , which has a similar premise, the stories forming a chain aren’t equally pretty but still some of them really grasp attention. Just as Calvino covers many styles, Mathews covers many fields of research. The protagonist listens to many stories, reads a novel, studies some documents. Like in Grady Tripp's novel from Wonder Boys, there's also a fair amount of horse genealogy in between. Mystery that emerges slowly concerns a religious sect and its female leader (the author points firmly at Graves’ White Goddess ).

All this is told in repeated bursts of facts, technical data, secrets, language games and occassional humour. For some, this is more likely to spawn growing indifference rather than continuous interest. I was eager enough to get through this novel in two sittings while on train – it’s relatively short and manages, for some 100 pages, to draw attention solely by being a literary oddity, which is not bad.

The Conversions is known mainly for it’s unorthodox ending and the author’s assumption that on completing the book his perfect reader would throw it out angrily, then think for a split-second and catch it before it falls to read again. Now I know I’m not the kind -- as much as I sometimes enjoy literature as a game to play, my curiosity and taste demand more than a riddle-fueled text machine bordering on a hoax.

One truly interesting thing about it is how many other literary efforts of similar kind it predates. So Calvino and Pynchon ‘are’ here. Pale Fire ’s playing upon appendixes is utilized here too. Dan Brown might be here as well, if you wish. The problem is that Mathews, having a concept and a considerable skill, didn’t seem to know exactly how to use them. Neither had he Nabokov’s grace nor Pynchon’s playful mastery. Oulipo's formal experiments usually seemed to have a purpose which is nowhere to be found here. What’s left is a puzzle, several pieces of which I was able to match together, yet unwilling to look closer for any others. Putting it simply, It might be clever enough, but it’s not fun enough. It’s still much better than Da Vinci Code, though. ( )