Impossible Object

By Enoch M Marvin

Impossible Object was the first Nicholas Mosley book that I ever read, and it completely blew me away and led to my obsession with Mosley's work. Over the past decade, I've given this book out to a lot of my friends, talked about it to various booksellers and other readers, and more often than not, they have told me it was a life changing book. At it's core, this is a book about love, or rather, the impossibility of love. Taken by themselves, each of the eight sections in this book are brilliant: a family plays a game in their basement that ends tragically, a writer in a pub observes the complicated emotional dance of a couple having an affair. But the way that these stories come together is what I most like about this book.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0916583090
• ISBN13: 9780916583095
• Release Date: August 2002
• Publisher: Dalkey Archive Press
• Length: 219 Pages
• Weight: 0.68 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.7" x 5.6" x 8.5"

Customer Reviews

Another great novel by Mosley

Like "Accident," "Impossible Object" is another example of an excellent 1960's novel which pushed literary boundaries at the time but is somewhat neglected now. Although advertised as a novel (and it IS a novel) it reads as a collection of short stories. Connected, yet so unique in style and substance they are initially recognizable as a narrative theme rather than a cohesive story, it is only in the end that the characters...

What a Surprise

If you read my other reviews, you'll see I'm an absolute snob. Just take my word for it. Beckett, Chekhov...Wallace Stevens, that kind of thing. I'm always skeptical when someone recommends to me a book by an author I have never heard of, especially one more or less recent. I won't summarize the book for you, just say that I hope you'll be as pleasantly surprised as I was. The form, the content...WEIRD and very difficult even...

It's a novel--no, it's a short story collection...

Mosely writes in the end of Impossible Object, "But you always read books more for form than for content," giving away, I believe, an epiphany that mostly comes to those who have read many, many books. Mosely's form in Impossible Object is extremely interesting because of how intertwined the stories are--characters reappear, images recur, and narrators are constantly positing on what exactly constitutes love. When you're...

A COMPLEX STORY THAT CAN BE READ ON MANY LEVELS

I was left with a sense of confusion after reading this book. There is so much interpretation that needs to be done after reading this, that a reader needs to back and re-read many times. A handful of stories were very interesting, and the rest, well, I can't comment on them because I didn't fully understand the book. Anyone who is up for a challenge,and good at interpretation of books on many levels, would enjoy this, and...