Michael Martone: Fictions

ISBN: 1573661260

Author: Martone, Michael

Condition: Used

When the author becomes the story, the possibilities are endless.Michael Martone, by Michael Martone, continues the author's giddy exploration of the parts of books nobody ever reads. Michael Martone is its own appendix, comprising fifty contributors notes, each of which identifies in exorbitant biographical detail the author of the other forty-nine. Full of fanciful anecdotes and preposterous reminiscences, Martones self-inventions include the multiple deaths of himself and all his family members, his Kafkaesque rebirth as a giant insect, and his stints as circus performer, assembly-line worker, photographer, and movie extra.Expect no autobiographical consistency here. A note revealing Martone's mother as the ghost-writer of all his books precedes the note beginning, Michael Martone, an orphan . . . We learn of Martones university career and sketchy formal education, his misguided caretaking of his teacher John Barths lawn, and his impersonation of a poor African republic in political science class, where Martone's population is allowed to starve as his more fortunate fellow republics fight over development and natural resource trading-cards.The author of Michael Martone, whose other names include Missy, Dolly, Peanut, Bug, Gigi-tone, Tony's boy, Patty's boy, Junior's, Mickey, Monk, Mr. Martone, and the contributor named in this note," proves as Protean as fiction itself, continuously transforming the past with every new attribution but never identifying himself by name. It is this missing personage who, from first note to last, constitutes the unformed subject of Michael Martone.