The Conversions
In Harry Mathews’s literary novel The Conversions, stories nest, esoterica abound, sentences fail, and gibberish is spoken.
A beguiling unnamed narrator with distinguished connections and intellectual leanings attends a gathering whose host dies, bequeathing him a valuable golden adze with symbolic engravings. He has to answer three riddles to maintain it. In the quest to find answers, he encounters bizarre people, including siblings with tragic pasts, an imprisoned Parisian revolutionary, and customs officials in fogbound Scotland who read contraband books. In Scotland, he discovers a novel with clues to the riddles.
Its prose marked by marvelous absurdism, mind-bending wordplay, and occasional surrealistic mise-en-scènes, the novel tasks its audience with making meaning from nested narratives, symbols, and intertextual references. It’s structured like a winding staircase, whereupon the narrator’s various stops are apartments on storied floors, opening out to tales that include a novel about the survival of three music enthusiasts in the Arctic, a French aristocratic family, and a persecuted religious sect. One descendant is an ignominious scientist bound up in his discovery of “infraheat,” a mystical blending of chemistry and physics in an infinite cycle of matter.
Further explorations involve historical digressions, dotted with musical works and historical references to Luis Buñuel and Orlando di Lasso, a late Renaissance Flemish composer. There’s even a German translation of a chapter called “The Otiose Creator” in the appendix. Elsewhere, a fantastical invention, the moon-clock, is powered by swimming silver herrings.
At its heart, the novel is a literary puzzle that questions the nature and meaning of the holy grail as a literary convention, a historical ritual, and the legitimizing force behind kingly power. Indeed, The Conversions is an ode to illimitable meaning, an exuberant experiment in storytelling, and a surreal wonderland of the obscure—“combinatorial literature” at its trippiest.
Reviewed by
Elaine Chiew
Disclosure: This article is not an endorsement, but a review. The publisher of this book provided free copies of the book to have their book reviewed by a professional reviewer. No fee was paid by the publisher for this review. Foreword Reviews only recommends books that we love. Foreword Magazine, Inc. is disclosing this in accordance with the Federal Trade Commission’s 16 CFR, Part 255.
