To an astronomer, man is but an insignificant dot in an infinite universe---said whoever. Though that insignificant dot is also the astronomer.---said Einstein.
p. 433, The Last Novel
Before placing David Markson's spellbinding "Notecard Quartet" (namely, these four novels: Reader's Block; This is Not a Novel; Vanishing Point; The Last Novel) back on the shelf, I'd like to share a few more notes from my reading experience. (Page numbers are from the Dalkey Archive edition of Reader's Block and the Counterpoint omnibus edition of This is Not a Novel, Vanishing Point, and The Last Novel.)
1. In one of the many online essays devoted to Markson and his quartet (though I'm currently unable to identify which one), an author suggested that these books, composed almost entirely of an encyclopedic range of historical facts, quotes, and what Finnegans Wake calls "scrips of nutsnolleges" (FW 623.32), are not intended to spring the reader off to Google the history and validity of each item. I mostly adhered to that approach, streaking thru the pages with a growing sense for the vastness of the anomalous, paradoxical, occasionally confounding historical record of artists and thinkers. On the occasions where I was compelled to look stuff up, a vertiginous awe accompanied the realization of just how much color and feeling (love, pain, passion, humor, anger, confusion) can be extracted from any of Markson's terse lines once drilled into.
