mantissa

In Mantissa, Fowles describes that ancient relationship between the author and his muse, which is complicated but at the same time full of violence and affection. Although the fairy's relationship with the artist is filled with intense sensuality, the existing experience turns into a much more complex emotional tide. In this novel, which can be counted among his masterpieces such as The French Lieutenant's Woman, The Creature and The Magician, Fowles asks questions and makes them ask, while holding his sarcastic and cruel gaze to the reader's eyes like a flashlight. What is the real price paid to the fairy when the author takes his inspiration and transforms it into literary form? While John Fowles brings literature, love and eroticism face to face on different levels in the "thin but strong web" he weaves in Mantissa, he does not forget to entertain as well as make the reader think.

Novelist Miles Green, lying in a hospital room, has lost his memory. The muse Erato is, in turn, a caring doctor; a punk who criticized her for being anti-feminist and bourgeois elitist and listed her "literary crimes"; a geisha; She appears on the scene as an authoritarian forest fairy in Green's semi-blurred world. In this fantastic fiction dominated by the striking dialogues of the flesh and the word, we watch the nature of reality and creativity, the alienation of art, today's literature's transition to an increasingly self-oriented style, male-female relations, and the changing balance in the composite vessels of the life-art axis, with Fowles' clever observations. Miles Green finally asks himself the following question; "If you struggle with women in the swamp of reality, in other words, if you get into a race of words, you will always lose. (...) I wonder if women, just to take revenge, to confuse and distract men who are better than them, to lose their vital intellectual desires and essence? Did they invent literature to waste it on mantissas?"
What do you think?



Number of Pages: 191

Print Year: 2009


Language: Turkish
Publisher: Ayrinti Publications

First Printing Year: 2009

Number of Pages: 191

Language: Turkish