This month the Big Other Book Club is reading Travesty by John Hawkes. Everyone is welcome to write a post about Travesty or Hawkes. It is 132 pages and out of the handful of books of his I’ve read, the most accessible.
John Hawkes’ short novel Travesty presents a monologue of a person driving an automobile who plans to deliberately crash the car into a farmhouse because his wife and daughter are lovers of his friend Henri. Henri and his daughter are with him. The collision is expected to occur within 100 minutes. – Conte (below)
A few resources:
Design and Debris: John Hawkes’s Travesty, Chaos Theory, and the Swerve by Joseph M. Conte
All That Remains: On the Fiction of John Hawkes by Daniel Green – it looks at Travesty, as well as The Lime Twig and Second Skin
Start Suffering – my appreciation of Hawkes, focused on The Lime Twig, with links to other sources
This looks splendid. If Travesty has even the dimmest resemblance to The Lime Twig or The Passion Artist, it will be a treat.
Travesty is my favorite John Hawkes novel.
Thanks, Greg. TRAVESTY is Hawkes writ small, but exquisite. I see it as rather like one of Sebald’s ruminative peregrinations, except with bombs going off, including the body-bomb we call orgasm.
Ole and quelle surprise Brad, Adam, and John. It’s a wonder and I hope we’ll get a few more to occupy this French-soaked burst of language.
It feels a little seedy self-promoting in this space, but I’m very keen on participating in this reading group & felt some kind of introduction would be nice. That the post is recent & on the topic of Hawkes makes linking to it now slightly more bearable.
Finished reading Travesty last night over a bottle of wine . . . so very good. I like it better than The Lime Twig even. “I am as serious as a sheet of flame” — love that line.
Great Brad! Wine seems appropriate with Hawkes’s sentences. More to come soon.
Thanks for linking your reading of the novel Heloise.