I've spent my Saturday sick, in bed reading Nicholson Baker's The Anthologist. And I've finished it in one sitting.
The book is so endearing, mainly due to Baker's manic narrator, whose stream of consciousness covers his musings on poetry, language and ordinary banalities of life. You at once pity the self-depricating anthologist, while being amazed at his knowlegde and witty musings on the state of poetry and his career within that world of words.
The narrator has a form of writer's block when faced with completing an introduction to his anthology. Everything is riding on this piece of writing. You learn that this unfinished, or rather altogether non-existant, introduction is the reason his love has left him (according to him). He is also broke - and the necessity of getting paid for the piece of work looms over his daily life.
Its a rambling mess of poets' names - covering centuries of writers. The narrator provides a peek into his mind - this jumble; years of poerty knowledge crammed, and then spilled out of his brain in starts and fits. And then, as if out of nowhere, he stops and exclaims his loneliness in a simple sentence or contemplates some mundanity of his surrounding. But then he's back again - on to the poets.
This book makes you wish you new more about poetry before you started reading - to preface all this knowledge - to make sense of all this information. But then again, thats the whole point of the novel. You aren't reading this book to learn about poetry, instead you are just by default picking up bits of information. Instead you are focused and enthralled by the form of the narrator's ramblings; the in-between moments when he suddenly and painfully realizes he's utterly and pitifully alone.
While you are commiserate with the narrator, you also just plain love him for his wit - the laugh out loud bits of random humor dispersed throughout. One of my favorites is when he uses lyrics from rapper Ludacris during poetic meter analysis.
While the book is centered around poetry, it never becomes pretentious in the way that I (and probably many others) always thought of poetry. Instead its whole point it to make it seem like its something I could talk about with my friends over a beer. The poets themselves being described by their love affairs, their silly quirks, their shortcomings - in a shrewd way of getting them to seem more approachable - more like friends, rather than these great literary legends. In the end, I come away wanting to investigate these characters' poetry - precisely because this narrator makes them and their work accessible.
I deeply enjoyed this book - because I felt engrossed by this kooky narrator, who's epistemological quest left me intrigued about poetry - and also convinced of its importance through carefully (or would it be carelessly?) crafted prose.
The Anthologist
by Nicholson Baker
Paperback available July 2010
The hardcover was widely reviewed. For a sampling of the reviews see below:
New York Times
Washington Post
Christian Science Monitor
