Telling stories is telling lies
JOHNSON, B.S. Albert Angelo. London: Constable & Co Ltd. 1964.
8vo. Black cloth bound boards with gilt lettering to spine; black, blue and orange illustrated dust wrapper with review blurb; pp. [10], 11-180, [4]; very minimal scuffing to head of spine; minor offsetting from free end paper to half title and preliminaries slightly separating from the hinge; otherwise near fine.
First edition of the iconic second novel from the experimental novelist B.S. Johnson.
English writer B.S Johnson once said, "telling stories is telling lies". Albert Angelo is a masterpiece in experimental literature, tracing the life of a substitute teacher who longs to become an architect. Both pages 149 and 151 have holes cut into them, what Johnson calls, ‘future-seeing holes’, so as to lend the reader an opportunity to grasp the future of what lies on page 153, a preview to a resolution of the present-past. Similarly, in the last section of the book, "Disintegration", conventional punctuation is erratic and often eradicated in the place of a Beckett-like stream of consciousness. A fragment from Beckett's The Unnamable is appropriate ly included before the prologue in which there is the exclamation; "Open up, open up, you'll be all right, you'll see", and throughout his career, B.S Johnson remained committed to pioneering an avant-garde method of talking; works which are frequently auto-biographical. Infact, the book culminates with an interruption by Johnson himself, the authorial voice explaining what he was trying to achieve in writing Albert Angelo. B.S. Johnson would die by suicide at 40 in 1973. He wrote eight years before this; "The two terms 'novel' and 'fiction' are not synonymous ...The novel is a form in the same sense that the sonnet is a form; within that form, one may write truth or fiction. I choose to write truth in the form of a novel".
This copy includes an apt cryptic inscription by the previous owner to the rear pastedown which reads: "With God on our side", followed by the chords for the Bob Dylan song.
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