Harry Mathews

Join us for a conversation between Nicholas Delbanco, Ed Park, and Lucy Sante, on the occasion of the reissue of Harry Mathews's second novel, Tlooth.

Opening on a baseball game in a Siberian prison camp, Harry Mathews’s Tlooth is absurdist from the jump. The narrator, a three-fingered dental assistant who escapes from Russia to find the criminal surgeon who took the other two fingers, treks across half the world—from Kabul to Venice to Milan to India to Morocco to Rome to France—in pursuit of revenge. From page to outrageous page, Mathews constructs a labyrinth of language, rife with the arcane puzzles, mesmerizing digressions, and nested stories that would become hallmarks of his oeuvre.