Form of Taking It All

Fiction. "In this Extraordinary collage-epic, Rosmarie Waldrop measures the highly subjective experience of her 'narrator' in contemporary Mexico City against the discourses that control--and yet cannot quite contain--that experience: the historical (the 'discoveries' of Columbus and Alexander von Humboldt), the scientific (the formulation of quantum theory), and the political (the view from Washington in the late twentieth century). The elaborate interactions of these 'unpredicted particles' create a language field of extraordinary richness and excitement. In its verbal density and intellectual range, A FORM / OF TAKING / IT ALL is quite simply unique"--Marjorie Perloff.