This is a novel of first-person stories interspersed with what seem to be jumbled thoughts; yet, the whole thing hangs together quite well. I was time and again impressed by the circles that I only noticed when they were completed, and by the common threads that run like highways through the thing.

I think that if a man had written this in the last thirty years or so, I might be concerned for him, might think it expressed an unhealthy view of men and women. Written in the 1960s, however, I think that "Impossible Object" is a compelling and expert address on the issues of love in a particular time and place.

Mosley's voice is outstanding. I'll be reading more of his work. ( )

I think I'm too old for experimental fiction.

When you fall in love you don't want to get what you want, or how could you be in love with it?

Do we love out of narcissism? Masochism? Do we truly desire the one for whom we claim we would willingly lay down our life, or is there a more selfish motive at work? Why do we continually place ourselves in vulnerable positions, time and time again—and is not loving one of the most vulnerable of all positions?—despite the lacerations, the recollections, and the bodily wounds that would have it otherwise?

There are so many myths and stories about love, about desire; from oral histories to legends, from folktales to tragedies, from songs to visual art—love is the most aestheticized topic, and, because of this, is the "impossible object," as Nicholas Mosley phrases it. As a fetishized, internalized, and always externalized force, love is something from which we can never make any concrete sense no matter how hard we try. And yet try and try we do.

Why is there this compulsion, then? And why is another book about love, like Mosley's Impossible Object, a warranted undertaking? As with all questions concerning love, there are no easy answers to these questions, nor are there to many others that arise when thinking about the complex matrices involving love, desire, sex, and both physical and psychological violence.

What is difficult, though, is to speak of love outside the realm of cliché and the many mythopoetic images that come to mind when we talk about love. Mosley is able to invent a language all his own here, one that is truly a feat in that it combines immense technical skill in the art of poetics: relying on repetition, recurring images (the narrator, or one of the narrators, is rather obsessed with Nietzsche's ides of recurrence), and motifs and redolent rhythms that meander out and then return back with such ease into prose that is a gem to the ears if read aloud. There is nothing sentimental about love here whatsoever: this is humanity and all of our stories laid bare, rough as if left exposed on a rock in the heat of an unblinking day with carrion circling overhead as if in some Greek myth.

No review can do this book justice: in fact, this has to be the finest book I've read in years, hands down. I was floored over and over again, and not only do I feel as lacerated as we all do when opening ourselves up to the idea of loving again, after immense loss or pain or anguish, but I also readily look forward with enthusiasm to another encounter with Mosley's work very, very soon. An impeccable, impeccable novel. ( )

It started off so promising (well, besides the little interludes between stories), but toward the end I was slogging through it just to get it finished. The second short story is definitely worth five stars, about a married couple in the midst of a fight. Those interludes though - I am not a big fan of stream of consciousness storytelling, even one with a premise underneath that more or less ties it all together. Maybe one star. The later stories, between two and three stars. By the end of the book, I was getting tired of the characters, of their way of thinking and acting and always going back on what they were saying or doing. Confusing, needless, and boring. But that second story - I almost clapped my hands afterward. Too bad the rest of the book dragged it down. ( )

I wanted to write you something impossible, like a staircase climbing a spiral to come out where it started or a cube with a vertical line at the back overlapping a horizontal one in front. These cannot exist in three dimensions but can be drawn in two; by cutting out one dimension a fourth is created. The object is that life is impossible; one cuts out fabrication and creates reality. A mirror is held to the back of the head and one's hand has to move the opposite way from what was intended.

It's important to remember that writers are magicians. Their art always starts with deception. In this way, writing is closely related to love. In the last section of the book, the author--Mosley--who happens to be a master magician, weaves an allegory about a princess and a woodcutter. But the magician--Mosley--casts his spell over his tale and reveals them as the witch and magician they really were. Thus another romance starts with deception and ends in the deception of art. For we find out later--too late?--that the magician--woodcutter--and the witch--princess--are both on stage, performing a ridiculous tableau.

"What is the point of being a witch and a magician," said the magician, "if we cannot become something different?"

Meanwhile back in the "real"/main story, the female lover disagrees:

I knew that he always thought that life could be refashioned and go on, but I thought that it should not. There are some things for which one cannot be forgiven.

But the magician--Mosley, in this case--does believe in this refashioning. His mode of magicianship has always been this art of transformation--rabbits out of hats, if you will--the metaphor and the simile, and he has never been shy about either.

p16: She sat with her hands between her legs; like mimosa.

p14: She had a soft mouth which birds could peck crumbs off.

p215: Beyond the waves their heads kept appearing and disappearing like oil.

And he's written his novel around this heavy-handed sleight of hand: story after story, the interlocking mechanism is at first unclear--maybe a connection is made by a similar comparison of a face to Cleopatra's, or a mention of a seaside town. At first the pieces do not add up, like a jigsaw puzzle in which you have focused too much on one problematic piece. By the end, you see that all the pieces do indeed fit, but the problem is now that they fit in too well, like a staircase that has connected itself back to its origin, making a convincing but impossible whole.

"Nietzsche said that everything goes round and round ... He said that everything eternally recurs; or rather that we should act as if everything did." My wife said "Why?" ... I said "Because this is the only way in which life is bearable." My wife looked disinterested. I said "As if everything that we do were such that we were going to go on doing it for ever."

This is a theme in the book. The male idea of being able to repeat something over and over, and the female idea that some things cannot. Thus Mosley--magician-- repeats the age-old, almost impossible theme of love. Can it or can it not be repeated? Likewise can love be repeated or only the disposable actions of love. The idea of acting comes in often, artifice:

We had been sitting in the pub in London one day and I had asked--Then what is our point?--and he had said in his voice that suddenly became like an actor--To maintain ecstasy. (p. 208, emphasis mine)

And the idea of a point. If the point is ecstasy, then love is just artifice, like writing. A set of mirrors to trick ourselves into thinking we are constantly at its height:

What I did not like was that for him life seemed to depend on complexity and flux: and this was not quite real, it was stimulated.

This is a carefully constructed, cynically dosed conception of love, art, and war (if they are not the same thing) that may or may not have anything to do with reality. But I highly recommend you read it anyway. ( )