281- ] English Literature , Andrew Crumey

281- ] English Literature

Andrew Crumey's Novels 

 Music, in a Foreign Language

Music, in a Foreign Language is the first novel by physicist Andrew Crumey, published by Dedalus Books in 1994. It won the Saltire Society First Book Award for that year, in a ceremony broadcast on STV.

It is an alternate history novel that imagines Britain occupied by the Nazis during World War 2, becoming a communist state afterwards. The central character, Charles King, is a physicist and musician involved in a dissident journal. His story is embedded within that of a narrator writing in post-communist times. Crumey has said that inspiration came from the many worlds interpretation of quantum theory, and eighteenth-century philosophical fiction. The title comes from a poem within the novel, written by a character in response to one by C.P. Cavafy.

Crumey explained a further reason for his choice of setting in an interview. "The most significant was a research trip I made to the University of Wroclaw in Poland, whose Institute of Theoretical Physics was situated in what, until only a few years previously, had been the local Communist headquarters. There was still much evidence of the former occupancy, and this labyrinthine building captured my imagination. But the only way I could bring it into my own domain, was to imagine such a building existing in Britain."

Music, in a Foreign Language was published in the United States in 1996 by Picador USA. Translated editions were published in Greece, Denmark, Italy, Russia, Taiwan and Romania.

The book shares its title with a 2003 album by Lloyd Cole.

Reception

Kirkus Reviews called it "a genuine novel of ideas, more than a little disorienting in the early going, as we labor to understand how its several parts will intersect—and surprisingly stimulating and exciting, as we see how Crumey imperturbably puts it all together. A formidable debut, from a writer whose possibilities, so to speak, seem virtually unlimited." Publishers Weekly called it "a thought-provoking but somewhat too ambitious debut."

Brian Stableford, in The A-Z of Fantasy Literature, called it "a polished exercise in postmodern/metafiction set in alternative world". The Cambridge Companion to British Fiction Since 1945 commented on the "inventive intertwining of science with literary and musical culture" in both Music, in a Foreign Language and Crumey's later novel, The Secret Knowledge. The book has been described within postcolonial scholarship as a "mock dystopia". Hartmut Hirsch related it to the theories of Michel Foucault, calling the novel "a spatial utopia that, at the same time, is a heterotopia... By giving Britain the characteristics of a socialist regime, one historical and cultural space is superimposed on another to produce a third, heterotopian space, which defamiliarizes Britain as well as socialist regimes in general. A fragmented history of this alternate Britain is reproduced in a text which is itself fragmented... The intertextual references to Borges, Svevo, Calvino and Eco are clear."

Pfitz

Pfitz is a 1997 novel by Scottish physicist and author Andrew Crumey. It concerns an 18th-century German prince who dedicates his life to the construction of imaginary cities. The name Pfitz is taken from an inhabitant of one of the prince's fanciful cities, Rreinnstadt.

In 1997, the book was named a notable book of the year by The New York Times. In that newspaper Andrew Miller said it, "makes for rewarding reading – cerebral, adroit, not afraid to take chances but never allowing itself to be seduced by theory, by mere cleverness."

It was published in Germany as Die Geliebte des Kartographen ("The Cartographer's Lover") and was the subject of a prize-winning television feature by Eva Severini.

In 2013 the Scottish Book Trust selected it as one of the 50 best Scottish books of the last 50 years.

Critical analysis

Mark C. Taylor related the multiple "authors" in Pfitz to complexity theory. "Pfitz is not just about emergent complexity but is a brilliant enactment of it. One of the strategies Crumey and his coauthors use to generate complexity is to create multiple self-reflexive loops by folding authors and readers into each other until the line separating them becomes obscure."

Stephen J. Burn sees Pfitz, Tom McCarthy's Men in Space and David Mitchell's Number9dream as examples of a subgenre he terms "multiple drafts" novels, with Pfitz being "the earliest—and arguably the most representative—example of this form." Burn's term "multiple drafts" is borrowed from Daniel Dennett's model of consciousness. Burn writes that Pfitz shows "evident familiarity with Daniel Dennett's work" and says it "might be considered to provide the hidden internal blueprint for different levels of the novel's action."

Toon Staes sees Pfitz as a "systems novel", a term coined by Tom LeClair who applied it to writers including Don DeLillo, Thomas Pynchon, John Barth and Ursula Le Guin. In Staes' usage, "systems novels feature multiple nonlinear and fragmented narrative strands that gradually fix the reader's attention on a network of relationships," with Pfitz being "an interesting test case."

Colin Manlove described Pfitz as a "'postmodernist' fantasy" with "a vision of a universal machine of wheels and cogs that churns out infinite textual universes, each of which has no 'reality' as we commonly know it."