A "comic extravaganza" (Washington Post Book World) from one of the most acclaimed voices in American avant-garde literature, Tlooth follows its narrator on a fantastical, globe-trotting quest for revenge.
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.