“A Barthes-influenced, highly idiosyncratic homage to Harpo Marx, the silent, but hardly quiet member of the Marx Brothers. The form of this exhaustive book is a frame-by-frame read of scenes in all 13 of the Marx Brothers’ comedies, but the approach is anything but conventional. With a poetic sensibility, sensuous curiosity, and boundless intellect, Koestenbaum uses Harpo, a character who he came to know later in life, as a literary subject. . . . Comprised of dense packets of prose, this is a volume best taken as a decadent dessert course.”
“An excellent example of a type of delirious scholarship: ‘We commit a cruelty against existence if we do not interpret it to death.’. . . a good indicator of a truth that the whole brouhaha regarding the lyric essay suggested anyway: the best essays are very likely written today with no ambition toward anything so belletristic as the essay as such.”
“Provocative, original scholarship that lights a fire under the typically stodgy studies that we usually get from university press star biographies.”
“Wayne Koestenbaum is our Roland Barthes, updated, remastered, cleared for the pressure zone of American mythologies. Delicate and brave, discerning and outrageous, the meditations organized around the other Marx track unconscious byways and the remarkable turns of a highly personal investment. Startlingly original, Koestenbaum provides critical understanding with poetic acuity and breathtaking disclosure.”—Avital Ronell, author of The Test Drive
"The Anatomy of Harpo Marx is an effusive and provocative celebration of the potential of nonverbal communication, lying somewhere between poetry and criticism, history and diary, polemic and self-analysis. It is also funny, smart, often revelatory, and always sharp. It is, for all its analytical depth, a great read."—Michael Long, author of Beautiful Monsters: Imagining the Classic in Musical Media
“Behind that face and in Harpo’s body, Wayne Koestenbaum finds more material than existed in New York’s fabled garment district. Koestenbaum's work is compelling and surprising; his detailed explorations, gifts to readers wondering about what lies beneath our culture’s surfaces. Read Wayne Koestenbaum for his exuberant embrace of the unrecognized or ignored; for his pleasure in explaining the inexplicable, and for his delight in deciphering Elizabeth Taylor’s cleavage. Read him now for unveiling the most enigmatic of presences, Harpo Marx. —Lynne Tillman, author of American Genius, A Comedy
