Three Goat Songs.

New York, NY Four Walls Eight Windows, 1991. Paperback First Edition Thus; First Printing indicated. First Edition Thus; First Printing indicated. Very Near Fine in Wraps: there is just a hint of wear to the corner tips and the slightest toning to the white background field of the wrapper covers; else only the mildest rubbing; the binding remains square and secure; text clean. Virtually 'As New'. NOT a Remainder. NOT a Book-Club Edition. NOT an Ex-Library copy. 8vo. 166pp. Trade Paperback. In a theater of coastal rocks, before an audience of goats, a man tells his story--about the impossibility of telling his story. Like the rocks, which he describes both as faces and as anal, ``hair-clogged fissures,'' storytelling, he says, consists of fronts and rears, beginnings and ends. And language avails him no devices with which to connect these ``into some single statement worthy of a whole being.'' So the man refers to himself in this trilogy of novellas through a ``cento of butt-ends,'' a patchwork of scraps from others' tales. Brodsky craftily revises the ancient Greek term for tragedy--literally ``goat song.'' He writes not of the individual's flouting of order, the theme of tragedy, but of the individual's desire for order in a unified narrative of the self. Brodsky's prose seems to proceed from the very core of his character's thinking, ``from the site of its eruption.'' Its molten flow consumes all types of language--colloquialisms, legalese, and some eminently obscure vocabulary. The result is a vigorous, eccentric style that enables Brodsky to bring a Swiftian gusto to the novel of ideas and write a challenging, at times dazzling book.