Once upon a Time Floating OP — John Barth

In The Floating Opera the narrator and central character yearns to build a boat and sail away from what he sees as a meaningless existence into a completely private life, but he manages neither to finish a boat nor to sail away....This new novel takes the form of an opera, a sort of double Columbus Day celebration, complete with an overture, an interlude, acts and opposite-twin entr'actes, and even a final Episong....With all this, the novel does manage to be a substantial personal memoir as well....Once Upon a Time is a celebration of the power of narrative, of the questions it must ask and can answer....it is brilliantly conceived, elegantly written, bursting with life, profound in its understanding, bawdy and funny, and comic in the wisest and best sense of the word. -- New York Times