Mantissa is a novel by British

United Kingdom

The United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern IrelandIn the United Kingdom and Dependencies, other languages have been officially recognised as legitimate autochthonous languages under the European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages...

 author John Fowles

John Fowles

John Robert Fowles was an English novelist and essayist. In 2008, The Times newspaper named Fowles among their list of "The 50 greatest British writers since 1945".-Birth and family:...

 published in 1982. It consists entirely of a presumably imaginary dialogue in a writer's head between himself and an embodiment of the Muse Erato

Erato

In Greek mythology, Erato is one of the Greek Muses. The name would mean "desired" or "lovely", if derived from the same root as Eros, as Apollonius of Rhodes playfully suggested in the invocation to Erato that begins Book III of his Argonautica....

, after he wakes an amnesiac in a hospital bed.

Critical reception

Mantissa was Fowles' only novel to receive generally negative reviews. The New York Times called it "a surprisingly tedious novel," asserting that it was little more than Fowles' response to critics that he felt misunderstood his work. The Boston Globe named it "an idiotic story." Time magazine, in a more positive review, asserted that the book consists of a sort of intellectual play between Fowles and the reader, or by Fowles at the expense of all reading. The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette likewise identified the book as intellectually playful but found the dialogue tiresome.