Viktor Shklovsky's A Hunt for Optimism cannot be easily categorized, much like William Carlos Williams's monumental and still overlooked Spring and All. It might be called a memoir, a collection of "stories," a sequence of anecdotes about the great critic's contemporaries, a series of jolting insights into the nature of writing and art, as well as a book of biting aphorisms. It is, in brief, unclassifiable, and as with Williams's work, is a masterpiece on the subject of how to write, how to write about literature, how to create the possibility for change, and how to see the world. Begun in 1929 under the title "New Prose" and drastically revised after Vladimir Mayakovsky's sudden death, A Hunt for Optimism was criticized at the time of its first publication on the grounds that it lacked unity and was too "variegated" to be called a purely "Shklovskian book." Now, however, Hunt seems to epitomize all that is essential in Shklovsky's work: it is stylistically unpredictable, experimentally bold, unapologetically ironic, and disarmingly direct - making it one of the finest books he was to produce. "As for the unity of the book," he warns the reader, "it is often an illusion, just as is the unity of a landscape. Browse through our works, look for a point of view, and if you can find it, then there's your unity. I was unable to find it.

" Book jacket.