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Portrait of an Eye #1-3
Portrait of an Eye: Three Novels
This volume brings together three of the postmodern punkster's earliest novels, all originally published by obscure presses in the Seventies. As much as one wants to give Acker the benefit of a fair reading, it's hard not to be bored by the lengthy repetitions, the obscure plotlines, the complete disregard (deliberate, of course) for conventional notions of time. In The Childlike Life of the Black Tarantula, the fictional ``I'' decides to become various murderesses from history, as well as Yeats and Sade. Speaking in a cacophony of voices, she ``can't handle her own horniness,'' though ``sexual ecstasies become mystic communion.'' I Dreamt I Was a Nymphomaniac, another historical hallucination, further emphasizes Acker's sense of the self in disintegration--the reason one assumes the roles of so many other characters from history and literature. Here, a story of sexual obsession somehow transforms into a bland litany of case histories of prisoners whose rights have been abused. This political dimension to Acker's porno-anarcho prose becomes most explicit in The Adult Life of Toulouse-Lautrec, which begins by imagining the artist as a sex-starved, deformed woman. A murder plot sort of develops, to be solved by Hercule Poirot; van Gogh's daughter is actually Janis Joplin, who becomes the lover of James Dean. A profile of Henry Kissinger illustrates how society is corrupted, and individuals like Toulouse-Lautrec/Joplin/Dean suffer. A long political speech, full of half-digested left-wing notions, demonstrates America's decline into ``friendly fascism.'' All of which leads to the facile equation, dramatized in the last section, that the CIA and the Mob are like-minded institutions of repression. The sexual details of Henry Miller, the numbing prose cutups of William Burroughs, the relentless assault on the senses of thrash music--to point out the excess of Acker's entire enterprise only serves her sense of striking out against the bourgeoisie. But it is possible to understand exactly what she's trying to do, and still find it a worthless exercise. -- Copyright ©1992, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
320 pages, Paperback
First published February 11, 1992
31 people are currently reading
714 people want to read
About the author
Kathy Acker
84Ìýbooks1,141ÌýfollowersBorn of German-Jewish stock, Kathy Acker was brought up by her mother and stepfather (her natural father left her mother before Kathy was born) in a prosperous district of NY. At 18, she left home and worked as a stripper. Her involvement in the sex industry helped to make her a hit on the NY art scene, and she was photographed by the newly fashionable Robert Mapplethorpe. Preferring to be known simply as 'Acker' (the name she took from her first husband Robert, and which she continued to use even after a short-lived second marriage to composer Peter Gordon), she moved to London in the mid-eighties and stayed in Britain for five years.
Acker's writing is as difficult to classify into any particular genre as she herself was. She writes fluidly, operating in the borderlands and junkyards of human experience. Her work is experimental, playful, and provocative, engagingly alienating, narratively non sequitur.
Acker's writing is as difficult to classify into any particular genre as she herself was. She writes fluidly, operating in the borderlands and junkyards of human experience. Her work is experimental, playful, and provocative, engagingly alienating, narratively non sequitur.
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 31 reviews
September 14, 2021
Love bits and pieces of this, and each successive novel of the three is a little more readable and coherent than the last, but this is just way too fragmented and rambling and borderline horny gibberish. These are Kathy's first novels, and even though you could argue that every book by her is VERY similar there's definitely a tangible difference in quality between these run-on sentences about cum and her later stuff (which is also predominately run-on sentences about cum but it's BETTER). Still love her!!
July 29, 2024
i think this is her best at least of what i have read so far. i think i much prefer kathy's early work to her later work, it's just so gutsy and so fast moving and intense. it's punchy. and like you know there was nothing like it, you can feel the frustration at that through the page. maybe that's why it appeals to me so much - that she clearly wants the writing more than anything, writing for the sake of writing but also writing to be great. i understand that feeling. formally experimental, clearly stuff cut and pasted, collaged in the middles of sentences. in TL she's really going for that, pages and pages of political analysis of the US (which i am wondering if she wrote herself or pasted in from somewhere or some combination) with the story of this couple, marcia/janisj/kathy and scott/jamesdean/dan? i like that in Nympho peter shows up and they have this gender swapped, tender relationship. i wonder what peter thinks about him being in her work so much. i wonder what anybody thinks about being written about by kathy. i liked the installment form of BT. it was cool to read it knowing that she had literally mailed it around in installments. at the end of each installment she writes where things are "taken from" and she always says "and from myself" and i love that and the way it puts her life as like lived towards fiction, or lived towards this weird mix of fiction and reality. she's just a genius and i love her and i can feel her vulnerability in this book more than any i've read so far at least of her fiction - obviously i'm very into you is a different story - like she just wants somebody to know her you know. like yeah you're so me honestly. maybe not a good thing to be but whatever. anyway i also think that kathy's sex writing is some of the most fun and crazy and hot and interesting in the early stuff of hers i've read, later it's not as graphic and therefore also not as fun because you can't forget that her characters are having sex in crazy scenarios/relationships the way you can when the scene is like three pages long. she also seems angrier. there's so much fire!! i love you kathy, forever and ever and ever!
October 17, 2007
All three of these short novels are readworthy and totally memorable...I actually preferred her pared down Nymphomaniac to the other two...but these are all masterful works...her gift for parody is pretty much nonpareil...make no mistake...if Swift were born in this age he would probably be as fluent in gender as Acker is...
July 13, 2024
a multi-axis read. at times a bit too stuck on the sexual identity crisis, but overall a fascinating soak in historical, political, and personal positions in society.
July 26, 2013
not erotica. not really meta-fiction. not even post-Naked Lunch. i don't really know what it is: somehow Kathy Acker devised a creative system of appropriations, re-imaginings & streamofconsciousnessfantasies and viola...this...or these...
i would hate to say either you love her or you hate her but she has a really strong narrative voice & either you like that voice or you don't. you either like what she says or where she is going or you don't--
it would be easy to say for someone new to her work (which basically i am relatively am...) to NOT start w/ this work but there really did not seem much deviation b/w "portrait of an eye" and the 1st book i read of hers, "don quixoite," except that i would assume her later work is more streamlined and focused but that is just my opinion. it would seem that now that for me her work is the only fiction i can read w/ any real enthusiasm besides william gibson i guess and i think i may or may not have a crush on either kathy acker or more specifically, THE IDEA OF KATHY ACKER...but this is not really important...
i would hate to say either you love her or you hate her but she has a really strong narrative voice & either you like that voice or you don't. you either like what she says or where she is going or you don't--
it would be easy to say for someone new to her work (which basically i am relatively am...) to NOT start w/ this work but there really did not seem much deviation b/w "portrait of an eye" and the 1st book i read of hers, "don quixoite," except that i would assume her later work is more streamlined and focused but that is just my opinion. it would seem that now that for me her work is the only fiction i can read w/ any real enthusiasm besides william gibson i guess and i think i may or may not have a crush on either kathy acker or more specifically, THE IDEA OF KATHY ACKER...but this is not really important...
read-in-2013
March 16, 2014Acker's first three published novels, as good a point to embark from as any, really. Or maybe not, as I'm sure that she refined her tools and tactics, and if I wasn't pretty committed and excited to read more of her stuff and stopped here, I'd probably be missing out. But Acker is exciting, I 'll definitely be plunging on to other of her novels.
Anyway, first novel already reviewed , now plunging on into the weird Burroughsian repetitions of the second. Invigorating, in a way.
Anyway, first novel already reviewed , now plunging on into the weird Burroughsian repetitions of the second. Invigorating, in a way.
September 21, 2021
“I need to love someone who can, by lightly, lightly stroking my flesh, tear open this reality, rip my flesh open until I bleed.� i didn’t know how badly i needed to read this until now!! such a refreshing, but thought-provoking read :�)
July 12, 2008
As Vanessa Place once said, "Kathy fucking Acker." Hats off to the roaring girl.
April 9, 2025
"Does the soul survive the body?
Yes.
Then love need not be physical.
Is our civilization near an end, or transformation?
Yes.
We have to consider the terror we are living through."
I read a third of this, and then came back after several months to finish.
Three novels? I'm not sure, it didn't feel that way.
The bio in the back said Acker was back in the US after leaving the UK. I suppose that was true at the time, though this was an ebook, you'd think it would be updated but no, still alive. Acker died in 1997 in Tijuana at an "alternative medicine" cancer clinic. She'd had a double mastectomy earlier in her illness and after that decided to pursue psychic healing, acupuncture, etc.
That's her right. I've never had cancer, so I don't know. I don't even know if I'd fight a cancer diagnosis. Chemotherapy is poison. Why not surrender? Our culture has turned cancer into a spectator sport, and maybe I don't want to play. I prefer basketball.
Anyway.
I counted the word "cunt" 90+ times.
My issue with death is the lack of control. That's also my issue with illness and injury and aging. Consciousness really is a curse, isn't it?
I'm not sure when these novels were written, I can't be bothered to look, but the desperation is there. A wild clawing and articulate rage, justifiably so, given the world in which she spent her adult years. All the Reagan and Bush, the nothing, the seemingly low stakes of everything.
What are we doing?
There's Kissinger. The mob. A brothel. Van Gogh. James Dean and Natalie Wood. The United Fruit Company. Poirot. Janis Joplin. The failed Paris Commune.
All your favorites on one Compact Disc!
Yes.
Then love need not be physical.
Is our civilization near an end, or transformation?
Yes.
We have to consider the terror we are living through."
I read a third of this, and then came back after several months to finish.
Three novels? I'm not sure, it didn't feel that way.
The bio in the back said Acker was back in the US after leaving the UK. I suppose that was true at the time, though this was an ebook, you'd think it would be updated but no, still alive. Acker died in 1997 in Tijuana at an "alternative medicine" cancer clinic. She'd had a double mastectomy earlier in her illness and after that decided to pursue psychic healing, acupuncture, etc.
That's her right. I've never had cancer, so I don't know. I don't even know if I'd fight a cancer diagnosis. Chemotherapy is poison. Why not surrender? Our culture has turned cancer into a spectator sport, and maybe I don't want to play. I prefer basketball.
Anyway.
I counted the word "cunt" 90+ times.
My issue with death is the lack of control. That's also my issue with illness and injury and aging. Consciousness really is a curse, isn't it?
I'm not sure when these novels were written, I can't be bothered to look, but the desperation is there. A wild clawing and articulate rage, justifiably so, given the world in which she spent her adult years. All the Reagan and Bush, the nothing, the seemingly low stakes of everything.
What are we doing?
There's Kissinger. The mob. A brothel. Van Gogh. James Dean and Natalie Wood. The United Fruit Company. Poirot. Janis Joplin. The failed Paris Commune.
All your favorites on one Compact Disc!
January 7, 2022
Kathy Acker will mess with your head. Here she uses pornography like a fist, or a flood - it overwhelms until you're drunk with it, or until it's simply the water in which you swim. Enmeshed in long quotes from other narratives, and (at the end) a lucid history of capitalism, it's just A LOT. It feels very punk rock, and Acker finds a way to make the whole thing truly hers, but it's not as compelling a read as her other books.
November 12, 2023
I liked it, to an extent. When it comes to stream of consciousness, I prefer it to be a bit more adjective heavy. I want messy and wide and just a bit surreal instead of choppy and abrupt and with a dose of absurd. And yes I do understand how close together those two are but it's still *different* right? You understand how the vibe is different?
February 16, 2024
A good collection that sometimes blurs because it seems like her fascination with certain topics in her early stages of writing were a bit to obvious that they just came out full force to a faulty degree. But her critiques of individualism, American culture, capitalism, and her discussions of true feminism and sexuality are just incredible.
February 12, 2025
I think the layout of the book is its greatest feature. You get a good sense of what she’s trying to explore with Tarantula by reading the stories after that. It’s sexy. It’s schizoid. It’s fucking weird at times I guess, I’m not familiar with whatever genre you could call this. But I loved it. It was a real fun jaunt. I’m very curious to see what she followed this up with.
July 26, 2023
3.5 not 3. I think Kathy Acker's whole thing has the potential for such a wide range of quality. These three are much rougher than her other works in a way that I'd be hard pressed to recommend them unless you already know that you like her work
December 15, 2022
I can’t believe how magical Acker always is for me. This book shows a complete mastery of emotion and language that I could only hope to emulate. Perfect.
June 17, 2023
uwielbiam sposób pisania acker i każda jej książka mnie zachwyca
January 19, 2024
Acker’s early work. Up there w my preferred, especially The Black Tarantula. The focus of my diss so this will be a recurring feature of my reading for the foreseeable.
March 29, 2025
I like the Childlike Life of the Black Tarantula pretty well. I guess I am moving on from this tome without finishing it for now.
May 31, 2012
To write about Acker’s Portrait of an Eye, one must come up with not one but three book reviews since this book comprises her three early novels: In the Childlike Life of the Black Tarantula, Imagining: I Dreamt I Was a Nymphomaniac (which I think had the best title, if I could I’d probably write a story revolving around this title but the story will be about something different altogether, more on this later), and the Adult Life of Toulouse-Lautrec. With the breadth and variety of books I’ve read in my 15 year (I would have to say I started reading seriously when I was 16 but, of course, I’ve known how to read since I was 4 or 5), I have to say my taste leans toward to the traditional. Although, po-mo fiction does, at times, interest me. To say Acker’s books here are non-traditional would be the biggest understatement but are they worth reading or are they there to satisfy mere curio?
In The Childlike Life of the Black Tarantula, “murderesses� pepper the narrative but are they leading towards something? Will the lives of these murderesses intersect? Unfortunately, that wasn’t the case. Every chapter is appended by a paragraph that merely informs the reader that these (albeit fake) chapters were lifted. This has collectively ruined, either my interest in the, at the outset, very avant-garde-ish manner that this book was written. I guess it’s just that: mannered with no substance. How can you ruin a very good opener: “Intention: I become a murderess by repeating in words the lives of other murderesses?� But Acker manages to do so in a grand manner.
� I Dreamt I Was a Nymphomaniac,� offers a tantalizing title but nothing more. Nymphomaniac’s characters about an androgynous woman and an androgynous get lost in the mire of plagiarized paragraphs and repetitious ‘choruses� which, unlike Beckett, isn’t even entertaining nor witty.
Two disappointments in a row, I thought Acker’s Adult Life of Toulouse-Lautrec would, at the very least, redeem the two initial offerings. Imagining the artist as a sex-starved, deformed woman starts which then dives into a murder plot of sort then we see Janis Joplin become the lover of James Dean. Then, Henry Kissinger, I’m practically lost in the pseudo-political speech that Acker suddenly spewed. Mere curio? I should think so. Acker doesn’t even provide context in these books so why should you? If she couldn’t place her abstractions in the real world, at least provide a world where these can at least be believable.
I do not know now if I should read Mother: Demonology at all. And to think Blood and Guts in High School was so much perverse fun.
June 30, 2013
this is early acker, three novellas from a period (did it ever really end? if not can you call it a period?) in which she was trying to change the grammar of narrative. her work here focuses mainly on the body, the female body, the desires that it harbors and the place of those desires sociopolitically, with parallels to kissinger's foreign policy and the cult like idolotry that forms around celebrity: the books subjects, though genderbending and anachronistic range from the sexual relationship of james dean and a nine year old janis joplin to the impending nymphomania of a historically inconsistent femal toulouse lautrec. the idea of identity and sexuality and how the two merge is ackers concern, and for the most part its fascinating.
acker pulls out the entire bag of postmodern tricks: anachronism; shifting perspectives/gender; repetition; nonstandard grammar; etc. unfortunately, at times, they seem less like tricks or anything that moves the narrative than a collection of tics, something to fall back on. the narrative in these three stories is like trying to grasp handfuls of sand and while im sure that is done purposefully (the ever present pm commentary on the subjectiveness of experience and the confusion that comes w/ trying to figure the whole thing out...) it can make for a tedious read.
acker pulls out the entire bag of postmodern tricks: anachronism; shifting perspectives/gender; repetition; nonstandard grammar; etc. unfortunately, at times, they seem less like tricks or anything that moves the narrative than a collection of tics, something to fall back on. the narrative in these three stories is like trying to grasp handfuls of sand and while im sure that is done purposefully (the ever present pm commentary on the subjectiveness of experience and the confusion that comes w/ trying to figure the whole thing out...) it can make for a tedious read.
December 9, 2013
I bought this book so I could read The Adult Life, but I also read the first two novels first. Individually, I'd probably give Black Tarantula and Nymphomaniac each one star & The Adult Life four, though I probably appreciate Adult Life much more having read the other two first. Adult Life has the closest thing to a stable narrative & consistent setting. People read Acker for the same reason they read Hubert Selby or William S. Burroughs, for language, not so much for story. Tarantula and Nyphomaniac are very early works and, while they are the most raw, they're also the most lacking in language, simultaneously nauseating and boring. But I would definitely recommend Adult Life to anyone who enjoyed Last Exit to Brooklyn or .
January 23, 2016
This is an author finding her voice. There are brief moments of insight, tantalizing bits of sublime work, but mostly repetitious, meandering cut ups and pastes of various sorts. As Acker says in an interview (and so Zizek and Lacan would agree) the erotica is not erotica! If the text speaks of something else, it's obviously sexual, but if it's sexual then it's obviously something else. So you can read this as a tear-down of power relations, of the attempt to break out of family-oedipal narratives, of the whole rigmarole. Does she succeed? Is she able to find a new space? It doesn't seem so with these texts.
Definitely for the die hard Acker fan.
Definitely for the die hard Acker fan.
August 12, 2007
You know, I understand that she's attempting to overturn established concepts of identity with her nonlinear narrative, and her use of the formal aspects of these stories to do that is intelligent. I just couldn't bring myself to enjoy any of these stories.
April 5, 2009
I'm still quite early in the first story of this collection, but I am finding it too...dated in its archness, its stream-of-consciouness asides and jumping time and place. Maybe I am completely misreading it, or maybe it will even out, but it feels very opaque so far.
April 28, 2023
the kind of book you dog-ear to share later on...
July 10, 2022
Acquired Aug 22, 2006
The Book Addict, London, Ontario
The Book Addict, London, Ontario
October 1, 2008
A difficult non-linear read with some deeply funny moments. Best line: "No one will ever fuck me cause I'm a hideous cripple!".
November 26, 2012
I only read Black Tarantula, but I absolutely loved it. I wrote my senior thesis for my English Lit. Degree on her use (or lack thereof) of authority and identity in Black Tarantula. Amazing read..
June 6, 2009
Very bizarre book of short stories. but enjoyable none the less
April 6, 2010
Fun to read out loud. She hates punctuation. Kind of difficult. Choppy. Try hard.
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