I am from that laid back generation that liked to tell people to do their own thing and not judge anyone and all that, but if Story of the Eye is yourI am from that laid back generation that liked to tell people to do their own thing and not judge anyone and all that, but if Story of the Eye is your thing then I would like to run quite a long way away from you and never have to speak to you again and I will judge you.
To say it’s rather pervy would be to say the pope is a bit of a Catholic, or that God is really quite potent.
Now, it’s true that pervy erotic porn sounds like some kind of fun, just ask your grandmother, but it turns out it really isn’t if it’s George Bataille’s kind of fun. Because his kind of fun is going to involve a lot of really unpleasant stuff. Oxymoronically, this is total turn-off porn. Each and every sex scene, meaning each and every paragraph, will involve eggs, eyeballs, dead people, blood and fountains, geysers, and bucketloads of urine. If you’re going to take a walk on this wild side, you will need an umbrella and a raincoat and I would think gloves too.
A FELLOW READER’S ANGUISH
Over at The Reader’s Room blog *, where they are ploughing through 1001 Books you must Read Before the Next Global Pandemic Overtakes Us, Bookworm wrote :
Yet again the 1001 editors have managed to select a book that no sane person could enjoy. They appear to be obsessed with perversion and the more disgusting the descriptions of sex, the better. There is no need for anyone to read this before they die. In fact, it should be on the “don’t read this even if you have only days to live� list.
You see blurb-writers lazily describing this book as
one of the erotic classics of the twentieth century.
I am on the side of Bookworm here. What we seem to have is two completely different concepts of the erotic or the pornographic. The intellectual version includes Story of an Eye, Story of O and all of De Sade. I suggest that none of that stuff is likely to excite or turn on most people, they all involve extreme cruelty and dismemberment and death along with all the major and minor bodily fluids so it seems to me that the intellectual version of porn could only be enjoyed by Ted Bundy. And Bundy wannabes. And Susan Sontag, whose 1967 essay included here appear to celebrate them all, or at least redesignate them as literature.
Simone was tall and lovely. She was usually very natural; there was nothing heartbreaking in her eyes or her voice. But on a sensual level, she so bluntly craved any upheaval that the faintest call from the senses gave her a look directly suggestive of all things linked to deep sexuality, such as blood, suffocation, sudden terror, crime; things indefinitely destroying human bliss and honesty.
Yes, in Georges� world sexuality involves blood, suffocation, sudden terror, and crime. Also many many raw eggs (never poached or fried or boiled).
HE LOOKED LIKE A PRIEST OR A CHEMISTRY TEACHER
[image]
Georges said :
In general, people savour the 'pleasures of the flesh' only on condition that they be insipid.
By people I think he means me � my pleasures, even those of my wildest imagination, are all from Georges� point of view, irredeemably insipid. They never involve eggs, eyeballs, dead people and buckets of urine.
My kind of debauchery soils not only my body and my thoughts, but also anything I may conceive in its course, that is to say, the vast starry universe, which merely serves as a backdrop.
I will spare you any quotations relating to the eggs, eyeballs, orifices and unlikely genital manipulations that festoon the pages but I need to give you an idea of what some intellectuals appear to think of as horny. But before I do, here’s a funny thing I found.
THE AGE OF THE CHARACTERS
It says before each story on the website Literotica
All characters are eighteen or older.
But Georges breaks every rule (as well as every egg). He doesn’t care. He says :
I was nearly sixteen when I met Simone, a girl of my own age
So it appears all of these very unhygienic goings-on are performed by 15 years olds. Why hasn’t this book been busted for underage sex ?
A BIKE RIDE
So anyway, our two teenagers go for a bike ride. Now, many of us probably did this in our carefree youth. This is how Georges describes it :
It struck me that …if Simone and I were killed, then the universe of our unbearable personal vision was certain to be replaced by the pure stars, fully unrelated to any external gazes and realizing in a cold state, without human delays or detours, something that strikes me as the goal of my sexual licentiousness: a geometric incandescence (among other things, the coinciding point of life and death, being and nothingness), perfectly fulgurating.
It doesn’t sound like any bike ride I ever went on in my youth. Also, it doesn’t sound like it makes any kind of sense to me.
BATAILLE IS AN ALIEN PLANET
Apparently he had a tragic childhood. Also apparently he gets thrown in with all of those other terrifying French thinkers like Baudrillard, Derrida, Barthes, Lacan and so on. But this novella was enough and too much for me. I have a naïve idea that eroticism and porn should in some way evoke pleasure in the reader. I know, I’m hopeless.
We had abandoned the real world, the one made up solely of dressed people, and the time elapsed since then was already so remote as to seem almost beyond reach. Our personal hallucination now developed as boundlessly as perhaps the total nightmare of human society, for instance, with earth, sky, and atmosphere.
O William Gass Such a pain in the ass His difficult prose Gets right up my nose
Note : I've been reading this novel on & off for about 6 months. But not nO William Gass Such a pain in the ass His difficult prose Gets right up my nose
Note : I've been reading this novel on & off for about 6 months. But not no more.
IT’S YOUR FAULT, CLEAR AS DAY
The Tunnel comes to you with the maximum number of intellectual endorsements possible for a novel that isn’t James Joyce’s Ulysses. Before you pick it up you’ve been beaten into submission by the priestly class of all that is good and holy in modern literature. You are acutely aware you’re in the Presence of a Masterpiece. So let it be as clear as possible : if you don’t like The Tunnel by William Gass, it’s your fault. You aren’t bright enough, we’re so sorry. It’s not for you. Here’s your money back. Go and play with Jonathan Franzen or Joyce Carol Oates or David Mitchell. Don’t bother us up here in the Gassosphere.
THE CLASS SYSTEM OF NOVELS
There’s a class system in the happy world of the novel like there is everywhere else. And there’s almost no social mobility. This is the thing I mean :
The highbrow canon : Proust, Flaubert, Joyce, Nabokov, Gaddis, Gass, Thomas Mann, Pynchon, DFW, Bolano, Faulkner, Dostoievsky, Bernhardt, Alexander Theroux, Saramago, Kafka, Virginia Woolf, Flaubert etc etc. Also Flaubert. Don’t forget him.
Middlebrow : Jonathan Franzen, Cormac McCarthy, Joyce Carol Oates, Philip Roth, Martin Amis; all those Booker prize winners and losers; F Scott Fitzgerald, Raymond Chandler, D H Lawrence, Charles Dickens, Jane Austen, etc etc
Lowbrow : Everything else, starting off with Fifty Shades of Grey; all genre fiction except that written by Ursula le Guin, Neil Gaiman and David Mitchell
Hey, don’t frown, I didn’t make the rules. This is not an anti-elitist rant. I think Ulysses is the greatest ever novel! I love Virginia Woolf! Don’t shoot! I’m coming out with my hands up.
THE CASE OF WILLIAM GASS
It’s both strange and not strange that William Gass is in the Highbrow section.
The not strange part is that William Gass can write many terrific sentences, those ones where you feel the top of your brain lifting up up up. Many sentences you just want to bequeath to posterity or have Beethoven set to music or make your kids marry them or make them Pope. Also, he loves his stream of consciousness and his chaotic make-of-this-what-you-will torrential form of writing. All expository material is removed. All indications of who is speaking and why is ejected with a clip round the earhole. This stuff is for people who can cope. All that plotty stuff and indentations and quotation marks are for dweebs who can’t cope. Gass takes no prisoners. And I don’t mind that too much � I gave Omensetter’s Luck a whole 3 stars!
The strange part, where it seems that the literary elite which clutches The Tunnel to its bosom should actually be throwing it up over the side of the bridge over the troubled water of bad literature, is that everything you can identify as character or incident or major theme in The Tunnel is tired, cliched and monotonously foghorned about like Gass thinks he has invented this stuff.
There’s a fat white middle aged tenured professor who hates himself and his wife (also fat) and his kids.
There’s an awful lot about the disappointment of middle age, esp. as regards sex.
He’d like to diddle his teenybop students.
He’s written a big book on the German population under the Nazis and the big issue of guilt and innocence under the Nazis is, he has found, ambiguous, imagine that.
He is in the process of digging a literal tunnel out from the cellar in his house! Like you do.
Which is a metaphor I guess for Gass trying desperately to find a way out of his own novel.
Which for the first 200 pages is peppered with really very lame post-modish typographical amusements; these will make any reader of House of Leaves or The Familiar or the works of Alasdair Gray sneer mightily
Our professor bangs on forever about his midwestern childhood, like about 500 other novels do that I could refer to.
He is also obsessed with a previous great mentor-teacher of his, and bores on for pages about him.
All of this is very groanworthy. We’ve been here before so many many times. Another microscopic self-flagellation by a male person revealing the true repulsiveness of male persons? Great.
Then there’s the tone, which is unremitting. Our professor has woken up on the wrong side of the bed on page one and doesn’t stop spraying bile and dripping venom on everybody and everything until the final page 652. How do I know this, given that I ran out of puff and the will to live just before page 200?
THE TUNNEL : A SCIENTIFIC CORE SAMPLE
I took a core sample. Here are the results.
Page 99 : I hate all soft pillows; they close over you like soft fat walls.
Page 199 : It’s Lacelli’s strut that gets me; it’s his dimpled dandification I can’t abide.
Page 299: The Fascist salute looks borrowed from one of Karl May’s awful books about American Indians. “How� and “Heil� are harmonious.
Page 399 : His accent is substandard suburban, Jersey Shorish, and ugly in every way, but not overly voweled and wavy; he does not speak, to sum the situation, any more miserably than most; nevertheless, what a wop! Mama mia and more so � what a wop!
Page 499: I had to lecture on the Treaty of Versailles, or on some other sublime-silliness of so-called human society; I had to listen to student excuses; I had to mark exams as if I cared whether the dumb klutzes lived or died.
Page 599 : I hate that pork-faced picture.
THE GASS OVEN
The highbrow canon is full of miseryguts like Bernhardt and Theroux, so Gass fits right in. Some fans might say well, you know, this is all black humour, doncha geddit. It probably is, but it wears you down. It’s the same tone of voice page after page. The same guy with not a good word to say for anybody. Hey, Gass fans, doesn't it ever wear thin?
But in fact liking or disliking The Tunnel is a complicated business, as is everything to do with this monstrous puthering bloviation because The Tunnel is both brilliant and awful at the same time. Page by page, line by line, it’s fabulous and loathsome. Wonderful and horrible, searingly intelligent, beautiful and repulsive, all at the same time.
I found that I didn’t want to stick my head in this Gass oven any more so, this being the first day of a new year, my first resolution was to give up digging.
I’m left with the thought, heresy to Gass fans, that all the time and effort Gass took on this novel was perhaps could be just maybe a hideous misuse of his brains and time in the same way that Joyce wasted his last 18 years with the unreadable Finnegans Wake.
FURTHER READING FOR THE CURIOUS
For a brilliant demolition of The Tunnel here’s a 1995 review
For a great evenhanded and mostly positive Å·±¦ÓéÀÖ review here’s this from Ian Graye :
I am in awe of anyone who can finish this novel. The idea is fairly simple, it’s an examination of a random act of violence in which this guy is driviI am in awe of anyone who can finish this novel. The idea is fairly simple, it’s an examination of a random act of violence in which this guy is driving along with his two daughters in the back and gets into a beef with a van, they overtake each other, the van slows down when he slows down, it’s the kind of situation in Spielberg’s Duel movie, and the passenger in the van produces a gun and shoots bullets into the car, and the youngest daughter dies.
There are eight chapters in this novel which examine eight versions of this event. I am all for books about random violence but I could only manage to read version number one. So if the main idea is pretty good, so what was the problem? Stephen Dixon was the problem. It’s the way he writes. It drove me up the wall. I ran out of walls in my own house to be driven up and I had to ask the neighbour for the loan of one of his walls so Stephen Dixon could drive me up that one too.
What is so bad about Stephen Dixon’s style? I will give you a couple of quotes. In this one, the father has finally met his surviving daughter after many years and now they’re walking around the city she used to live in, which he still lives in, and he says
I guess the new modern tall hotels and such and their elevators on the outside walls like crawling bugs and the people who are drawn to it all make it more safe, and let’s face it, Glen’s company wouldn’t have held its sales meeting here if it hadn’t been for the changes in this part of town, so suddenly I’m going to have one of those spur-of-the-moment even lifetime changes of opinion about this place, though I don’t know if it’s an inner one, whatever I mean by that, and say the whole change of it is great, for you wouldn’t be here with me now if it wasn’t for what they did to the waterfront and the new convention centre and hotels and restaurants and all sorts of tourist draws, individual paddleboats in the harbor, for christsake, the aquarium with performing fish
So this guy talks in pure mindless blather which is one thing but then, so does the author and the only other main character which is the surviving daughter Margot. Here’s the author describing a phone conversation - our guy is thinking how it would be if he visited his daughter in her home in Oregon :
he’s the last person to get in the way or upset things or busy- or nosybody around and no problem as to who’ll cook him breakfast or cook him anything if she wants and in fact she might even have to fight him as to who’ll cook for all of them during his stay, only kidding, and also only kidding about assuming there’ll even be a stay and she says what does he mean? She’ll love having him but they don’t have that much room in the house, comfortable as the place is � each boy has his own bedroom and there’s no family room and now no playroom to convert, that room has become Glen’s home office and the basement his woodshop and the only other places are an unventilated attic and an airless crawl space, but maybe the two youngest boys can double up and he can stay in one of their bedrooms for a few days.
The lurid melodrama of the original incident is breathlessly and brilliantly told in this nonstop helterskelterese, but Lord preserve us, when it comes to discussing the finer points of a possible family visit, this novel sounds just like a guy who I used to work with who simply did not know when to shut up, to the extent that you had to say goodbye and walk away from him, and he’d still be finishing up an everlasting sentence or paragraph or several strung-together paragraphs, so to speak, when you had boarded your bus for the journey home.
Third example, in case you’re not convinced
if you’re going to hire a cashier or a guy who hangs up coats or things like that, even someone who takes care of the men in the restrooms of the higher-class restaurants, better to have one who can chase not-too-threatening unwanteds out of the place or at least look like he can, finds it more economical than working just to retire, maybe for the time being, and take the small union pension he’ll get and accident insurance from getting shot at work, which isn’t half bad, and in a year full Social Security with medical coverage the government gives, -care or -caid, calls her a lot but after five and at weekends because it can cost a great deal and blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah blah
Oh , also, there was clearly a nationwide paragraph shortage in 1995 when Mr Dixon was writing this as he only allows himself a new paragraph every two pages or so.
I was really interested in how the eight variations of the shooting were explored but wow, I could not stand that voice for one tiny second more.
Jeffrey Eugeniges in his fanboy introduction says that when he first read this
I was suddenly pulled into a never-before-experienced realm : the sunkeJeffrey Eugeniges in his fanboy introduction says that when he first read this
I was suddenly pulled into a never-before-experienced realm : the sunken world of a strange and marvelous book. Elect Mr Robinson for a Better World is that very rare thing : a book without antecedents.
O Jeffrey Eugenides, you may be very sweet But I feel your education has been somewhat incomplete
Kafka (1915) K. was informed by telephone that there would be a small hearing concerning his case the following Sunday. He was made aware that these cross examinations would follow one another regularly, perhaps not every week but quite frequently.
Donald Barthelme (1976) Some of us had been threatening our friend Colby for a long time, because of the way he had been behaving. And now he’d gone too far, so we decided to hang him.
Donald Antrim (1993) Today I’m not sure I’d favour drawing and quartering an ex-mayor and Chamber of Commerce volunteer. That’s what we did to Jim Kunkel after the Stinger incident.
Yes, strange, violent and random things are being described in a voice of ironic normality. And this has been going on for years.
So anyway, in this thankfully brief novel, we’re in American suburbia, there’s a low-level war going on between two suburbs, people are throwing up fortifications round their houses, areas are mined, schools have been closed (because of withdrawn funding, not because of this guerrilla war), and Pete Robinson is thinking of running for mayor. First he has to bury the various parts of the dismembered ex-mayor (currently in his freezer) in various sacred places throughout town, intoning passages from the Egyptian Book of the Dead over them. Oh, and Pete's wife has become a coelacanth. (Not literally, spiritually.) You get the picture? Yes, this is bizarro fiction, of which there is now quite a lot.
I took a chance on the notoriously bizarro Blueprints of the Afterlife by Ryan Boudinot after some serious raving by one of my Å·±¦ÓéÀÖ friends. Here we have giant heads that appear in the sky; there is the world's greatest dishwasher who is a person; there are over 600 clones of an ancient pop singer's backup dancer; there is a person who keeps getting murdered; indeed there is a lot of fun going on. However, I found that some of the odder science fiction writers had got to this level of wackiness already. But I did like it, because Mr Boudinot has impressively weird ideas and he doesn’t waste them writing mild comedy sketches strung together by room-temperature standup riffing.
Franz Kafka, you rock. Donald Barthelme and Ryan Boudinot, you also rock. Donald Antrim, you are John Denver. ...more
literature is about the creation of reactionary bourgeois subjectivities� [I] write with (18 rated review, please note)
Stewart Home, in an interview :
literature is about the creation of reactionary bourgeois subjectivities� [I] write with the intention of destroying the novel as we know it
[Mandy, Charlie & Mary-Jane is] funny if you've got a black sense of humour, and hopefully it is unreadable and distressing to those who are uptight, po-faced, repressed and even more deluded than the narrator!
**
It looks like Stewart Home has been trying to be the literary mashup of Kathy Acker and Johnny Rotten for the last 20 years, all porn, pastiche 'n'pomo, but I never heard of him until a couple of months ago, and I’m thinking back with nostalgic fondness to that time. Life can be so good without Stewart Home novels. So my message in this review is: if you haven’t read any Stewart Home novels yet, enjoy that fact. Bask in it. Prolong your Homelessness in any way you can.
Male authors (often leftish ones) seems to have such a relish for writing about vile male protagonists in the first person* � it’s like they are just dying to release all their violent misogynistic drug-abusing fantasising which they have spent a lifetime of leafy dinner parties politely suppressing. So yes, here’s yet another novel about one of these horrible guys. Charlie is a lecturer in cultural studies and in this scene he’s in a communal student kitchen looking for something sharp. There he runs into his own girlfriend.
“Charlie, what a surprise! What are you doing here?� “Chloe Smith got drunk, I had to help her friend Rachel Hornby carry her back from the student bar. I told Rachel to go back to her room but she insisted on staying with her friend. I’ve come through here to find some scissors or a knife. I wanted to stab Rachel in the neck, mutilate her, fuck her corpse and then have sex with her unconscious friend.�
“Charlie,� Mary-Jane chided. “You’ve got such a sick sense of humour, it’s all those splatter movies you watch. Stop kidding around.�
This novel is remarkably lame stuff if you take out the sex with corpses. It could be one of the very many unfunny comedies on BBC Radio Four � they have two slots, 6.30 to 7 pm and 11 to 11.30 pm - reserved for truly grim sitcom/panel gamey stuff, all recorded before a live audience who must, I assume, have all just smoked marijuana and are in a condition where absolutely everything is funny because they emit laughing noises continually, an actor has only got to say “Hello darling� and they’re all gasping on the floor and banging their heads against the wall for relief from the intense joy. So that audience is the only one I can conceive who might enjoy this Stewart Home novel.
As an example of the level of comedy in this book, our hero works at the City University of Newcastle upon Tyne, the acronym for which is� oh, I see you’re ahead of me. And Stewart sprays this amusing acronym around as furiously as I spray my Oust (“the aroma of freshly laundered towels�) when the cats have used their litter tray. Repeating witless puerility does not fool the reader into thinking it’s an amusingly outrageous motif, like the prose is wearing a spiderweb tattoo on its face; it just makes us think that the author thinks his joke is so fucking funny he can’t help but bathe in it like it’s comedic asses milk.
Rape is a central metaphor in this novel, or maybe I should say that rape is a frequent occurrence in this novel to the point where you assume it must be a metaphor. The version of rape on display here is the rape of unconscious women. It happens like a lot. They’re roofied or KO’d or asleep and our hero rapes them cause that’s what gets him hot. So this author being all anti-capitalist and so forth, maybe what this metaphor means is that capitalism drugs its victims before violating them � pretty vague, but this must be a metaphor, right, as opposed to just a lot of scenes where the antihero rapes unconscious women because such scenes are intrinsically edgy and therefore sexy? Even though the protagonist rapist is not himself a capitalist but an anticapitalist like SH himself? Hmm, now I'm muddled up. Perhaps I'm taking this metaphor too literally! Oh what a paradox.
This novel is as far from good literature as Lulu’s 1969 Eurovision song contest entry Boom Bang-a-Bang was from good pop music. And yes, we know that Lulu sometimes cheekily slipped in the odd James Joyce reference in her singles (Love Loves to Love Love) just as Stewart Home slips in a million references to Eurosleaze horror directors and rock bands and deconstruction theorists and so forth, but nodding and winking at the audience cannot divert is from the underlying bankrupt horror that is this novel.
Bankrupt because it seems that the anti-capitalist author these days has only one string to his guitar � all he can do is shove his disgust in our faces by replicating the awfulness on the page. It’s a gesture of despair.
And any horror in this comedy-horror novel comes from the realization that the author actually has fans who enjoy this stuff.
* Elementary Particles, 1982 Janine, Money, Bad News, I, The Supreme, Extinction, The Killer Inside Me, Vernon God Little, Lolita, American Psycho, etc
Winnie-the-Pooh, light of my life, fire of my loins. My sin, my soul. Win-knee-the-Pooh: the tip of the lip taking a trip of three steps down the palaWinnie-the-Pooh, light of my life, fire of my loins. My sin, my soul. Win-knee-the-Pooh: the tip of the lip taking a trip of three steps down the palate to return at four to kiss : Pooh. He was Pooh, plain Pooh, in the morning, standing eighteen inches in one sock. He was that scruffy old bear at school. He was Mr Winnie Pooh on the dotted line. But in my arms he was always Bear. ...more
This was the one which convinced me that I didn't have to finish a book if it became as painful as having my toes gnawed off one by one by the neighboThis was the one which convinced me that I didn't have to finish a book if it became as painful as having my toes gnawed off one by one by the neighbour's strange nine-year-old son. I realised the author was the guy who wrote the script for Last Year at Marienbad which is the all time quintessence of French cinematic 60s avant-gardery. Dig the Wikipedia plot summary
Through ambiguous flashbacks and disorientating shifts of time and location, the film explores the relationships between the characters. Conversations and events are repeated in several places in the château and grounds, and there are numerous tracking shots of the château's corridors, with ambiguous voiceovers.
The characters are unnamed in the film; in the published screenplay, the woman is referred to as "A", the first man is "X", and the man who may be her husband is "M".
I'm not saying the book is as bad as the movie, not at all. It's worse. But something happened on page 84, which broke the terrible monotony. I found an insect squashed there. I imagined its last thoughts : Oh no, this is not a large flat black and white flower petal, it's something else... what's that up above me... aargh...
I took the tiny corpse to be a sign saying that if I carried on Alain Robbe-Grillet would squash the life out of me too. Metaphors can be helpful, even obvious ones.
Thank you little dead bug, you did not die in vain.
Oops, looks like I'm the only goodreader who hated this pretentious male fantasy. How many more edgy, slightly SM or even completely SM relationships Oops, looks like I'm the only goodreader who hated this pretentious male fantasy. How many more edgy, slightly SM or even completely SM relationships will we be presented with by male authors, in each of which the S part of the relationship is the man and the M part is the woman, and the man remains clothed and the woman is mostly unclothed, and the man is older and the woman considerably younger? By contrast with all this Blue Velvet, Last Tango in Paris, Secretary-style art, porn is blazingly honest....more
This big thing was on my shelf for so long I often mistook it for an ugly minimalist sculpture. How many baleful glares were traded between myself andThis big thing was on my shelf for so long I often mistook it for an ugly minimalist sculpture. How many baleful glares were traded between myself and itself before I gave it the statutory 100 pages. And before I did that I noticed that even the publisher's blurb on the cover apologised for it! They knew it was bad! Anyway I thought it was unreadable and it made me very cross. But that was then. Reading 100 pages of bad books never puts me in a grumpy mood these days because I know how much fun I'll have with them on Å·±¦ÓéÀÖ later.
Mr Vollman has been described as "the maximalist's maximalist"....more
Beaten senseless by the author's large brains I slumped to the ground. When I awoke I found rats had eaten the rest of the book and they had all died Beaten senseless by the author's large brains I slumped to the ground. When I awoke I found rats had eaten the rest of the book and they had all died with uncanny expressions of horror on their little furry faces. I wasn't disappointed. This novel was a little too avant for my garde....more
I failed, I failed, I gave up, I'm sorry. It was written in English, Jim, but not as we know it, and I flipped forward and it was all like that. This I failed, I failed, I gave up, I'm sorry. It was written in English, Jim, but not as we know it, and I flipped forward and it was all like that. This book has too many brains and it frightened me in the way a sufferer from dementia must be frightened when they look at a clock and realise they no longer can tell the time. It's not a novel at all, it's a cruel and unusual punishment. Using oven gloves I placed it in a plastic bag then I double-bagged it and hid the whole thing in a dark recess of my cellar, shuddering the while. I couldn't throw it in the bin because I tried that the previous week and they refused to take it. ...more
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