amateurish, moronic, thoughtless, sadistic, repetitive schlock with no redeeming value whatsoever. What enjoyment there isFrom Too Much Horror blog :
amateurish, moronic, thoughtless, sadistic, repetitive schlock with no redeeming value whatsoever. What enjoyment there is comes in the form of disbelief. You'll be amazed at the lack of any attempt at realism in any aspect. You'll be astounded at the depraved depths to which the author can descend!
THE KINDNESS OF STRANGERS
I only just heard about this 1977 lunatic horror novel and it sounded like fun, so I thought I’d get a nice cheap sleazy looking hopefully stained copy and read it, but I couldn’t because it’s out of print and people are charging CRAZY SKY HIGH prices. But then I found that some kindly soul had done an audio book of it and put the whole thing on Youtube! Problem solved.
PRAYING MANTISES! THOUSANDS OF THEM! THE SIZE OF A MAN!
So here is a short summary of a book you will probably not read.
A man in a boat off a Columbian island observes an earthquake followed by a tsunami. Back on land he then can’t but notice that thousands of giant praying mantises are pouring forth from fissures in the very ground caused by the earthquake. And they are so hungry. So they are eating people.
Our hero is called Dyke and is 25 years old and he has an alarming back story. It seems he has been roaming the world committing all kinds of crimes, torturing people and so forth. He is no boy scout. And he had a disagreement with four of his shady chums and they beat him soundly and he was “robbed of his manhood” eleven years ago. Since then life has lost some of its sparkle. But now, Dyke feels excited and happy again, watching the mantises eat people. One of them even eats his only friend in Colombia – slowly! And it gets his juices flowing! So he decides to become King of the Mantises. That will show everybody.
He lures a mantis by offering it frozen sheep from his extraordinarily large boat refrigerator, then he captures it by using a steel reinforced net which he always carries because he is a tough hunter of wild beasts even though now he is without his manhood.
Dyke’s eyes had a molten steel stare that used to knuckle victims to their knees. His eyes compensate for the zigzag of awful scars all over his face and body. He had jet black shoulder length hair. "But he was a eunuch now. He could never marry". Not even a mantis. We will come to that sad episode.
THEY WERE A DEATH DEALING MANHOOD DESTROYING BOY BAND.
In a flashback we learn that the leader of this boy band was a boy who did not know what kindness was. Ryan Gout was the leader but Pete Stuart was the meanest, he gouged out people’s eyes and his favourite hobby was maiming children just for fun. He would laugh as he did so.
The gang was tired of kicking out old ladies’ brains for fifty dollars. They wanted to steal a million dollars. Pete says he has a bottle of nitro so they can blow a safe. And he knows where one is. So off they go, to Old Man Shield’s place. Whoever he is. They’re going to ring his doorbell, roll him around on the ground and knife him a little. So they do all that and chop up the old man. There is a lot of chopping, two or three pages. “Zeb’s blood red knife followed Pete’s into the heart section.” The old geezer is well dead “yet the boys cut on”.
So they blow up the old geezer’s safe and find a fortune in dollar bills.
After some post-robbery contemplation Dyke decides to rob all the loot for himself. Unfortunately he is discovered by the gang who whip out their flick knives and begin slicing with glee. “I’ll pull his socks off so we can get at his toes”. But it’s not his toes Dyke worries about.
“No don’t cut me there, cut me anywhere, but leave me that!” he whimpers.
But they do cut him there and leave him to die like a dog in the desert.
But luckily some local vaqueros rescue him and patch him up, including blood transfusions.
I’LL CALL HIM SLAYER
I’ll teach this mantis who he is and to come when I call.. I’ll call him Slayer!
Dyke trains Slayer. He figures that it will take two months to fully train him, and also to make “some kind of potion” that will stop Slayer or any other mantis from eating him. At this point Dyke catches a local man stealing from his store of food. He feeds him to Slayer. Ten page description of the ensuing meal. Slayer loves eating people alive, what’s the fun in eating dead people right? And Dyke gets his jollies watching Slayer. It’s a match made in heaven. Dyke wonders what it would be like to be eaten by Slayer – for a long time. “His own death would not exhilarate him".
Dyke makes his repellent potion. Pages about this. Finally, after a long process in which an anteater dies, he smears his arm with this horrible stuff and forces his feet to walk to Slayer’s cage, thinking “What if Slayer bites off my arm and chews it up before my eyes?... I wonder what it’s like watching a beast eat part of your body while you are helpless to prevent the gruesome snack?”
I’m sure we all wonder that from time to time.
“As the mantis stopped to catch his breath” …. Wait a minute, even I know that insects don’t have lungs…. Oh anyway, this is nitpicking…. Dyke muses :
I think I could see Slayer swim in a sea of blood and I could swim in it with him, especially if it was the blood of people, of men, of the four men I hate with all my guts. An ocean of blood wouldn’t sicken me… I could spend my whole life seeing him eat men alive…
Enough! I think I can see where this is going. There will be pages about Slayer eating people and Dyke enjoying it. He will track down the boy band and Slayer will eat them one by one with mean Pete left till last. And finally the potion will wear off and Slayer will eat Dyke. If anybody finished this astonishingly ridiculous novel, written in the same English language that Henry James used to write The Golden Bowl, then maybe they will let me know.
I will never look at a six feet tall praying mantis in the same way again....more
A curious and kind of heartwarming story – now and then I watch the videos of a booktuber named Criminolly and at some point he got dragHOW I GOT HERE
A curious and kind of heartwarming story – now and then I watch the videos of a booktuber named Criminolly and at some point he got dragged into reading The Most Disturbing Books Ever. He would do a video about one of these every now and then. The titles were suggested to him by his booktube followers and friends, and you can imagine they were mostly the usual suspects. One must-read on this list was Notice by Heather Lewis. He discovered it was out of print & shelled out for a second hand copy. Then he read it and was mightily impressed and contacted Serpent’s Tail, the original publishers, asking why they’d let it go out of print. Lots of back and forth later, and lo! Because of his enthusiasm and encouragement they republished Notice in February this year.
How nice – it’s like finding out that us book fans actually count for something! Power to the people!
THE MOST DISTURBING BOOKS
Olly read Cows by Matthew Stokoe and quite rightly called it The Least Disturbing Book Ever – that was great (I agree). Anyway, after all this extreme reading he nominated Notice as The Most Disturbing – much worse than American Psycho, The Wasp Factory, We Need to Talk About Kevin, etc etc. (BTW Lolita was on the list, quite rightly.) So naturally my curiosity was somewhat piqued.
Why do we read disturbing books anyway? Same reason as we watch horror films. Which is? Well, sometimes I think it’s just a macho thing – do you dare to watch The Human Centipede Full Sequence? (Answer : no!!!) Like – do you dare to ride the great big scary rollercoaster? (Answer – no!!!!)
I’ve read a bundle of these Disturbing Books and there’s another bundle I would never ever read – 120 Days of Sodom by de Sade, Hogg by Samuel Delaney, anything by Peter Sotos, My Absolute Darling….
CONNECTIONS
Heather Lewis writes somewhat like Dennis Cooper and Mary Gaitskell, the subject matter is ghastly, awful, horrendous, but it’s recounted in a lacksadaisical, lacklustre, affectless zoned-out style, quite appropriate for the first person narration, because this first person is severely traumatised and gets retraumatised at least twice.
And Notice can be filed next to some other narratives of female self-immolation, like Story of O and The Piano Teacher. It’s in that unhappy orbit.
WAS IT ANY GOOD
Well it was strange – nothing like the vortex of horror I was expecting. This is the story of a self-destructive woman who drifts in and out of prostitution and runs into a couple of horribly sadistic clients; but mainly it’s the story of her lesbian relationships with two women, and these take up the great majority of the book, and are written about very tenderly, but also in a blank ghastly can’t-escape-from-my-own-head kind of way. The language is distant, desiccated, debilitated, and frankly very wearing :
I glanced at Beth because I hadn’t been keeping an eye on her and had just now noticed it. She was looking right at me. This put me further off base because until then I thought maybe she hadn’t been paying attention. Realizing she was confused me all the more because I’d been both wanting her to and not. Or I’d been wanting her to but at the same time was afraid of it.
There are pages of this kind of mad waffley sub-psychobabble. It was like Henry James if Henry James was a 14 year old girl strung out on quaaludes.
As I say, an appropriate voice for the character, but for me a turgid not great read, sorry to say....more
This is the original What Would Jesus Do? novel. It has a curious history. In 1896 this preacher Charles Sheldon thought up the famous challenge and hThis is the original What Would Jesus Do? novel. It has a curious history. In 1896 this preacher Charles Sheldon thought up the famous challenge and had the lightbulb idea of incorporating it into his sermon in the form of an ongoing story – come back next week for part two, everybody! See what happens when our characters try to live their lives asking WWJD all the time! The idea was a huge hit, his church was packed, and at the end of it he wrote it up as a novel and serialised it in a religious magazine and tried to get it published. The publishers turned him down flat. So the magazine decided to publish it as a novel themselves, and they sent off the manuscript to be copyrighted but they didn’t send the whole manuscript and the copyright office said their application was invalid. So the magazine version sold out immediately – 100,000 copies, apparently, and of course other respectable publishers spotted this phenomenon and also saw that it was out of copyright and pirated it and sold millions, and poor Charles Sheldon didn’t get a dime. How sad. But it was God’s will, you know!
I read all this in the preface, which also tells me In His Steps has been
carefully edited and updated for modern readers.
Hmmm…. What could that mean? I don’t think they did a great job because quite soon we have Rev Sheldon introducing a young female character like this :
A statuesque blonde of attractive proportions, Virginia had an appealing face. The spectacles she wore simply emphasised her gifted intellect.
Well anyhow, the story is located in the town of Raymond and focuses on the big cheeses in the church who take the WWJD pledge, such as the editor of one of the main local papers. He immediately decides to stop publishing accounts of prize fighting and he cancels all adverts for alcohol and tobacco, much to his manager’s consternation, who loudly proclaims they will go bust within the month.
Transposing the moral teachings of first century rural Judea onto late 19th century middle America throws up some bizarre questions, which Rev Sheldon acknowledges :
It is a different age. There are many perplexing questions in our civilisation that are not mentioned in the teachings of Jesus. How am I going to tell what he would do?
Apparently if you feel that’s what Jesus would do, then that’s enough. So we get some ludicrous stuff like :
The three agreed that, whatever Jesus might do in detail as editor of a daily paper, He would be guided by the same general principles that directed His conduct as the Saviour of the world….Jesus would not issue a Sunday edition.
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The big idea is actually most interesting – what would happen if Christians actually took the teachings of Jesus seriously? The characters are convinced they are at the beginning of a social revolution. And yes, you can see that could very well be. But the novel fritters the big idea away, and its band of well-meaning wealthy types spend their time and money improving the lives of the poor by singing beautifully to them and closing down saloons. There are cringe-makingly pat scenes such as the one where it is discovered that a member of the church is the owner of some slum tenements – he immediately weeps and promises to fix all the plumbing. (In fact there is a whole ocean of religious weeping here, the pages are wringing with it. )
But I will give the Rev Sheldon credit for one scene, in which a bunch of working men let the do-gooders know what the real solutions are, as opposed to the weeping, singing and nourishing soup. One guy frankly says that revolutionary socialism is the only way forward, none of this mystical nonsense.
And indeed there is a lot of Christian self-criticism in here :
The bishop was appalled to discover how few of his wealthy friends would really suffer any genuine inconvenience for the sake of humanity.
Well, as a novel this is hopeless, the reverend was no writer, his characters are thin puppets, and he has no idea of a plot, but we can’t complain about that, it’s all about the Big Idea; and I don’t think he worked it out well enough or went as far as he could with it.
A brief, gleefully bleak horror comedy that begins with three pretty funny jokes. Our Mormon protagonist finds himself in a room being administered byA brief, gleefully bleak horror comedy that begins with three pretty funny jokes. Our Mormon protagonist finds himself in a room being administered by an 8 foot demon complete with horns. Demon is trying to figure out which hell he should go to. What? But I shouldn’t be here at all! I’m a good Mormon! I believe in God and Jesus and everything! Demon explains well, kiddo, you picked the wrong religion. The real true religion is Zoroastrianism. Our Mormon is indignant – why was this not made clear? “Bit of bad luck there,” says the demon, in a don’t blame me, I don’t make the rules kind of way.
So anyway, he gets zapped off to one particular Hell and he’s reading the rules on a big helpful board :
Welcome to Hell. This Hell is based upon a short story by Jorge Luis Borges from your world called “The Library of Babel”. Here you will find all the books that can possibly be written.
And after listing nine rules, it concludes
We hope you enjoy your stay here. We have done all we can to make your stay a pleasant and instructive one.
Kind of counterfactual, you may think. But really this Hell is pretty pleasant, you get to eat delicious food all the time, you get to have your 25 year old body which never gets sick, and wonder of wonders you get to meet people and have sex, should you so desire. What could be so bad about Hell, then?
For the answer, you should read this funny and excruciating little book.
Note : In case you were wondering how many books are in this library of hell, there is an answer. The combination of letters and words are confined to those found on a Roman alphabet keyboard, and include all the punctuation too, alas, so the number is quite high, it’s 95 to the power of 1,312,000 which is way way more than the number of electrons in our present universe.
A sharp glinting sliver of horror not confronted, glanced at and shuddered away from, then finally grasped. Sometimes the things that are closest to yA sharp glinting sliver of horror not confronted, glanced at and shuddered away from, then finally grasped. Sometimes the things that are closest to you are hardest to see. Now I have to know more. This tiny novel is not to be missed. It will only take you 90 minutes, or less. ...more
Was ever a good deed punished like this one….. Teacher in 1950s Glasgow has a slum kid in his class, already on probation for stealing, and the targetWas ever a good deed punished like this one….. Teacher in 1950s Glasgow has a slum kid in his class, already on probation for stealing, and the target of revulsion and mockery by the other kids. But Tom the slum kid is the smartest one in the class. So benignly selfregardingly wellmeaning teacher Charles decides it would be a great idea to introduce Tom to the finer things in life & open up his cramped horizons by taking him with his family off to the seaside cottage they rent every year for a fortnight. How great-hearted! How misguided! How disastrous!
It's a strong tale and the psychology of everyone is scored like a late quartet by Beethoven : the sceptical wife, the jealous but fascinated daughter, the oblivious son, the battleaxe mother-in-law, and most complicatedly, frantically virtue-signalling (to himself as much as anyone else) Charles and Tom, who wasn’t ever waving but always drowning. Leading us to the gloomy inevitability of the final chord.
In the middle of this delightful ultra-English country house satire written in 1921, I got a jolt. One of the pompous old geezers is lecturing our limIn the middle of this delightful ultra-English country house satire written in 1921, I got a jolt. One of the pompous old geezers is lecturing our limp-as-a-lettuce-leaf young Denis the would-be poet about what the world is really like (they do this quite a lot) :
People are quite ready to listen to the philosophers for a little amusement as they would listen to a fiddler or a mountebank. But as to acting on the advice of the men of reason – never. Wherever the choice has had to be made between the man of reason and the madman, the world has unhesitatingly followed the madman. For the madman appeals to what is fundamental, to passion and the instincts…
At that exact moment, in 1921, there was a guy just starting his political career in an obscure minuscule laughably unpopular political party over in Germany. Of course, he was Hitler, and he was a madman. It gave me a shudder.
That was an unintentional serious note - this is a sweet, funny book. When you start it you might groan and think hasn’t this eccentric aristocratic and artistic types all lined up to be executed by gentle mockery been done to death? And it has. But this young man Aldous Huxley could really turn out lovely sentences, unexpected anecdotes and lashings of charm.
Such a nice novel to end the year with. 3.5 stars....more
The problem with Goodreads (well, there are so many problems, where do we begin? take the app, for instance - it’s got enough bugs to delight a thousaThe problem with Goodreads (well, there are so many problems, where do we begin? take the app, for instance - it’s got enough bugs to delight a thousand entomologists) is that you can find inspiring five star reviews and equally horrifying one star reviews for every book ever – well, of course, readers are nothing if not heterogeneous – so where does that leave you when you pick up your next novel? It’s confusing.
In this case I shoulda believed the reviewers who said they wouldn’t put this book out if it was on fire. The thing is that you can tell this novel is a comedy and you can see which bits are intended to be hilarious but that’s as far as it goes.
Can’t remember why I got this in the first place. I thought it was one of the 1001 Books You Must Read In The Next Week Or The Dog Will Die but it isn’t. Comedies about the awkward sex lives of practising Catholics in the 1960s aren’t immediately obvious must-reads. There must have been a reason. Maybe some nasty burglar broke in and left his copy on my shelf....more
1. A guy will spend years writing a long book about sexual h(Note – this may be a little tiny bit spoilerish)
THE WAY THINGS WERE IN INDIA IN THE 1940s
1. A guy will spend years writing a long book about sexual health in marriage, knowing that it will be a big hit when published, and when he meets a total stranger one day he will whimsically sell him his manuscript for whatever cash the guy has in his pockets (a few rupees) and the total stranger will take the manuscript and get it published and become rich and the author will never ask for any royalties, not even when he meets the random guy again later on. And no one will ever mention the total unfairness or borderline insanity of such an occurrence.
2. A 15 year old son will run away from his family because of a fight with his annoying father, and the parents, realising he has gone, will fall into despair, weeping and wailing, but they will never think of asking the police to find their son. In fact they will not make even the feeblest attempt to trace him. It seems registering a teenager as a missing person is not something anyone would do.
3. After the income from the sex book dies down, the guy thinks hmmm I need a job, I know, I will become a financial expert and get everyone to lend me their cash. How can I do this? Of course! I will offer my customers 25% interest when the bank only offers 5%! So this is an offer the whole town of Malgudi cannot refuse and they shower our guy with all their stashed cash caches and lo! they get their 25% and everything is peachy. How this guy is able to do such a thing, what he does with all the money to be able to afford such a Himalayan altitude of interest, is not explained. Maybe it was only ever a Ponzi scheme. Who knows. Maybe R K Narayan didn’t quite know either.
4. Everybody’s fortunes randomly rise and fall as if they were the playthings of gods who were high as kites on lsd.
This is the 6th RK Narayan novel I have read and I think that’s enough. The two best ones were The Dark Room and The Painter of Signs. I have concluded that he is a little bit hit or miss. But he is a very affable, friendly writer....more
Back in the early 19th century the idea was to bung as many clauses as possible into your sentences – if you could interrupt yourself twelve times befBack in the early 19th century the idea was to bung as many clauses as possible into your sentences – if you could interrupt yourself twelve times before the full stop, that was style. Mostly I enjoy the sclerosis of early Victorian prose, it’s like wading through barb-wired treacle but you knew what you were in for and like spelunking it can be an invigorating challenge.
But Nathaniel Hawthorne - really, this guy is too much. Here he is talking about a little kid who’s already bought some gingerbread from the shop and now he’s returned :
Phœbe, on entering the shop, beheld there the already familiar face of the little devourer—if we can reckon his mighty deeds aright—of Jim Crow, the elephant, the camel, the dromedaries, and the locomotive. Having expended his private fortune, on the two preceding days, in the purchase of the above unheard-of luxuries, the young gentleman’s present errand was on the part of his mother, in quest of three eggs and half a pound of raisins.
This is sickly simpering stuff indeed. “The little devourer”….”his mighty deeds”…”his private fortune”…”unheard-of luxuries”… he is beating this spoofiness to death, it dies horribly long before he gets to the half pound of raisins. He thinks he’s being kindly-funny when he’s being revolting. Well, of course, that was the taste in polite humour back then – patronising little children mercilessly. And he doesn’t stop laying it on with a trowel :
These articles Phœbe accordingly supplied, and, as a mark of gratitude for his previous patronage, and a slight super-added morsel after breakfast, put likewise into his hand a whale! The great fish, reversing his experience with the prophet of Nineveh, immediately began his progress down the same red pathway of fate whither so varied a caravan had preceded him.
We are taking the whole first page of chapter 8 to hack through all this arch blathering about a gingerbread whale and the fun stuff about Jonah and the red pathway. And he will not stop wringing every last morsel of hilarity from the small boy.
This remarkable urchin, in truth, was the very emblem of old Father Time, both in respect of his all-devouring appetite for men and things, and because he, as well as Time, after ingulfing thus much of creation, looked almost as youthful as if he had been just that moment made.
Finally the kid leaves – phew, maybe we can get back on track now.
As the child went down the steps, a gentleman ascended them, and made his entrance into the shop.
Okay – a new character. Ah, wait – in 1850 that meant that you had to spend a page describing what he’s wearing because no one in those days knew what anything looked like.
It was the portly, and, had it possessed the advantage of a little more height, would have been the stately figure of a man considerably in the decline of life, dressed in a black suit of some thin stuff, resembling broadcloth as closely as possible. A gold-headed cane, of rare Oriental wood, added materially to the high respectability of his aspect, as did also a neckcloth of the utmost snowy purity, and the conscientious polish of his boots. His dark, square countenance, with its almost shaggy depth of eyebrows, was naturally impressive, and would, perhaps, have been rather stern, had not the gentleman considerately taken upon himself to mitigate the harsh effect by a look of exceeding good-humor and benevolence. Owing, however, to a somewhat massive accumulation of animal substance about the lower region of his face, the look was, perhaps, unctuous rather than spiritual, and had, so to speak, a kind of fleshly effulgence, not altogether so satisfactory as he doubtless intended it to be. A susceptible observer, at any rate, might have regarded it as affording very little evidence of the general benignity of soul whereof it purported to be the outward reflection. And if the observer chanced to be ill-natured, as well as acute and susceptible, he would probably suspect that the smile on the gentleman’s face was a good deal akin to the shine on his boots, and that each must have cost him and his boot-black, respectively, a good deal of hard labor to bring out and preserve them.
My dear fellow goodreaders, this was page 116 and I could take it no more. Congratulations to the steelier readers who finished this novel with their sanity intact. I decamped for the austere pages of Wikipedia where I read the Plot Summary. And ugh, what thin gruel it was. All that for this?
The DNFs come thick and fast. Will I actually finish a novel this year?
This was fiercely original and intriguing, but also boring and plotless, and even worse, convinced me that like a dim-witted person at a comedy club, This was fiercely original and intriguing, but also boring and plotless, and even worse, convinced me that like a dim-witted person at a comedy club, I just wasn’t getting it and why are all these people laughing. You get a series of episodes, like short stories, about people who you then realise are insects, so that even though they’re wearing a slinky dress and high heels, they also fly and have a proboscis and wanna suck your blood, like a literal metaphor. This novel is a Satire About Post-Soviet Russia, so maybe not surprisingly mosquitos and dung beetles feature a lot. One insect blatantly says “We’ve been sold down the river, every one of us. Along with the rockets and the fleet. They’ve sucked us dry.” Okay, that was straightforward. But there was a lot of hoho Russian humour that went over my head.
He set the glasses on the grass, filled them to the brim, and raised his own. “Whose is it?” inquired Arthur. “It’s a cocktail,” answered Archibald. “Turkmenian second group and Moscow region engineer with negative rhesus factor. Cheers!”
Insect/humans (whatever they are) says stuff like “I killed the conceptual artist in myself long ago.”
Ah well, for me it was a miss but the more esoteric Goodreaders will love it....more
There are some novels that seem to exist mainly to give the author the excuse to indulge in some classic rants, some hilarious – the wonderful “95 TheThere are some novels that seem to exist mainly to give the author the excuse to indulge in some classic rants, some hilarious – the wonderful “95 Theses 95” section in Lake Wobegon Days by Garrison Keillor and the various hair-raising direct addresses to the reader in How to Kidnap the Rich by Rahut Raina – and some horrific like the spinetingling Grand Inquisitor chapter in The Brothers Karamazov; I bet you can think of many more.
Philip Roth is rantmeister supreme, and Operation Shylock is stuffed full of them, some truly sublime in their utter offensiveness; in fact this novel is like he woke up and thought huh, I’ve become a safe cosy prize winning A list candidate for Greatest Living Novelist, I’ll show the bastards I can still rock, I’m gonna offend EVERYBODY! Just watch me!
So he starts off with the insane idea that one day, he, Philip Roth, gets a call from his cousin who lives in Jerusalem who says hey Philip, I didn’t know you were already here and he says what? No, I’m still in New York – and thus he discovers that a) there’s a lookalike running around in Jerusalem pretending to be Philip Roth; and b) this other Roth is holding a series of lectures on the exciting new concept of Diasporism.
This concept says : Jews why are you putting yourselves in danger by still living here in Israel? Now your enemies will always know where you are! Israel is the most dangerous place for you! Avoid a second Holocaust! Get back to the diaspora! Get back to Poland, Lithuania, Russia, Ukraine – they will welcome you with open arms, you’ll be so much safer there! They feel so guilty about the Holocaust!
As you can see, this is a serious jest, the irony is as thick as an elephant’s hide, you can hear Philip Roth chortling as he elaborates this lunatic idea of this lunatic double. The language he puts into the mouth of his crazy double is so inflammatory I can’t quote it.
But he is bent on being fair to everybody – all will get their chance to spew fort their hatreds! As the real Philip Roth arrives in Jerusalem to confront and denounce the fake Philip Roth, he runs into an old grad school chum George Ziad, a Palestinian American who relocated to the West Bank. George is chock full of the bile of daily life under the occupation and he gets a ten page rant in which Philip Roth allows himself to say the antisemitic Unsayable uninterrupted and at full volume. Here’s how Philip now describes his old friend :
As we drove, embittered analysis streamed forth unabated, of Jewish history, Jewish mythology, Jewish psychosis and sociology, each sentence delivered with an alarming air of intellectual wantonness, the whole a pungent ideological mulch of overstatement and lucidity, of insight and stupidity, of precise historical data and wilful historical ignorance; a loose array of observations as disjointed as it was coherent and as shallow as it was deep – the shrewd and vacuous diatribe of a man whose brain, once as good as anyone else’s, was now as much of a menace to him as the anger and loathing that, by 1988, after twenty years of the occupation and forty years of the Jewish state, had corroded everything moderate in him…by the time his ideas wormed their way through all that emotion, they had been so distorted and intensified as only barely to resemble human thought… despite the thin veneer of professorial brilliance, which gave even his most dubious and bungled ideas a certain intellectual gloss, now at the core of everything was hatred and the great disabling fantasy of revenge.
Naturally some chapters later we get the anti-antisemitic diatribe from another character :
There are antisemites who are like alcoholics who actually want to stop but don’t know how. …there are occasional antisemites who engage in nothing more than a little antisemitism as a social lubricant at parties and business lunches; moderate antisemites who can control their antisemitism and even keep it a secret when they have to; and then there are all-out antisemites, the real career haters…
I wanted to reread this in many ways appalling novel now, at this ghastly time. In some ways it’s so crazy, such a ripe slab of too-knowing too-smirky metafiction (the “real” Philip Roth gets to shag the “fake” Philip Roth’s sexy girlfriend) that many readers might perform the wall-hurl and scream No More, Please! This time round I was horrified and couldn’t look away at about half of it and thought the last third dribbled away in nonsense.
Four head-banging stars. I do not recommend this novel! It’s upsetting. ...more
The frustrated librarian within me sometimes categorises novels into categories such as Novels Which Are Really Memoirs*, Female Self-Loathing As An AThe frustrated librarian within me sometimes categorises novels into categories such as Novels Which Are Really Memoirs*, Female Self-Loathing As An Art Form** or Isolated Miserable Women Spiralling Down Down Ever Downwards***. This one easily slotted into the category Old Farts At Play which already includes
House Mother Normal by BS Johnson Old Masters by Thomas Bernhard Greybeard by Brian Aldiss A Five Year Sentence by Bernice Rubens Love in the Time of Cholera by Gabriel Garcia marquez The Old Devils by Kingsley Amis Quartet in Autumn by Barbara Pym
Muriel Spark has gleeful gruesome fun with this cast of dodderers. Early on we are at a cremation. The former boyfriend of the crematee is there :
“Madam,” said Percy, baring his sparse green teeth in a smile, “the ashes of Lisa Brooke will always be sacred to me. I desire to see them, kiss them if they are cool enough.”
And we frequently visit a ward for (less well-heeled) elderly women at a local hospital where the inhabitants are divided into the semi-gaga and the totally-gaga :
The senile cases were grouped around the television and so were less noisy than usual, but still emitting, from time to time, a variety of dental and guttural sounds
Or, later,
Some of the geriatrics were still eating or doing various things with their slice of cake.
So as you see this is a black comedy. The posh old ladies that won’t be crammed into the geriatric ward but will eventually expire in a leafy nursing home in Surrey totter about the plot, conniving with or blackmailing each other. Much sad but true humour is derived from an ancient couple who are both petrified that their 40 year old affairs will be revealed when, in fact, each is well aware of the other’s indiscretions. I wonder how many couples just like that are in the real world.
There is a terrible MacGuffin in the plot, and this lost it a few points. An anonymous man (or men) phones up these old ladies and gentlemen and informs them “Remember that you will die”. They all slightly panic and try to get the police involved. I wish I would have been around in London in 1958 and told Muriel Spark to ditch that part, it’s tiresome. The real meat of this short novel is the cringemaking you-can’t-say-that slagging off of farty upper-middle-class old relics. She is merciless. Go, Muriel! I should add that there are a few glimmers of compassion here and there.
And she can produce some lovely zingers, too :
Her words depressed him. They were like spilt sugar; however much you swept it up, some grains would keep grinding under your feet.
*******
* A Question of Upbringing, The Wallcreeper, The Adventures of Augie March, The Naked and the Dead, Voyage in the Dark… the list could go on and on, too many to list
**Grotesque by Natsuo Kirino The Piano Teacher by Elfriede Jelinek A Day Off by Storm Jameson Dept of Speculation by Jenny Offill Dietland by Sarai Walker All of Jean Rhys’ novels except Wide Sargasso Sea
***The Lonely Passion of Judith Hearne by Brian Moore Skylark by Deszo Kosztolayni The Driver’s Seat by Muriel Spark* The Life and Death of Harriet Frean by May Sinclair Mrs Palfrey at the Claremont by Elizabeth Taylor The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath The Yellow Wallpaper by Charlotte Gilman...more
Absolutely no idea what this one was all about. It wandered from amiable comedic whimsy into poetical landscapery (perfectly nice) and then into manicAbsolutely no idea what this one was all about. It wandered from amiable comedic whimsy into poetical landscapery (perfectly nice) and then into manic repetition (perfectly irritating) :
P143 :
It’s a shame to wrong the world
What are you, a worldly person or one who wrongs the world?
Aren’t you someone who wrongs the world?
Sometimes we confuse the petty things of the world with wrongs to the world.
(Then for a whole page, nothing about wronging the world. But then )
P145
Earth not yet contaminated by the world’s wrongs, the wrongs that take place on the earth
Yes, my friend, the world has been wronged
P146
The world has been wronged
He’s suffering the pain of the wronged world
P147
And he’s suffering the pain of the wronged world
The world has been badly wronged
(Building up to the final crescendo)
P148
Our friend knows that we’re suffering the pain of the wronged world
The world is big and beautiful but it has been badly wronged
Everyone suffers each for himself, but not for the world that has been wronged
I am writing down the pains of the wronged world
It doesn’t stop there, but I will spare you the wronged worlds on page 149 (three times) and 150 (twice). There is clearly something going on here which went whizzing over my head. This novel is supposed to be in one sense a cryptic covert criticism of Mussolini’s Fascist regime, but I did not get any of that, and I did not get what all this strange repetition was for. So I am thinking that I am not the right reader of this oddball novel. But it is in 1001 Books you Should Read Because We Say So...more
A very simple very Scottish post-apocalypse story that mostly reads like a How-To guide for surviving in the wild. First, as soon as you realise socieA very simple very Scottish post-apocalypse story that mostly reads like a How-To guide for surviving in the wild. First, as soon as you realise society is about to collapse, stock up on provisions :
Six pounds of tea, a pound of coffee as an occasional luxury. A stone of salt butter in an earthenware jar. A stone of split peas…six tins of fruit, a box of water biscuits, two dozen fresh eggs (p26)
They flee from town into the midst of the beautiful highlands where the deer are plentiful and Hugh just has to saunter forth and bag a stag before his wife Terry has made the tea. He in continually making improvements as he goes along :
When I skin this beast you must make a wrist-strap for me of its skin to carry bullets. You know, a piece of hide about two inches broad to fasten round my wrist with slits cut in it so that I can carry bullets in a handy way.
Ah yes – vegetarians might not like this story so well, beasts are being shot and butchered every other page, this couple appear to be total meatarians. The idea of going a day when they do not chew the haunch of an animal never occurs to them. So we have a lot of this kind of thing :
I gralloched the hind and severed her backbone. When the forequarters were happed with stones to keep them safe from carrion beasts and birds I got the hindquarters over my head, with a haunch on each side of my neck and the legs in my hands. Staggering, tripping, reeling, I blundered home.
Good Lord, it's like something from American Psycho.
1936
This short strong very compelling and gorgeously written book was published in 1936 and set in 1944. Another war was coming by 1936, this was well-known, and this novel is about what happens when it comes. But hold on, there’s something strange about this. Wild Harbour reads like a Scottish Walking Dead minus zombies – all of society immediately collapses and you better get yourself in survivalist mode or die. But this did not happen during 1914, the first world war. Why would society collapse in the second world war? It’s not a story about plausible eco-catastrophe, like The Death of Grass which I recently read, and it’s not a post-nuclear collapse – the reason why all of society suddenly falls apart is never explained.
Which gives the novel the aspect of being a parable; you can only survive away from society for so long, eventually you can’t stay away in your Crusoe idyll, but when you return you’ll wish you hadn’t. No one can live on love (and boiled deer) alone. Or something. Another fable-like element is that at no time in the 6 month period of the story does either Hugh or Terry express any concern for their parents, their families or their friends. This is quite odd. Mind you, the idea of Hugh faithfully writing all this stuff down in a journal, replete with pages of dialogue, while sitting in his cave after a hard day’s gralloching is fanciful too. But that’s a convention of all literature.
LOVE STORIES
Some readers will experience this book not as an apocalypse fable but as two love stories – the love of the natural world
It was a warm drowsy day; the heat of the yellowing sun, the sound of bumble-bees, the smell of heather in flower, lulled and drugged our senses half to sleep save our ears that harkened through the hours for sounds that did not come.
And even more the love of Hugh for his wife Terry
I have often tried many a time to keep my vexations secret and my unhappiness hid, but she finds them out, and I am glad when I am discovered.
These are both very intense almost enraptured relationships.
DOES IT DESERVE TO BE IN THE 1001 BOOKS YOU MUST READ BEFORE NEXT THURSDAY LIST?
Yes, a short sharp and very meaty Scotapocalpyse....more
- Don’t I remember you said you were done with Muriel Spark? In fact, wait… I have the quote right here : "I’ve done with Muriel Sparks. She’s bonkers- Don’t I remember you said you were done with Muriel Spark? In fact, wait… I have the quote right here : "I’ve done with Muriel Sparks. She’s bonkers".
- I don’t deny it.
- So? Now you are reading her biography and you have read this one which is the 5th for you…. You will not win any awards for consistency here.
- Well, I guess it might be that some authors are like an itch you can’t scratch in the middle of your back.
- Or it may be that you can’t resist a big 700 page literary biography and then you get dragged into the whole just one more Pringle thing.
- Or that. Also there’s a religious thing. She started as a straightforward agnostic then converted to Catholicism in her late thirties. This is strange, she seems like a very brainy person. I wanted to know more about that.
- So what’s the deal with this one?
- First novel written age 38, very late to start novel writing, and she is writing a story featuring herself (“Caroline”) living her own exact life in which she hears strange unearthly voices preceded by the clatter of a typewriter, and the voices say out loud the description of what just happened, so she realises she is a character in a novel (The Comforters). The voice is that of Muriel the Author talking to Muriel the Character, both of them being versions of Muriel the Real Person.
- So metafiction then.
- Lightly applied metafiction, yes. On page 93 she complains loudly about to this Author. She’s just converted to a big religion but she doesn’t want her thoughts and actions controlled or influenced by “some unknown possibly sinister being”. She says “I intend to subject him to reason.” And without apparently any irony she adds “I happen to be a Christian”. Christians being people who never get influenced by an arbitrary unknowable absolute power.
- Enough of the snarky comments, decent law abiding Christians could be reading this review you know.
- Are you implying there might be indecent outlaw Christians somewhere?
- (Eyeroll). I think we should wrap this review up now, don’t you? Speaking personally, I’m not all that interested in Muriel Spark. I saw the movie, it was okay. I love Maggie Smith.
- Oh well, all right. As in other novels by this oddball author, she gets hold of a great idea and futzes around with it and doesn’t get all the fun out of the thing. I would have loved to have a great knock down drag out row between the character and the author, for instance. And some of the characters were silly. But I liked the graceful slightly boggling ending.
"Afternoon, m'lady - dust tha fancy a quick un over yon five barred gate?"
"Oh you earthy gamekeepers, well I don't know... oh alright... but only if y"Afternoon, m'lady - dust tha fancy a quick un over yon five barred gate?"
"Oh you earthy gamekeepers, well I don't know... oh alright... but only if you mention my private parts in a rough yet tender manner and clasp them enthusiastically betwixt your craggy extremities."
Lord Chatterley, from a mullioned window: "Grr, if I wasn't just a symbol of the impotent yet deadening power of the English aristocracy I'd whip that bounder to within an inch of an orgasm."
40 years later :
Barrister in full periwig : "Is this a book you would want your wife or your servant to read?"
Jury : "Well, it's not one of his best, that's for sure, but it isn't bad, crudely propagandistic but it does trenchantly place its finger on a particular moment in the shift of class consciousness in Britain."
The blurb says that the nasty old spinster Cousin Bette goes on a mission to destroy her supercilious condescending family, so I though well, that souThe blurb says that the nasty old spinster Cousin Bette goes on a mission to destroy her supercilious condescending family, so I though well, that sounds fun!
It also says “Cousin Bette is a book in which Balzac is most characteristically and triumphantly himself”. That turned out to be not so much fun because Balzac is an insufferable know it all who obsesses about a) people’s income; b) married men spending fortunes on their various mistresses, some of whom are more than somewhat young looking; and c) the quality of interior furnishing. Well you might say this applies to most authors – they are knowitalls about the world they’re writing about, and they do love to describe rooms and furniture, especially in the olden days because due to a lack of tv nobody knew what anything looked like.
When I checked my review of the only other Balzac I read – Old Goriot – I see it began very badly and tediously and then warmed up and I liked it in the end. But after dozens and dozens of pages of Cousin Bette he was still describing jewelery and mistresses and how if you could flash enough cash you could get yourself any pretty woman you cared to in France in the 1830s. Yourself being a man, of course.
So this is going to be all about hypocrisy and double standards and the awfulness of the rich and the even more awfulness of the many people trying to become rich or trying to pretend they’re still rich. I kind of ran out of patience before the plot got going. This book got to feel like medicine for an ailment I didn't have.
I hope Cousin Bette and her monobrow utterly wrecked this ghastly family and she shouldn’t have stopped there either. She should have formed a group of ninja guerrilla spinsters who could bring down all these lofty misstresstaking grandees with well-aimed poison darts. But I will never know.
As Elvis said
A little less conversation, a little more action, please All this aggravation ain't satisfactioning me
My mission: the destruction of the last vestigial traces of traditional manhood in the race in order to realign the sexes, thus reducing population whMy mission: the destruction of the last vestigial traces of traditional manhood in the race in order to realign the sexes, thus reducing population while increasing human happiness and preparing for its next stage
What the what? What was that again, Myra? What next stage?
There is only the logic of a madperson in this novel: a gay author* writes a novel about a gay man who becomes a transsexual woman and who then rapes a straight man (she is the new American woman who uses men the way they once used women) which has the effect of filling, as it were, the straight man with rage so that he transforms from a gentle sex partner into a man who inflicts terrible violence on his current girlfriend, much to her great joy, as she loves the kind of rough sex that puts her in hospital. The modern reader’s head might be exploding at this point.
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There is a swingers party featuring members of a band called The Four Skins (of which there are five members, and sometimes that’s the level of humour here).**
This outrageous for 1968 and even more outrageous for 2023 novel is strewn with what-did-she-just-say run-that-by-me-again moments*** as Myra flings theories, dreams, schemes, insults****, denunciations and diatribes to the right and to the left, usually invoking references to 1940s movies and unremembered stars, as she rampages her way through the farcical mostly cringe-making plot.
As well as being grotesquely offensive, Gore Vidal is very funny. There’s a character called Uncle Buck who dictates various memos-to-self throughout, and he is hilarious. Would have loved more of him.
Now can I in all conscience recommend this rancid, dyspeptic, sly, lofty, over-educated, phallocentric satiroparodic jeux d’esprit?
I have to say : approach with extreme caution.
NOTES
1) SOMETHING I LEARNED
Until the Forties, only the upper or educated classes were circumcised in America. The real people were spared this humiliation. But during the affluent postwar years the operation became standard procedure, making money for doctors as well as allowing the American mother to mutilate her son in order that he might never forget her early power over him.
2) TWO LITERARY PREDECESSORS
Orlando (1928) – Virginia Woolf’s transgender classic; GV naturally loved Orlando but one can only imagine with a shudder what Mrs Woolf would have said about Myra Breckinridge.
Lolita (1955) – another surprise hit novel about sex written by a highbrow about which I wonder if most of the millions of copies sold were abandoned halfway. I mean, was this really what the eager purchasers of Myra Breckinridge were after? - He promptly took me in goatish arms, rammed his soft acorn against my pudendum, and bit my ear.
*****
*GV would have complained (imperiously, majestically) about this; he rejected the notion that there was such a thing as a gay person – he thought that there were only gay acts.
**I wonder if GV noted the arrival of English punk band The 4-Skins in 1982; and likewise wonder if the 4-skins ever read Myra Breckinridge
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***Such as her observation that young men in the 1960s are quite totalitarian-minded, even for Americans, and I am convinced that any attractive television personality who wanted to become our dictator would have their full support. !!! Or how about : in every American there is a Boston Strangler longing to break a neck during orgasm. Ours is a violent race.
****Not even I can create a fictional character as one-dimensional as the average reader...more
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