Johanna Hedva

Another boring book about insipid, privileged people written by a pretty decent US writer. It seems young US writers are so caught up in their blinkered ideology while being anesthetized by their wealth and privilege, that they have lost sight of reality.

If you can afford to get yourself into a quarter million dollars of debt, and live between Berlin and Los Angeles (as does the main character, and it seems the author themself) you are privileged, no matter how you “identify”. Sure you aren’t the 1% characters, each of whom you disdainfully call “white” girls (are you sure you”re not misgendering them, missy), but you’re better off than 99% of the rest of humanity. Hence your so-called “artistic suffering” comes off petty and whiney, best not put on paper, because it makes you sound pretentious.

I want the couple hours I invested in this book back, so recommending you don’t waste your time. If you want to read a really great, semi-autobiographical first novel about becoming a young person becoming a transgressive artist, read Joyce’s Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man.… (mer)

I was so pleased by Salt Is For Curing as my first book from Sator Press that I decided to try another, and ended up selecting On Hell. I did not know what I was getting into.

At first I wasn't sure that I was going to finish this book because it is just so vulgar. And I don't just mean "bad words" (though it is pretty much wall-to-wall swears) but in the full sense of the word -- making coarse and explicit reference to sex and bodily functions at all times. This book starts out as a series of interviews where we read only the interviewee's responses -- and he is someone who is brimming over with a simmering rage at the world, at the government, at the prison-industrial complex. The language is a wall thrown up as defense that takes a bit to see through -- that Rafael is a man so fed up and so resistant to spending another moment in this hell that he is turning himself into a modern Icarus.

So many thoughts on body hacking/modification, privilege, prison, escape. A challenging novel, but never a boring one.… (mer)