Review from a Transgressive Fiction Fan
So listen. Look. I am a READER, right? I mean, I read all the time, everywhere, every day, a book a week. But most of the time the book I’m reading is a dull throb beneath my fingers, a soft hum behind my eyes, a lovely way to spend a bit of time in between things as I meander through my life. You know? It’s something I adore, but softly, passively, and often forgetfully—very nice while it’s happening, but flitting away quickly after I’m on to the next.
And then sometimes there is a book that is more like a red hot fucking coal, a thrum nearly audible whenever I’m close to it, a magnetic pull that stops me doing anything else and zings me back so strongly that I just want to bury myself in its tinnitus at all times—five minutes in line a the bank, two minutes in the elevator, thirty seconds while my coffee date checks her email—gorging myself with sentences and paragraphs until the whole world recedes and shrivels into flat black-and-white nothing.
This, this, this is one of those books. It’s a book that bracingly reaffirms my faith in literature, making me endlessly astonished by its power and poise and brilliance. I know I am constantly chided for hyperbole, but this is truly one of the greatest books I’ve ever read.
“Insightful” Review from a Mainstream Reader
My generosity overfloweth today, in granting this absurd waste of time 1 full star.
In my defence for having read 370 pages of this 800+ page tome (tomb?) I need to admit I was convalescing post-surgery and was tied to a bed, so I couldn’t get up and throw it out the window … or into the blaze of a wood stove. More’s the pity. Absurdly at one particular 2 a.m. reading, I thought I could just eat the pages and thus destroy at least one copy of this waste of good paper.