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gullevek's review
4.0
I have no idea if I even understood what was going on in this book, but I enjoyed it. It was truly strange and abstract and sometimes hard to follow, but it was great.
There is not much more to say, just that this is a book very hard to recommend. If you enjoyed books like Catch 22 or Gravity Rainbow, then yeah, this could be worth reading, else, no.
There is not much more to say, just that this is a book very hard to recommend. If you enjoyed books like Catch 22 or Gravity Rainbow, then yeah, this could be worth reading, else, no.
steeluloid's review
1.0
A third of the way in I was wanting to rip the pages from this book and throw it in the trash.
Two thirds of the way in I was fantasizing about burning it in the hearth and uploading the video to Youtube.
This book is out of print, and not available digitally, which means I might make it my mission to buy and destroy every remaining copy.
This is the work of a madman, madam. I'm mad. and a man. and Tarmacadamantium. adam rantium. ranting. panting. A dam waste of my Pentium. I'm adamant at that (Its not bloody difficult, Brain).
Can I say it's unintelligible drivel? Only in the same way that I could say that about the Times Crossword. Both are supposedly very clever, and I understand neither. Much like the news read by Stanley Unwin.
I started and abandoned this book in 1987. So I thought I'd give it another go.
Ah, the wisdom of youth. I was smarter at 18 than I am today; twenty summer evenings lost in this bottomless pit.
But I didn't let it beat me. I read it to the last and now it sits by my lavatory in case I ever run short of Andrex.
Two thirds of the way in I was fantasizing about burning it in the hearth and uploading the video to Youtube.
This book is out of print, and not available digitally, which means I might make it my mission to buy and destroy every remaining copy.
This is the work of a madman, madam. I'm mad. and a man. and Tarmacadamantium. adam rantium. ranting. panting. A dam waste of my Pentium. I'm adamant at that (Its not bloody difficult, Brain).
Can I say it's unintelligible drivel? Only in the same way that I could say that about the Times Crossword. Both are supposedly very clever, and I understand neither. Much like the news read by Stanley Unwin.
I started and abandoned this book in 1987. So I thought I'd give it another go.
Ah, the wisdom of youth. I was smarter at 18 than I am today; twenty summer evenings lost in this bottomless pit.
But I didn't let it beat me. I read it to the last and now it sits by my lavatory in case I ever run short of Andrex.
flying_monkey's review
5.0
Barefoot in the Head is one of the finest things to emerge from the wreckage of the 1960s.
It is not by any means an easy read, indeed it is far more experimental in forms and style that many more feted non-sf avant-garde works. The prose and poems (some of which individually are really fine pieces of work) and songs and at times simply patterns of letters that compose the work are fragmentary and fractured - the ravings of minds changed beyond recognition by mind-altering psychotropic weapons. Yet somehow it makes sense: the wrong words start to mean something, you start to establish a vocabulary from random or mistaken strings of words and, although how I am not quite sure, you can even get a deep sense of story and character through all the confusion. At times you just have to sit back with a wry smile and know that Aldiss deserves so much more than to be continually ignored by the snobbish mainstream critics: this guy is a British national treasure, and one of the great writers of the late Twentieth Century in English. The degree of sheer literary craft involved in this work is quite remarkable.
This is a book about culture and religion and drugs and technology and war and so much more: as such it stands with Burroughs' Naked Lunch. Dick's A Scanner Darkly and Delaney's Dhalgren as monuments to the ambiguity of the breakdown of both mind and order and dark side of pure freedom. But somehow it is more adventurous and more daring than any of these works.
It is not by any means an easy read, indeed it is far more experimental in forms and style that many more feted non-sf avant-garde works. The prose and poems (some of which individually are really fine pieces of work) and songs and at times simply patterns of letters that compose the work are fragmentary and fractured - the ravings of minds changed beyond recognition by mind-altering psychotropic weapons. Yet somehow it makes sense: the wrong words start to mean something, you start to establish a vocabulary from random or mistaken strings of words and, although how I am not quite sure, you can even get a deep sense of story and character through all the confusion. At times you just have to sit back with a wry smile and know that Aldiss deserves so much more than to be continually ignored by the snobbish mainstream critics: this guy is a British national treasure, and one of the great writers of the late Twentieth Century in English. The degree of sheer literary craft involved in this work is quite remarkable.
This is a book about culture and religion and drugs and technology and war and so much more: as such it stands with Burroughs' Naked Lunch. Dick's A Scanner Darkly and Delaney's Dhalgren as monuments to the ambiguity of the breakdown of both mind and order and dark side of pure freedom. But somehow it is more adventurous and more daring than any of these works.
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