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shadowsmoon's review
2.0
Hmm I so wanted this to be better but it just irritated me mostly. There were some lovely passages of stream of consciousness but overall it left me feeling rather disappointed. :(
dumbmaddie's review
dark
emotional
sad
medium-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? Character
- Strong character development? No
- Loveable characters? No
- Diverse cast of characters? No
- Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes
2.75
arirang's review
2.0
"I had this vision of a book in which I would record my total experience, and I knew how it should sound: with all the tones that no one ever admires, the Gruesome, Tender, Needy, Sleazy, Boring, the Lurid and the Cute. In such tones I would tell me kawaii tale"
My 3rd book from the Goldsmiths shortlist, and as with Magnus Mills, an author whose books I have had issues with in the past.
Thirlwell draws knowledgeably on a wide range of very worthy influences, particularly from continental Europe (Gombrowicz, Proust, Doestevsky, Hamsun, Kundera etc) but doesn't live up to their standards. He can come across as a poor imitation of Milan Kundera, although, to be fair, one sanctioned by the great man himself.
And I'm clearly not alone in my doubts. Of the 930 books on my Goodreads' shelves, only 10 have a worse average rating from Goodreads readers than Lurid and Cute's (2.79 at the time of writing), [and for 4 of the other 10 I'm the only reviewer]. Albeit dividing opinion isn't necessarily a bad thing as last year's Booker and Goldsmiths shortlisted J proves - almost as poor a rating, but one of my, as well as two distinguished juries', books of 2014.
Enough of my preconceptions - would this novel prove the pleasent surprise that Magnus Mills's did?
Lurid this novel most definitely is - e.g. a drug fuelled orgy scene followed by a visit to a massage parlour - but cute? More a case of irritating. Actually the full quote in the novel from which the title is taken is much more representative of the tone of the book, but presumably the title "Gruesome, Tender, Needy, Sleazy, Boring, Lurid & Cute.” was rejected by the publishers as less commercial.
It's not that Thirlwell is a bad writer. It's just that he, rather deliberately, even, writes provocatively bad books.
The narrator's tale is packed with trite 'witticisms' - describing a painting he looked at upside down: ("Jesus was standing on his halo, beside a very bright Madonna - I mean the religious kind, not the disco version") and largely clunky similes ("fate was all around me like the crimping on a beer-bottle top.").
Yes that is the narrator's, not Thirlwell's voice, but it's the voice to which the reader is forced to listen. Thirlwell himself refers to his style as 'ruthless levity', and it reminded me of Joshua Ferris's dreadful To Rise Again At a Decent Hour from the 2014 Booker shortlist. And turning to the back of the book, what do I find? A tribute to this novel's 'satisfying ironies and verbal dexterity' from none other than Ferris himself.
And 'verbal dexterity' isn't even accurate - if anthing Thirlwell has deliberately chosen to make the narrator's voice ineloquent, with sentences such as "The only thing that's made me unlike other people is that me I think much more."
He knows the narrator is unlikeable and even has him, while rebuking himself, implicitly rebuke the reader at one point "I'm aware that the entire history of art is about removing the likeable from the picture, it's only the philistine spectators like Nelson who say: Jeez, there was no one in the movie you'd want to like hang out with"
Thirlwell, having found the narrator's voice, dropped his previous plan to give the narrator a name (which had been intended to distance the narrator and author) and even changed the description of the character to physically resemble himself (the narrator's wife tells him his problems are "psychosemetic") , deliberately increasing the temptation to identify author and narrator.
The text of the story is broken up every few pages by annoying bold sub-headings, designed to tell the story in miniature: e.g. the first chapter (24 pages) "in which our hero wakes up", "to discover his transformation", "whose reality he tries to doubt", "with blood all over the picture", "which creates small traps and impasses", "in the manner of many catastrophic myths", "but nevertheless he does his best" & disappears from the bloody scene" - complete with lack of punctuation. They are Kunderaesque except Milan does it much better and Tom McCarthy uses a similar approach in Satin Island, complete with digital numbering, but again more effectively.
The setting is a mishmash ("Mescal diners", "Strange pets, not quite possums or small lemurs but almost", "In every garden people hung these elegant paper lanterns", "People filling the streets with their cortados and their umbrellas", "the Cricket stadium", "Koalas or pigeons were playing in the jacaranda trees"), per Thirlwell himself 'a non- or impossible place', intended to represent global suburbia ("when you travel to any city of your choice you can find yourself at home, just as long as you get out far enough, not too far but just enough" - which the narrator seems to see as a simile for marriage). Artistically a valid approach, but it felt that A Little Life did it better, and again it seems designed primarily to provoke.
The narrator suffers, again deliberately, from a gap between his perception of himself as a deep thinker and the reality of his observations:
"In my impressions of the world I am super-subtle. Were I ever to be a super-hero, I would be a super-hero of thinking"
MY MOTHER
Let's not try to analyse everything to death, shall we. Just this once
ME
But what else can I do?"
Thirlwell takes the epigraph for his novel from Hamsun's Hunger, and the narrator makes a clear suggestion that his tale is the 21st Century equivalent of this and Dostoevsky's Notes from the Underground:
"Maybe in some far off century if you wanted to reinvent the social contract, you would have done it with more squalor, living underground in isolation, and losing yourselves in crazy monologues and financial worry and hunger, but in this very bright time it also seemed that you could do it more softly - just in this desire to create a more adventerous existence: with friendships, love affairs, extra or extended families."
Indeed one suspects Thirlwell sees the novel equally as a 21st century update of The Unbearable Lightness of Being. But this isn't another Kundera - for all the similarities, it couldn't be further from the lyricism of his prose. To give more contemporary references from the Booker and Goldsmiths awards, it's instead a combination of the worst of Satin Island, Little Life and To Rise at a Decent Hour
Overall, I can, just, understand why the Goldsmith Jury chose this for their shortlist, and I can see what Thirlwell was trying, if failing, to do (especially helped by the following interview in the excellent Paris Review http://www.theparisreview.org/blog/2015/05/29/ruthless-levity-an-interview-with-adam-thirlwell/), but the fact remains that it was neither an enjoyable nor an enlightening book to read.
My 3rd book from the Goldsmiths shortlist, and as with Magnus Mills, an author whose books I have had issues with in the past.
Thirlwell draws knowledgeably on a wide range of very worthy influences, particularly from continental Europe (Gombrowicz, Proust, Doestevsky, Hamsun, Kundera etc) but doesn't live up to their standards. He can come across as a poor imitation of Milan Kundera, although, to be fair, one sanctioned by the great man himself.
And I'm clearly not alone in my doubts. Of the 930 books on my Goodreads' shelves, only 10 have a worse average rating from Goodreads readers than Lurid and Cute's (2.79 at the time of writing), [and for 4 of the other 10 I'm the only reviewer]. Albeit dividing opinion isn't necessarily a bad thing as last year's Booker and Goldsmiths shortlisted J proves - almost as poor a rating, but one of my, as well as two distinguished juries', books of 2014.
Enough of my preconceptions - would this novel prove the pleasent surprise that Magnus Mills's did?
Lurid this novel most definitely is - e.g. a drug fuelled orgy scene followed by a visit to a massage parlour - but cute? More a case of irritating. Actually the full quote in the novel from which the title is taken is much more representative of the tone of the book, but presumably the title "Gruesome, Tender, Needy, Sleazy, Boring, Lurid & Cute.” was rejected by the publishers as less commercial.
It's not that Thirlwell is a bad writer. It's just that he, rather deliberately, even, writes provocatively bad books.
The narrator's tale is packed with trite 'witticisms' - describing a painting he looked at upside down: ("Jesus was standing on his halo, beside a very bright Madonna - I mean the religious kind, not the disco version") and largely clunky similes ("fate was all around me like the crimping on a beer-bottle top.").
Yes that is the narrator's, not Thirlwell's voice, but it's the voice to which the reader is forced to listen. Thirlwell himself refers to his style as 'ruthless levity', and it reminded me of Joshua Ferris's dreadful To Rise Again At a Decent Hour from the 2014 Booker shortlist. And turning to the back of the book, what do I find? A tribute to this novel's 'satisfying ironies and verbal dexterity' from none other than Ferris himself.
And 'verbal dexterity' isn't even accurate - if anthing Thirlwell has deliberately chosen to make the narrator's voice ineloquent, with sentences such as "The only thing that's made me unlike other people is that me I think much more."
He knows the narrator is unlikeable and even has him, while rebuking himself, implicitly rebuke the reader at one point "I'm aware that the entire history of art is about removing the likeable from the picture, it's only the philistine spectators like Nelson who say: Jeez, there was no one in the movie you'd want to like hang out with"
Thirlwell, having found the narrator's voice, dropped his previous plan to give the narrator a name (which had been intended to distance the narrator and author) and even changed the description of the character to physically resemble himself (the narrator's wife tells him his problems are "psychosemetic") , deliberately increasing the temptation to identify author and narrator.
The text of the story is broken up every few pages by annoying bold sub-headings, designed to tell the story in miniature: e.g. the first chapter (24 pages) "in which our hero wakes up", "to discover his transformation", "whose reality he tries to doubt", "with blood all over the picture", "which creates small traps and impasses", "in the manner of many catastrophic myths", "but nevertheless he does his best" & disappears from the bloody scene" - complete with lack of punctuation. They are Kunderaesque except Milan does it much better and Tom McCarthy uses a similar approach in Satin Island, complete with digital numbering, but again more effectively.
The setting is a mishmash ("Mescal diners", "Strange pets, not quite possums or small lemurs but almost", "In every garden people hung these elegant paper lanterns", "People filling the streets with their cortados and their umbrellas", "the Cricket stadium", "Koalas or pigeons were playing in the jacaranda trees"), per Thirlwell himself 'a non- or impossible place', intended to represent global suburbia ("when you travel to any city of your choice you can find yourself at home, just as long as you get out far enough, not too far but just enough" - which the narrator seems to see as a simile for marriage). Artistically a valid approach, but it felt that A Little Life did it better, and again it seems designed primarily to provoke.
The narrator suffers, again deliberately, from a gap between his perception of himself as a deep thinker and the reality of his observations:
"In my impressions of the world I am super-subtle. Were I ever to be a super-hero, I would be a super-hero of thinking"
MY MOTHER
Let's not try to analyse everything to death, shall we. Just this once
ME
But what else can I do?"
Thirlwell takes the epigraph for his novel from Hamsun's Hunger, and the narrator makes a clear suggestion that his tale is the 21st Century equivalent of this and Dostoevsky's Notes from the Underground:
"Maybe in some far off century if you wanted to reinvent the social contract, you would have done it with more squalor, living underground in isolation, and losing yourselves in crazy monologues and financial worry and hunger, but in this very bright time it also seemed that you could do it more softly - just in this desire to create a more adventerous existence: with friendships, love affairs, extra or extended families."
Indeed one suspects Thirlwell sees the novel equally as a 21st century update of The Unbearable Lightness of Being. But this isn't another Kundera - for all the similarities, it couldn't be further from the lyricism of his prose. To give more contemporary references from the Booker and Goldsmiths awards, it's instead a combination of the worst of Satin Island, Little Life and To Rise at a Decent Hour
Overall, I can, just, understand why the Goldsmith Jury chose this for their shortlist, and I can see what Thirlwell was trying, if failing, to do (especially helped by the following interview in the excellent Paris Review http://www.theparisreview.org/blog/2015/05/29/ruthless-levity-an-interview-with-adam-thirlwell/), but the fact remains that it was neither an enjoyable nor an enlightening book to read.
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