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A review by aneides
And the Ass Saw the Angel by Nick Cave
3.0
It's taken a fucking pandemic for me to finally get into this horrible, horrible book. I have tried several times over the last six years but have been unable to get past the first dozen or fewer pages. To be clear, the subject matter/content is horrible--a dark and twisted world full of omens and prophecies and scary-ass religious fanatics, torture and murder of both humans and animals, a swamp, and nearly every kind of ugliness one can imagine. The writing, however, is good, even poetic, with a few glaring problems.
This book is a muddle... spending much of its time inside the head of a mute young man, abused by his parents and the community at large, with any number of delusions. Complete with sizable gaps in his memory, Euchrid may be the quintessential unreliable narrator. There was a lot of imagery and symbolism that I recognized as Biblical without any confidence that I was understanding its full significance... I was in many cases unable to determine if an event/character was echoing a Bible story/character or, rather, inverting its meaning. In fact, ATASTA sort of reminded me of Cormac McCarthy's Outer Dark which appears to have been written as an inverse nativity. Perhaps only the formerly hyperreligious can fully understand and appreciate the depraved genius of this work. The glaring problems add to the muddle, perhaps in ways unintended by the author.
THE GLARING PROBLEMS:
1) Poor conformity to the setting the author has chosen.
The book is set in the southeastern US (unspecified exactly where, although in sugarcane country, so... Louisiana or Florida would be the best candidates) but word choices of the (omniscient?) 3rd person narrator and characters are from Cave's own Australian/British lexicon rather than the American terms that surely would have been used. (I have less of a problem with the Britishy spellings, although it does seem a little strange for an American character to be speaking in British spellings. Is a that ridiculous thing to be hung up on? Probably.) He mentions cane toads more than once, which, after doing some small amount of internet research I have concluded is possible but unlikely, cane toads having been introduced but having not had a significant presence in North America--and then, only in a small part of southern Florida--until the 1950s. Perhaps Cave thought the amphibian scourge of the Australian continent originated in southeastern North America rather than coming from adjacent regions (the Caribbean, Mesoamerica.) Cave also mentions hills... which, from what I understand, are not really a feature of the US's sugarcane country. I mean, Florida may as well have been ironed. Also, almost no mention of non-white people, despite being set in the rural South. For a book that tries to present as Southern Gothic, it seemed odd to not have some racially based undercurrent, at least in the parts not narrated by Euchrid. This omission may or may not have been deliberate but the author being a non-American makes me wonder. Every other form of cruelty is presented in this book, why not the racial bigotry (possibly violence--and in this book, surely violence) that would have been there? It is so obvious an omission that I suspect it was deliberate, but I'm still not sure what is achieved. I mean, this book was a veritable cruelty buffet.
2) Euchrid's use of language
The protagonist, Euchrid, is mute, but when he narrates (one presumes his narration to be an internal dying declaration), he narrates very articulately in something of a Southern accent (ah, mah, unnerwear). People don't have accents in their thoughts, and Euchrid, being mute, is not speaking. We learn that Euchrid is at least somewhat literate and should know how to spell these simple words. We figure he might be a genius or perhaps his gift of language is divine (because he wouldn't have been sent to school and we can't imagine his hillbilly parents taking the time to educate him)... in which case wouldn't God/Satan have given him the proper spellings of common words along with the understanding of all these esoteric concepts? Even Foghorn Leghorn can spell "I" and "my," and he's a barely literate rooster.
Final comment is that this book felt a little self-indulgent but I am at a loss to explain why it should be any more so than any other literary novel. Maybe anything so steeped in religion would seem this way to me. Maybe just the sheer quantity of horrible material was gratuitous. Or maybe Euchrid himself is the self-indulgent aspect, wreaking vengeance after all his suffering. I might think about this some more, but it isn't likely. I'd like to get this black monster of a novel out of my mind as quickly as possible... by reading about a smallpox epidemic, I think.
This book is a muddle... spending much of its time inside the head of a mute young man, abused by his parents and the community at large, with any number of delusions. Complete with sizable gaps in his memory, Euchrid may be the quintessential unreliable narrator. There was a lot of imagery and symbolism that I recognized as Biblical without any confidence that I was understanding its full significance... I was in many cases unable to determine if an event/character was echoing a Bible story/character or, rather, inverting its meaning. In fact, ATASTA sort of reminded me of Cormac McCarthy's Outer Dark which appears to have been written as an inverse nativity. Perhaps only the formerly hyperreligious can fully understand and appreciate the depraved genius of this work. The glaring problems add to the muddle, perhaps in ways unintended by the author.
THE GLARING PROBLEMS:
1) Poor conformity to the setting the author has chosen.
The book is set in the southeastern US (unspecified exactly where, although in sugarcane country, so... Louisiana or Florida would be the best candidates) but word choices of the (omniscient?) 3rd person narrator and characters are from Cave's own Australian/British lexicon rather than the American terms that surely would have been used. (I have less of a problem with the Britishy spellings, although it does seem a little strange for an American character to be speaking in British spellings. Is a that ridiculous thing to be hung up on? Probably.) He mentions cane toads more than once, which, after doing some small amount of internet research I have concluded is possible but unlikely, cane toads having been introduced but having not had a significant presence in North America--and then, only in a small part of southern Florida--until the 1950s. Perhaps Cave thought the amphibian scourge of the Australian continent originated in southeastern North America rather than coming from adjacent regions (the Caribbean, Mesoamerica.) Cave also mentions hills... which, from what I understand, are not really a feature of the US's sugarcane country. I mean, Florida may as well have been ironed. Also, almost no mention of non-white people, despite being set in the rural South. For a book that tries to present as Southern Gothic, it seemed odd to not have some racially based undercurrent, at least in the parts not narrated by Euchrid. This omission may or may not have been deliberate but the author being a non-American makes me wonder. Every other form of cruelty is presented in this book, why not the racial bigotry (possibly violence--and in this book, surely violence) that would have been there? It is so obvious an omission that I suspect it was deliberate, but I'm still not sure what is achieved. I mean, this book was a veritable cruelty buffet.
2) Euchrid's use of language
The protagonist, Euchrid, is mute, but when he narrates (one presumes his narration to be an internal dying declaration), he narrates very articulately in something of a Southern accent (ah, mah, unnerwear). People don't have accents in their thoughts, and Euchrid, being mute, is not speaking. We learn that Euchrid is at least somewhat literate and should know how to spell these simple words. We figure he might be a genius or perhaps his gift of language is divine (because he wouldn't have been sent to school and we can't imagine his hillbilly parents taking the time to educate him)... in which case wouldn't God/Satan have given him the proper spellings of common words along with the understanding of all these esoteric concepts? Even Foghorn Leghorn can spell "I" and "my," and he's a barely literate rooster.
Final comment is that this book felt a little self-indulgent but I am at a loss to explain why it should be any more so than any other literary novel. Maybe anything so steeped in religion would seem this way to me. Maybe just the sheer quantity of horrible material was gratuitous. Or maybe Euchrid himself is the self-indulgent aspect, wreaking vengeance after all his suffering. I might think about this some more, but it isn't likely. I'd like to get this black monster of a novel out of my mind as quickly as possible... by reading about a smallpox epidemic, I think.