Take a photo of a barcode or cover
A review by onerodeahorse
Sissy by Ben Borek
3.0
Sissy works in London. He's timid and shy. He lives with his mother and at night he crawls inside her womb (where he has a desk, wi-fi, a computer) and each morning is literally re-birthed. Yes, you read that correctly. In the evenings, from his computer, he logs onto the Second Earth videogame and plays a mean gangster called Neno Brown. Feeling lonely, he decides to try and find love on the Slavic Beauties website.
Meanwhile, a group of leftist Polish intellectuals in London constitute the main sub-plots. One of them, Wassily, is attempting to find and take back to Poland the feet of several dead Polish ex-servicemen, each of whom had seven toes, so that he can bury and repatriate the feet. Another of the group embarks on an art project to ensnare unsuspecting men and record their sexual adventures.
All of this is narrated by a shape-shifting narrator with a foot fetish who lives in a houseboat, and it is all also written in rhyming sesta rima poetry, which lets Borek quote Eliot, Shakespeare, Nabokov, Larkin and plenty more besides.
There's so much for a reader to get excited about here, so much imagination and so many rich ideas at work about masculinity, the internet, art, the experience of Polish immigrants; but I should say that I didn't love Sissy.
I should also say that the synopsis of this book sounds a lot more fun than the reading experience of it actually is - largely I think this is because of the choice of form, which (while I love writers who place constraints on themselves) I just think makes the text often stodgy and needlessly opaque. I didn't hate it, and there's some great moments (the first "birthing" of Sissy is a fantastic "what the actual fuck am I reading" moment) but I felt that there's some squandered potential here.
Meanwhile, a group of leftist Polish intellectuals in London constitute the main sub-plots. One of them, Wassily, is attempting to find and take back to Poland the feet of several dead Polish ex-servicemen, each of whom had seven toes, so that he can bury and repatriate the feet. Another of the group embarks on an art project to ensnare unsuspecting men and record their sexual adventures.
All of this is narrated by a shape-shifting narrator with a foot fetish who lives in a houseboat, and it is all also written in rhyming sesta rima poetry, which lets Borek quote Eliot, Shakespeare, Nabokov, Larkin and plenty more besides.
There's so much for a reader to get excited about here, so much imagination and so many rich ideas at work about masculinity, the internet, art, the experience of Polish immigrants; but I should say that I didn't love Sissy.
I should also say that the synopsis of this book sounds a lot more fun than the reading experience of it actually is - largely I think this is because of the choice of form, which (while I love writers who place constraints on themselves) I just think makes the text often stodgy and needlessly opaque. I didn't hate it, and there's some great moments (the first "birthing" of Sissy is a fantastic "what the actual fuck am I reading" moment) but I felt that there's some squandered potential here.