From Kirkus Reviews:
The Marquis de Sade for mindless headbangers, Acker (Portrait of An Eye, etc.) here continues her endless stream of ranting about sex, politics, and the pain of childhood. Narrator Laure vents her anger and rage against repressive religions and her parents, who consider poor people inferior. She leaves home and begins her sexual adventures, which include lots of anonymous coupling, some random lesbianism, and casual S&M. Various characters defile religious objects with excrement, and there are also plenty of maggots and menstruation. At one point, the narrator seems to enter a boarding school straight out of Dario Argento's cult classic Suspiria, except that in this version a girl is found hanged by her tampon string. The trendy allusions proliferate: a hip mix of high and low cult. Lacan meets James Dean; Aerosmith kicks it up with Juan Goytisolo; and Radley Metzger is spliced with Luis Bu¤uel. Things turn into a bizarre version of Wuthering Heights, in which the narrator becomes Healthcliff, who becomes an animal. Further episodes find the (same?) narrator in a monastery of horny monks presided over by a head monk named Bush. If this political allegory is too difficult to follow, the next section launches into an explicit attack on ``President Bush'' and ``Mayor Koch.'' Ostensibly about love and desire, this humorless screed reveals a connoisseur's delight in body odors and functions. The author's sententiousness runs to such lines as: ``Moral ambiguity's the color of horror.'' Acker clearly likes to preach to the converted. Those who would be offended are unlikely to be attracted here. -- Copyright ©1993, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.
From Publishers Weekly:
Acker's ( Blood and Guts in High School ) 10th novel continues her well-established tradition of nontraditional prose: she borrows from both absurdism and metafiction, yet the final product is her own--a haunting and sometimes amusing fictional event. In a voice at once disturbing and wryly humorous, her narrator, Laure, recounts both dreams and real events to subtly weave together a dark autobiography. Laure's journey from the emotional and sexual abuses of childhood to the confusion of a girls' boarding school is fraught with psychological tortures, both created by and imposed upon her. Her attempt to overcome her parents' cruelty, her fetishization of various friends and lovers, and her eventual transformation into a weathered, motorcycle-riding bohemian are all told in vivid if surreal detail. Acker infuses often shocking social and political commentary that never detracts from her voice--everyone from the Marquis de Sade to H. Ross Perot fits right into the stew. Yet the book may leave some readers cold. Acker's constant graphic references to bodily functions and violent sexual acts are part of the experimental voice, but readers may feel as if the experiment--and the joke, as well--is on them. Despite inspired writing and astute observations, the novel ultimately fails to make us care. What emerges is a hallucinatory amalgam of emotion and desire, held together by a series of abstract events.
Copyright 1993 Reed Business Information, Inc.
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