thing how the brain works, Because this book is well written my brain kept trying to rationalize its events asking: how did this happen or that happen, Is it a dream A dystopia I'd say evidently its absurdism, its not meant to be something that could happen, but it does try to trick to to do something that is ultimately unachievable.
Its also a mockery of thess partying lifestyle, They partied back then. The Exterminating Angel with carnage and fornication, This was a gri and depressing story, though well written, Drunken irresponsible behavior by adults, For some reason I've never got around to reading as much Coover as I feel I should have, SPANKING THE MAID when I was in high school, other shorter bits and pieces, . . Finally got around the GERALD'S PARTY and I'm kicking myself for not getting into his novels sooner, This is such an utterly brilliant piece of multilayered work words other than the exact ones the book itself is composed of will not do it justice.
"Sublime" is as close as I can come, This isn't one of those nearly opaque literary exercise novels either, Not even close. Abundant Shakespearean/Joycean wordplay aside, this thing has so many scenes of such beautifully rendered slapstick it's capable of punching the same funnybuttons the Marx bros and W.
C. Fields did at their best, I am truly a Coover convert now, Splendid novel by a splendid writer, An entire novel set in a party! Whee! Coover manages to pull off, though it did kind of test my endurance to the limits, which is probably intentional.
Relentless, confusing, slapstick, disjointed lots of conversations going on at once and claustrophobic, in other words reading it felt like either being too drunk or the onset of a panic attack, oh and tons of guests getting murdered.
. . It is a novel full of ideas, on art, theatre the function of the intermission interesting, considering how this novel doesn't have any chapter breaks, love, sex, death, the "geometry of time" it's all in there somewhere.
This was my first Coover, I'll be reading more as soon as i've recovered, Robert Coover seems to have been partying hard one too many times
I followed him back into the living room where Roger was still carrying on pathetically over Ross corpse.
Tania had knelt beside him and was trying to console him, draw him away from the body, but he was beyond her reach, Beyond anybodys. He was wild with grief, looked a terror, his front now as bloody as Ross, His face seemed twisted, as if a putty mask were being torn away from it, and people watching him were twisting up, too, Vics girlfriend Eileen had apparently fainted and was lying on the gold couch,
Geralds Party is a mystery but it has gone a far distance from pulp fiction, It isnt sitelinkTen Little Niggers so in spite of all the disasters mass enjoyment continues and the party must go on
Cynical acid runs in streams
God saved Lot, youll remember, so Lot afterward could fuck his daughters, but he froze the wife for looking back.
On the surface, that doesnt make a lot of sense, But the radical message of that legend is that incest, sodomy, betrayal and all that are not crimes only turning back is: rigidified memory, attachment to the past.
Geralds Party is everything history, religion, art, bohemian ways of life and an allegory of human society,
Some are born to sweet delight Ew,
I don't have much else to say,
I can read Bataille without blinking, but somehow this disgusts me Couldn't get past the firstpages, Too slow and seemingly pointless in its painstaking detail to keep my interest, I get that that the excruciating detail is the point in the experiment of this novel, but it just too excruciating for me, A PoMo murder mystery. Gerald is having a big party with many friends and people he doesn't know, when a body of a very "well known" entertainer is found dead on the floor.
Craziness occurs in a very relaxed nonchalant manner, It is a very tough read, i mean very tough, Coover never states who says what piece of dialogue, with fifty or so characters in the book, and many around at each situation that is occuring, it takes a lot of effort to decipher who is saying the line.
It took me a good two months reading in complete silence to finish this one, However i found it very rewarding to get through, I'll never read another novel like this for the rest of my life, And it was highly entertaining, In an attempt to tie up the year's loose ends, I decided it was time to return to, and finally finish reading the last thirty pages of, Gerald's Party.
I was using a train ticket as a bookmark,
The ticket was dated January,,
That's my review of Gerald's Party absolutely bizzare, carnal, erotic, at the same time gross, ridiculous and absorbing and it puts you right THERE.
Made a piece of music based on some excepts of this book a few years ago after reading it in a class taught by Alvin Lucier one of the greats ofth century experimental sound art.
Very, very deep now into a Coover completist kick, it strikes me as worth noting that though the master is wellunderstood as a postmodernist at play in the realm of extant forms and as a wild, comic maven in love w/baroque mischiefmaking, he is insufficiently appreciated as a peerless artist of the obscene.
GERALD'S PARTY could well serve as a rousing ExhibitA for any huckster wishing to launch an investigation into this claim, It
is through and through a malevolent, obscene novel, Now, I am the furthest thing from a prude, I am incapable of being appalled by a novel, However, I am more than capable of being awed by a largesse of runaway prurience, And I am awed by the horrifying places Coover can take me, and the counterintuitive goodwill he appears to extend in so doing, To call GERALD'S PARTY merely bawdy is to fall egregiously short of adequately appraising its profoundly discomfitting diagnoses, One is obligated to approach this work as one locked in an engagement w/ the power and possibility of exaggeration, Our world, the one we basically operate in, is sufficiently indexed by this novel that its exaggeration of the carnal and destructive in our workaday lives is able to command status as a brutish, piercing judgement.
Scoundrel, know thyself! This is Coover's most biblically belligerent novel, appearing steadfastly committed to taking no prisoners, Many will not wish to take this trip to terminus, Woe unto them. But who could blame them Sex and violence, worked into our very helices, in no small part define us, they are indeed the repressed of the domestic scene, but we are not used to having these forces unleashed in such a way, and we are certainly not used to this level of abhorrence played at this level of comedy.
There are many chortles here, but, by God, many of them ought catch in the throat, It is too easy to see GERALD'S PARTY as another postmodern intertext, this one playing on the parlor drama / murder mystery, but that only works at the most abstracted theoretical level there is a detective on the scene, but he is more nightmare Borges than pomo Poirot what this thing is doing pagetopage is way off in another realm.
It is we who are obscene, The obscenity that we are as detailed w/ fullfrontal shockandawe caprice in this delightful, harrowing novel exists in concert w/, and not despite, what is fundamentally highmided in us.
So we find in this novel a combination of dreadful sin unleashed and persistent questions ontological, epistemological, and relating to the higher categories of aesthetics, We grapple w/ time, the domain of theatre, truth, beauty, identity, love, And we do so as we gorge ourselves in the most beastly manner, GERALD'S PARTY is a vertiginous and vertigoinducing highwire act, It does extraordinary things inside and outside parentheses to evoke radical, cascading, sensory, manypartied simultaneities, There is a huge cast and it is careening about in cosmic freefall, I can only imagine how exhausting and laborious a book this must have been to write, Probably Coover's most exhausting and laborious, And you have to go a little mad to give birth to such a Golem, Literary immortality is made of such undertakings, and Coover is as deserv'd of it as any American author, And he outdoes himself here, though, sure as shit, it ain't pretty, A blundrbuss. A cuss'd masterwork. I wonder if Darren Aronofsky read it before he made his comparatively chill MOTHER!,