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| Mad_Monk |
Progress, Anarchy, Dog-Eat-Dog, Money, Coke, 'Greed is Good', Chaos, Overkill. All very much themes in this selection. “Do As Thou Wilt” indeed.
(Synopses from publishers' catalogues to spare you my turgid gushings)
Kathy Acker
Native New Yorker and Manhattanite, novelist, poet and performance artist Kathy Acker came to be closely associated with the punk movement of the 1970s and '80s. Graduating in U.C., San Diego, in New York she worked as a file clerk, secretary, stripper and porn performer. Though most of her relationships were with men, she was openly bisexual for at least part of her adult life. During the early 1980s she lived in London, where she wrote several of her most critically acclaimed works. Acker's controversial body of work borrows heavily from the experimental styles of William S. Burroughs and Marguerite Duras. She often used extreme forms of pastiche and even Burroughs's cut-up technique. Acker herself situated her writing within a post-nouveau roman European tradition. In her texts, she combines biographical elements, power, sex and violence. Indeed, critics often compare her writing to that of Alain Robbe-Grillet and Jean Genet. Critics have noticed links to Gertrude Stein and photographers Cindy Sherman and Sherrie Levine. Acker's novels also exhibit a fascination with and an indebtedness to tattoos. She even dedicated Empire of the Senseless (1988) to her tattooist. Although associated with generally well-respected artists, even Acker's most recognised novels, Blood and Guts in High School, (1984) (the experiences of Janey Smith, a sex addicted and pelvic-inflammatory-disease-ridden urbanite who is in love with a father who sells her into slavery). Most critics acknowledge Acker's skilled manipulation of plagiarised texts from writers as varied as Charles Dickens, Marcel Proust and Marquis de Sade. (Publisher: Picador Books)
Martin Amis – Money: A Suicide Note (1984)
The novel is set in 1981 – the summer of the Brixton riots and the royal wedding – as the narrator, John Self, an obscenely successful director of TV commercials, jets between London and New York. His first feature film, a loosely autobiographical, absurdly oedipal story, is in development. Having made a small fortune from using images of scantily clad women to sell junk food, Self now plans to make a large fortune on the big screen, under the guidance of his producer, Fielding Goodney, a grinning, permatanned young man he met on a plane, too slick to be true. In one of the novel's many ironies – irony is Money's default position – “Slick” is Fielding's nickname for Self. A monster of appetite, John Self has no self-control and is anything but slick: he's obese, junk-guzzling, alcoholic, chain-smoking, pill-popping, priapic, with rotting teeth, tinnitus and a dodgy heart. In New York, he divides his free time between strip joints, brothels, bars, computer game arcades and fast-food outlets. In London, it's the pub or the kebab shop or the porn emporium or the bookies. He'd gamble in New York, too, if he could only find somewhere to do it. For a while there – say, for 25 years or so – it was looking like a good time for capitalism: the early 1980s seemed a turning point in history, the beginning of a victorious endgame for the forces of neo-liberalism, the crusaders of money. The governments of Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher oversaw the beginning of an apparently unstoppable period of financial deregulation and privatisation, during which organised labour was defeated, communism collapsed and faith in the power of the market grew and spread. Almost everyone seemed to agree that the best way to run things was just to stand back and let the money get on with it. (Publisher: Penguin Books Ltd)
Angela Carter – Burning Your Boats (1995), including The Bloody Chamber (1979)
A collection of stories retelling classic fairy tales and an anthology of subversive stories by women. Carter's screenplay for The Company Of Wolves (1984), directed by Neil Jordan, based on The Bloody Chamber was a bloodthirsty, Freudian retelling of the 'Little Red Riding Hood' story. This visually groundbreaking film studied the wolf-girl relationship in the light of sexual awakening. Re-writing fairy-tales from a feminist point of view, Carter argued that one can find from both literature and folklore “the old lies on which new lies are based.” However, her critics saw that using the old form, Carter produced the “rigidly sexist psychology of the erotic”. (Publisher: Vintage Classics)
Angela Carter – Nights at the Circus (1984)
“Angela Carter has influenced a whole generation of fellow writers towards dream worlds of baroque splendour, fairy tale horror and visions of the alienated wreckage of a future world. In “Nights at the Circus” she has invented a new, raunchy, raucous, Cockney voice for her heroine Fevvers, taking us back into a rich, turn of the 19th century world, which reeks of human and animal variety”. The Times. (Publisher: Penguin Books Ltd)
Angela Carter - The Sadeian Woman (1979).
A feminist reading of the Marquis de Sade, who is seen as a “moral pornographer”, putting pornography into the service of women or at least creating room within it for “an ideology not inimical to women”. Though Carter provides some biographical background, her focus is on Justine, Juliette and Philosophy in the Boudoir. In the first, the heroine is acted on rather than acts, feels rather than reasons and is the perfect victim. Carter sees her as a spiritual ancestor of film stars such as Marilyn Monroe. Her career is a “desecration of the Temple”, an inversion of the unnatural reverence accorded to women as Mothers and Wives. Her sister is her antithesis. She is rational, scheming, predatory, vicious and always in control, exploiting her sexuality to obtain power and moving from city to city, one step ahead of retribution. An astute business-woman, her career exhibits the virtues of bourgeois individualism - self-reliance and self-help - and the consequences of the emancipation of women, carried to their logical extremes. In the last, fifteen year old Eugénie receives an education in depravity, in a series of lessons in transgression culminating in her rape and mutilation of her mother. (Publisher: Virago Press)
Alan Clark (1928 – 1999): Volume 1 Diaries: In Power 1983-1992 (1993); Volume 2 Diaries: Into Politics 1972-1982 (2000); Volume 3 Diaries: The Last Diaries 1993-1999 (2002)
The late Alan Clark - Tory minister under Margaret Thatcher, historian and, most famously, serial philanderer, lies buried in the garden of Saltwood Castle, his family seat in Kent. It is a crowded little patch of lawn. His rottweilers and faithful labrador are buried close by. Clark's plot is surrounded by low rosemary bushes. His widow, Jane, chose the massive flat stone beneath which her husband lies. Alan had told her what he wanted written round its edges. It was among his final requests. Yet the vast slab's surface remains blank. “He wanted it to read, 'Happily married to Jane for 41 years'. Well, when he said that I just thought, 'Hah!' And, actually, I couldn't bring myself to do it. So I find myself thinking, 'Well what does one put?' I sometimes think it would be rather funny to have it like one of those fridge magnet type things where all the words are just jumbled up – diarist, historian, cad, adulterer, father, husband, scoundrel... everyone could choose the one they thought fit best.” (Publisher: Phoenix)
Quentin Crisp - How to Become a Virgin (1981)
This second volume of autobiography is as witty, acute and perceptive as its inimitable author. Quentin Crisp describes the wider horizons of his years as a celebrity, at home and abroad, that his first book and its dramatisation brought. His personal philosophy of inaction is explained, as well as his love affair with North America. (Publisher: Flamingo)
Quentin Crisp – Manners from Heaven (1984)
A fine guide to manners in the troubling modern age, with all its noise and haste, where what once was impolite or unthinkable is now empowering. Crisp sees a world devouring itself, seeing good manners and civility as a way of rectifying this. His chief point - that manners are a way of getting what we want without appearing an absolute swine. They are a way of making everyone happier and more comfortable, rather than a dusty old set of exclusionary rules. It is caustic and by no means conventional - for example, he feels that telling the truth all the time is not the best idea for smooth social relations - “The lie is the basic building block of good manners.” (Publisher: Flamingo)
Bret Easton Ellis - American Psycho (1991)
Brett Easton Ellis became established as one of the most notorious and reviled novelists currently writing. His work deserves its controversy. Patrick Bateman is a handsome 26-year-old Wall Street yuppie, who spends his days listening to Whitney Houston and working out which exclusive restaurant to eat in and what clothes to wear in a dizzying parody of 1980s consumerism run mad. However, Bateman is a psychopathic serial killer, torturing and sexually abusing young women before killing them by the most gruesome means. The novel contains extended descriptions of the restaurants, designer clothes, TV shows and the minutiae of Bateman's vacuous world, relieved only by clinically described scenes of torture and mutilation which are not for the faint-hearted. Bateman makes little attempt to justify his actions, commenting that, “this is the way the world - my world - moves”. As a satire on the bankrupt, money-driven world of the 1980s, American Psycho is a successful, if rather heavy-handed piece of fiction, whose controversy seems only set to increase. (Publisher: Picador)
Bret Easton Ellis - Less Than Zero (1985)
Clay comes home to L.A. for Christmas vacation and re-enters a landscape of limitless privilege and moral entropy, where everyone drives Porsches, dines at Spago and snorts mountains of cocaine. He tries to renew feelings for his girlfriend, Blair, and for his best friend from high school, Julian, who is careering into hustling and heroin. Clay's holiday turns into a dizzying spiral of desperation that takes him through the relentless parties in glitzy mansions, seedy bars and underground rock clubs. Morally barren, ethically bereft and tinged with implicit violence, this is a shocking coming-of-age novel about the casual nihilism that comes with youth and money. (Publisher: Picador)
John Fowles – Mantissa (1982)
Miles Green awakes in a hospital bed suffering from amnesia. He subsequently has several apparently imaginary dialogues with Erato, his muse, who assumes various forms throughout the novel. Themes include the struggle inherent to the creative process, the relationship between an author, his characters and the reader, and the clash of the sexes. Fowles noted “I knew that most people would disapprove of (Mantissa)… I wanted to give people the opportunity to kick me — which they duly did.” (Publisher: Picador)
Mary Gaitskill - Bad Behaviour (1988)
Fierce tales of love and sexual obsession depict the moments of dislocation, acute longing and forbidden needs that create the shocks of modern living. The film 'Secretary' was inspired by one these short stories. (Publisher: Vintage)
Rich: The Life of Richard Burton - Melvyn Bragg (1988)
This biography is supported by his own 300,000-word unpublished journals that cover the years of his marriage to Elizabeth Taylor, plus all his papers and unpublished memoirs of his adopted father. Many of those close to Burton (1925 –1984) have talked for the first time, his daughter Kate, his elder sister Cis, who brought him up as her own after the death of his mother when he was two years old and the teacher Philip Burton who adopted him and gave him his name. Bragg has also had the benefit of conversations with actors and close friends - Sir John Gielgud, Sir Michael Hordern, Lauren Bacall, Robert Hardy, John Neville, Emlyn Williams, John le Carré and Alec Guinness. Here, the actor who was born Richard Jenkins, the twelfth child of a South Wales miner, is revealed as never before, often in his own words. After a scholarship to Oxford, a brilliant career in the theatre, then Hollywood and films like “The Robe”, his career blossomed with “Camelot” and “Cleopatra” after which he married co-star Elizabeth Taylor. Further films intervened, then, in quick succession, he divorced Elizabeth Taylor, married Suzy Hunt and re-married Taylor, divorced her and married Sally Burton. In the book he discusses marriage, women, his work, arthritis and addiction to drink, also showing himself to be a fine descriptive writer and humorist with a love of literature. At the age of 56 he died in his sleep. Melvyn Bragg is the author of 13 novels; his non-fiction includes a study of Laurence Olivier, “Land of the Lakes” and “Speak for England”. Hardcover is illustrated. (Publisher: Hodder & Stoughton)
Thomas Harris – The Hannibal Lecter Novels
Harris invented the serial killer/ psychological profiler novel. The artists and writers of the Aesthetic movement tended to hold that the Arts should provide refined sensuous pleasure, rather than convey moral or sentimental messages. Silence and Hannibal present an individual interpretation of that.
The F.B.I call in a consultant, William Graham, to aid in the capture of a deranged murderer, the Red Dragon (1981). Graham is a troubled man with a rough past who manages to finally find peace in his early forties, taking his wife and her child to live an idyllic life in the Florida Keys. But he knows of the murders and he knows that he is the only one who can catch the killer before more people die. Throughout the story, Graham's methods are unlike any other the F.B.I could source - he identifies first with the victims, then with the killer. Graham consults Hannibal Lecter, a sociopathic genius whom he put away - almost at the cost of his own life. It becomes a race against time as Graham is pushed to his own breaking point in order to find a madman before he kills again.
As part of the search for a serial murderer nicknamed “Buffalo Bill,” FBI trainee Clarice Starling is given an assignment. She must visit a man confined to a high-security facility for the criminally insane and interview him. That man, Dr. Hannibal Lecter, is a former psychiatrist with unusual tastes and an intense curiosity about the darker corners of the mind. His intimate understanding of the killer and of Clarice herself form the core of The Silence of the Lambs (1988) - an unforgettable classic.
Contrarily, in Hannibal (1999), he took the structure of the traditional romantic fiction as his model, where a pair of antagonists must overcome obstacles and battle opposition to arrive at true love. Of course, in the hands of Harris, this is no Mills and Boon happy-ever-after. Not so much Four Weddings and a Funeral as Mass Carnage and a Dinner Party, a breathtaking journey into the darkest recesses of the human soul, revealing desires and passions that bring nightmares in their wake. In spite of this, Hannibal is a curious reaffirmation of the human spirit and, at times, an aesthetic masterpiece.
The 'prequel', Hannibal Rising (2006), tracks our homicidal “hero” through the traumas of woodland battles on the Eastern Front and into a post-war Soviet orphanage. A pampered French adolescence ensues with an artist uncle and his Japanese wife, Lady Murasaki, followed by a calling as a medical student in Paris. We leave Hannibal in the early 1950s, as the newly appointed intern at Johns Hopkins in Baltimore takes the train from Quebec. By this time, he has half a dozen gruesomely ingenious kills to his credit. Unfortunately, this novel ranks as one more superior shocker rather than an incisive dissection of the psychopathic mind. He gives you the sinews of horror, not its soul, and this book accounts for the modus operandi of the “monster” we already know. (Publisher: William Heinemann)
M John Harrison — The Ice Monkey (1983)
Creepy short stories in dank, occult London (Publisher: HarperCollins)
Patricia Highsmith – The Ripley Novels
(Placed in the 80s as they epitomise the sociopathic chic of that era).The amoral Tom Ripley is easygoing, devoted to his wife and friends, an epicurean, artistic polymath and a killer only by necessity. Necessity leads this polite aesthete to bludgeon or strangle eight people and watch with satisfaction while two others drown. He also sets in motion the successful suicides of three friends he actually, in his way, cares about. Yet aside from an occasional twinge about his first murder, Ripley feels no long-term guilt over these deaths. (Tellingly, he can never quite remember the actual number of his victims.) He was simply protecting himself, his friends and business partners, his home. Any man would, or at least might, do the same.
In The Talented Mr Ripley (1955), Tom makes a bid for another man's inheritance and succeeds, but has he really got away with it? Ripley Under Ground (1970) is set a few years later, when Tom is living in luxury in a French chateau with his beautiful wife Heloise – but the clever art forgery which funds Tom's expensive tastes is about to be uncovered. In Ripley's Game (1974), Tom sets up a man he dislikes to carry out two perfect murders, while in The Boy Who Followed Ripley (1980), a rich young stalker arrives at Belle Ombre and he and Tom end up fighting for their lives. Finally, in Ripley Under Water (1991), strange new neighbours show an overdeveloped interest in Ripley's past. Will Tom's shady dealings be exposed? (Publisher: Vintage)
Howard Jacobson – Peeping Tom (1984)
Described by one reviewer as 'the funniest book about sex ever written', is typically clever - witty and intellectually sophisticated. It tells the story of Barney Fugelman, (yes, Jewish, strongly inclined towards literature and sexual fantasy); Fugelman is a not-tremendously-successful writer who, it would appear, is some sort of reincarnation of Thomas Hardy. Which would be fine for him, perhaps, were it not for the fact that Fugelman has always considered Hardy to be 'a morbid superstitious little rustic who confused high peevishness with tragedy, niggardliness with humour, mean-naturedness with melancholy, [who] put it on history, genealogy, blood, evolution and the Prime Mover that he couldn't get his end away'. The book is one of Jacobson's funniest, but it is also touching and sad; Fugelman is a sort of tragic character and, by the end, his losses and his disillusionment seem (in the midst of the comedy) very real. (Publisher: Vintage)
Milan Kundera - The Unbearable Lightness of Being (1984)
A rich and complicated novel that is at once a love story, a metaphysical treatise, a political commentary, a psychological study, a lesson on kitsch, a musical composition in words, an aesthetic exploration and a meditation on human existence. As an expatriate Czechoslovakian writer, Kundera draws upon his firsthand experience of the 1968 Prague Spring and subsequent Soviet occupation of his country to provide the backdrop for the story of four people whose lives are inextricably enmeshed. Because the work is so complex, there are many themes that intertwine throughout the novel, just as a theme in a musical composition will be introduced only to reappear later in a different key. Indeed there are several critics who focus their entire analysis on the way Kundera uses musical structure to put together his novel. At its most fundamental level, The Unbearable Lightness of Being is about the ambiguity and paradoxes of human existence, as each person teeters between lightness and weight; between the belief that all is eternal return and Nietzsche's concept that life is an ever-disappearing phenomenon; and between dream and reality. (Publisher: Faber and Faber)
Milan Kundera - Life is Elsewhere (1973)
A budding poet and his adoring mother are the central characters of this intriguing early novel by Milan Kundera. He takes us through the young man's fantasies and love affairs in a characteristic tour de force, alive with wit, eroticism and ideas. (Publisher: Faber and Faber)
Milan Kundera - The Book of Laughter and Forgetting (1978)
The seven parts of Kundera's novel explore different aspects of human existence in the twentieth century, particularly as they are affected by life in the police state of the narrator's fictionalised Bohemia. In 1971, three years after the Russian occupation of his homeland, Mirek - under surveillance by the not-so-secret police - seeks to retrieve his love letters from his former lover, Zdena. Marketa and her husband, Karel, must cope with Karel's increasingly childlike mother while at the same time dealing with the amoral Eva and memories of past desires. At a small French summer school, two American girls learn the lessons of laughter. Displaced to a provincial town in Western Europe, Tamina (“all the other stories are variations on her own story”) urgently tries to retrieve memories of her husband and their past together in Bohemia, memories recorded in notebooks that she left behind at her mother-in-law's house in Prague. And forty-five-year-old Jan prepares to cross several borders - geographical, existential, erotic - for a new life in the United States.
The Book closes with a group of naked men and women on an isolated beach exchanging opinions about the fate of Western civilisation and the liberation of humanity, opinions that “Jan had heard ten, twenty, thirty, a hundred, five hundred, a thousand times before.” His own attempt to obliterate the border between past and present, to re-experience the innocent and blissful mystery of his youth, fails. In the end, he finds himself squarely in the land of forgetting. (Publisher: Faber and Faber)
Milan Kundera - Laughable Loves (1978)
Milan Kundera is one of the few authors in the world who can capture the painful transparency of desire with a few lines. In his collection of short stories, 'Laughable Loves', he uses his sparse but intricate prose to devastating effect, exposing the complex structures men build on top of their ultimately mundane fantasies and erotic desires. The author does not employ intricate and bemusing syntax; his straightforward, teasing style of writing illustrates his astute perceptiveness when unravelling the myths of love. Rather than leaving the reader bloated and immobile by unnecessary stodge, this book can make us appreciate the idea of thoughtful reflection being an ingredient in the creation of self-explaining simplicity, leaving us with a myriad of sensations to savour. (Publisher: Faber and Faber)
Thomas Ligotti - Songs of a Dead Dreamer (1986)
A confessed devotee of H.L. Lovecraft, Ligotti here leads the reader down dark corridors, weaving horror and reflection to enviable effect. (Publisher: Robinson Publishing)
Robert R. McCammon - Usher's Passing (1984)
In this most gothic of Robert McCammon's novels, setting is key: the continuing saga of the Usher family (descended from the brother of Roderick and Madeline of Edgar Poe's "Fall of the House of Usher") takes place in the weird and picturesque heart of the North Carolina mountains. The haughty, aristocratic Ushers live in a mansion near Asheville; the poor but crafty mountain folk (whose families are just as ancient) live on Briartop Mountain nearby. At harvest time, when the book's action unfolds, the mountains are a blaze of color. Add to the mixture a sinister history of mountain kids disappearing every year, a journalist investigating those disappearances, a monster called "The Pumpkin Man," moldy books and paintings in a huge old library at the Usher estate, and a secret chamber with a strange device involving a brass pendulum and tuning forks--and you've got a splendid recipe for atmospheric horror. (Publisher: Random House)
Anne Rice - The Vampire Chronicles: Interview with the Vampire (1976), The Vampire Lestat (1985), The Queen of the Damned (1988,) The Tale of the Body Thief (1992,) Memnoch the Devil (1995), The Vampire Armand (1998)
Written with a sly irony, the tales of vampiric rakehell Lestat, his introverted companion Louis, their creations and the legacy of their undead forebears. Written in the first person, these vampires are all excessively emotional, sensitive and sensual; easy prey to intense suffering and aesthetic passions. They have many artistic abilities and appreciate singing, painting, theatre and a preternatural “understanding” of any type of problem, puzzle or machine. Supernaturally beautiful, they make fledglings from humans they have grown to love/ covet in a process of 'unnatural selection'. Rapacious, envious and self-centred, these are eternal libertines. (Publisher: Futura)
Patrick Süsskind – Perfume: The Story of a Murderer (1985)
An exceptional story told with dark, dark humour that is rich with desire, sensuality and lust. Jean-Baptiste Grenouille is born in the eighteenth century, abandoned at birth in the slums of Paris. There is something odd about him, he has no personal smell, yet he has the most incredibly developed sense of smell, able to separate and identify every particle of every scent and store it in his memory. Through his cunning and planning he becomes a perfumer, learning the skills necessary to create scents specific to his own plots and schemes. One day he chances upon a aroma unlike anything he has ever come across before and begins a plan to take it for himself. (Publisher: Penguin)
John Updike - The Witches of Eastwick (1984)
The time is the late 1960s and the setting an imaginary but vividly realised village in Rhode Island. Experiencing “blossoming self-hood,” three women divorce their husbands, tug their children into the vortex of downward economic mobility and take up careers. These friends meet almost every Thursday, as a coven of genuine, practicing witches although their witchcraft is ordinarily mischievous rather than malign: “In the right mood and into their third drinks they could erect a cone of power above them like a tent to the zenith.” They are randomly promiscuous: “Being a divorcee in a small town is a little like playing Monopoly, eventually you land on all the properties.” Things turn nasty once the mysterious Darryl Van Horne has settled in at one of Eastwick's eeriest old houses. Updike drops devilishly loud hints about who Van Horne really is. When the witches join him in his oversize steamy teak tub for the first of a series of baths and orgies, Darryl asks, “You kids think this is hot? I set the thermostat 20° higher when it's just me.” It does not bother the three women that their satanic host acts and thinks like the piggiest of male chauvinists. His ample house gives their new-found senses of identity room to burgeon: “In Van Horne's realm they left their children behind and became children themselves.” This is where the action is, Sukie muses, “not here in town, where bitter water lapped the pilings and placed a shudder of reflected light upon the haggard faces of the citizens of Eastwick as they plodded through their civic and Christian duties.” (Publisher: Penguin)
Tom Wolfe - The Bonfire of the Vanities (1987)
Sherman McCoy, known to himself as a “Master of the Universe”, is a millionaire bond trader at Wall Street's Pierce and Pierce, where the roar of the trading floor “resonate[s] with his very gizzard”. His mastery is punctured, however, when, with his mistress at the wheel, his Mercedes hits and fatally injures a young black man in the Bronx. The story of McCoy's subsequent downfall is told alongside those of three other men, all characterised by their raging ambition and vanity: an alcoholic tabloid journalist desperate for a scoop; a power-hungry pastor; and a district attorney keen to impress one of his former jury members, the brown-lipsticked Miss Shelly Thomas.
Wolfe revels in the rambunctious, seething world of '80s New York and brings to life in primary-colours prose a city fraught with racial tensions and steeped in ego. The contrasting worlds of McCoy and his victim, Henry Lamb, are vividly dramatised, if not with great subtlety: rich, white Park Avenue versus poor, black Bronx. This brash tome is regularly described as “the quintessential novel of the 80s”. But the ability to “capture the decade” isn't the only measure of a writer's ability and, like a cerise-pink puffball dress, this story displays a blithe disregard for nuance. The big beast of a novel feels dense with research and bulging with bombast, yet, it has to be admitted, it's also great fun. (Publisher: Picador)
Edited Tue 7 Jun 11, 7:28 PM by Mad_Monk
