leebass wrote:What did you think of this? tried reading it a few months ago and got about half way through. Apart from Naked Lunch this is the hardest book i've tried reading, in terms of wtf is going on. Will pick it up again soon.limb wrote:
Towards the D.M.Z. Later, as he sat in the cabin of the helicopter, Talbot looked down at the
motorway below them. The speeding cars wound through the cloverleaves. The concrete
causeways formed an immense cipher, the templates of an unseen posture. The young woman in
the white dress sat beside him. Her breasts and shoulders recapitulated the forgotten contours of
Karen Novotny’s body, the motion-sculpture of the highways. Afraid to smile at him, she stared
at his hands as if they held some invisible weapon. The flowering tissue of her mouth reminded
him of the porous esplanades of Ernst’s ‘Silence,’ the pumice-like beaches of a dead sea. His
committal into the authority of these two couriers had at last freed him from his memories of
Koester and Catherine Austin. The erosion of that waking landscape continued. Meanwhile the
quasars burned dimly from the dark peaks of the universe, sections of his brain reborn in the
island galaxies.
well I think you're right to compare it to naked lunch as they're both pretty much as fucked up as a book can be, I can't imagine how anyone could take it any further without degenerating into complete gibberish. I've only got about half way through the atrocity exhibition so far but I like it, it's mostly just a stream of repeating images of sex, assasination, car crashes, death, geometry, astronauts, sixties art exhibits, psychology, but I'm happy to read this stuff just for the sound and feeling of it. It's like the blood and resounding vibrancy of all good books, what shit books completely lack is the concentrated substance of these types of books, just pure imagery, feeling and skilled writing, those are the things that stick in your mind about a novel, generally, it's like Ballard's kept that and the points he wants to make about society and thrown away the typical a to b type stuff like story and charecters similar to an abstract painter getting rid of people and pretty trees so he can concentrate on the splashes of paint, I like it. I like to see the guts on the outside, take it for what it is, and not try to work out what's going on. Also his notes are pretty interesting, though they don't really explain anything just tell you a bunch of other weird theories he has.
