One the one hand, we could say that these are stories about sex, or sexuality, and most often male sexuality, but on the other hand, to anyone who has read this book, you would know that to attempt to describe these stories in any such way would be reductive to the verge of violence, for these stories are both incredibly varied in a topical sense (if still in all cases somehow centered around or underpinned by sexuality, if not explicitly, then certainly implicitly, in a Freudian sense), and these stories are also incredibly varied in a narrative sense — for it as if the author reinvents himself with each story, and at times, as if he is reinventing the genre as a whole — and these stories are incredibly layered — with manifest meanings and latent meanings and meta meanings, and at times self-reflexive meta meaning, and with such an immensity of references to world literature and psychology and philosophy that you reel back at the thought of not just how much the author has written but how much he has read — until the whole effect simply bowls you over and leaves you unmoored and untethered and and at a loss to return to whatever it was you were before you read it.
Discussion about this post
No posts