Monday, September 11, 2006

A review attached

One has written a review of Ron Butlin's Belonging for ReadySteadyBook (and having mentioned that esteemed site, don't miss the recent interviews with Robert Kelly and James Reidel). I don't quote much from the novel but here's the first one:
It would be a glorious, incandescent, mind-expanding, post-craziness fuck ... and afterwards we'd promise each other the world all over again. Letting ourselves be wounded and healed - we called this love. And, for those brief moments, it probably was. Craziness, then forgiveness. More craziness, the more forgiveness. That was love. That was us.
I mention this here only because I didn't mention there that it reminds me of the Afterword Nabokov adds to later editions of Lolita. He tells of how a reader of the manuscript
suggested that his firm might consider publication if I turned Lolita into a twelve-year-old lad and had him seduced by Humbert, a farmer, in a barn, amidst gaunt and arid surroundings, all this set forth in short, strong, 'realistic' sentences ('He acts crazy. We all act crazy, I guess. I guess God acts crazy.' Etc.).
I love that. I am drawn to such repetition. Even the repetition of fullstops at the end. Repetition rules.

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