Junky (William S. Burroughs)

I actually started writing this review about a week ago whilst on Skype with Alcott, got one sentence in and promptly forgot about it. If my posts are a little sporadic for the next couple of weeks it is because I am currently writing reviews for FOUR publications (if you count this one) and seeing as this is the only one for which I get no money... it may be put on the back burner. This is not to say that I don't love writing reviews here; this is the one place I can write a review and completely slate a book should I so desire. Not so with my other forays into reviewing. Anyway, rejoycement over negative review ability aside here is a book which I LOVED. It is also a book which confirmed my belief that I don't really want to be a heroin addict, and also made me yearn (just a little) to have lived in the Beat Generation. I am talking of course about Junky by William S. Burroughs.

Although published as fiction, it is pretty well accepted that this is an autobiographical (or at least semi-autobiographical) account of Burroughs' own addiction. The main character is called William, last name Lee - the maiden name of Burroughs' mother and a majority of the incidents in the book were, surprisingly enough, incidents in Burroughs' own life. The book starts with Burroughs' first shot of morphine, details his many attempts at 'quitting for good' and lets you in on all kinds of secrets which you probably would know nothing about if you (like myself) have never taken heroin cut with milk sugar (bought from a shady Mexican lady) and cooked it up in a spoon over a Bunsen burner.

Through a series of really interesting musings about junk as a way of life, not just as a trip, you get to see inside Burroughs' head. And what a messed up place it is. We are talking about the man who shot (and killed) his wife when he convinced her to put a shot glass on her head so he could re-enact the William Tell shoots apple off son's head incident. Except with a gun. And he missed the glass and got his wife instead. (The same wife who is pictured on the cool first edition cover which I got thanks to the wonder of the internet - the very pulpy novel cover depicts an actual scene in the book.)

Anyway...I am running out of steam already with this review that never really got off the ground (although it got further off the ground than Alcott's first attempt at a Blackberry Wine review) - But this book is an amazingly written account of a narcotics addiction that spanned Burroughs' entire lifetime... it is fascinating... just go read it. Okay?

(ALSO - I am the proud new owner of a MacBook - have discovered blog looks kind of weird and small in Safari - sorry about that to all you Mac owners who have known this for a while and wondered why we insisted on using such tiny font - not our choice I am afraid.)

Hashish, Wine, Opium (Charles Baudelaire and Theophile Gautier)

Do we not all think that Theophile is quite an amusing name? And what a difference the end of a name does make:

Theodore: cute, teddy-bear like person, could be English, definitely wears a waistcoat.

Theophile: drives a white van, drinks vodka from a syringe, sweats a lot.

HIGHLY intellectual musings aside, I quite enjoyed this little homage to narcotics and alcohol written in the early 19th century. Baudelaire and Gautier both wrote extensively on their experiences with hash and opium in particular and both were members of the Club of Assassins. Detailed sketchily in the book (everything is a bit sketchy, most of it was written while they were stoned or drunk), the Club of Assassins was a little group of men who used to meet on Ile St Louis in Paris and get stoned together. They then used to go home and write or paint about the effects they had experienced.

I picked this up for the title and who wouldn't? I am well-versed in the effects of wine, but opium has never been offered up at any of the parties I've gone to (actually most of the time the most potent thing offered up is a vodka watermelon, and that's on a REALLY wild night) and I giggled to think of 19th century philosophers in knickerbockers smoking joints, thus I felt this was a necessary purchase.

The book was informative as well as amusing... I learnt that these dudes used to cook the hash with butter, pistachio nuts, almonds and honey to form a kind of jam "similar to apricot conserve". YUM. Sounds delish, I could even do without the hallucinogen to be honest. It's like... baklava jam! GENIUS.

I also learnt that the word 'assassin' is actually derived from the Arabic 'hasishin', which means to be under the influence of drugs. Assassins in Persia were fed drugs before they killed. Interesting non?

Last lesson I learnt from this book- If you work with children (sigh, as I do), do not leave this lying around your place of work. The only thing worse to leave around is Dead Babies.

Rating: 7/10.

Still Waters (Camilla Noli)

A publishing rep told me this was a 'kick-ass' read and unlike anything I would have read in the past.

The last bit was true: I don't recall ever having read anything this bad before. I probably have, but not in recent memory.

Still Waters tells the tale of a successful career woman who has become a full time mum and wife. Her life has become so mundane and pedestrian and the children rail on her nerves so much that she begins to fantasise about killing them.

And then she does.

Publication for Still Waters has been delayed here in the UK because of the Baby P. case that was all over the news. Rightly so, although I don't know when IS a good time to debut a book about baby killing, and I'm not really sure what the marketing team were worried about: a loss of sympathy for the narrator of the story? Were we supposed to feel for her?

My biggest problem is with the way this book was marketed. "All mothers love their children... don't they?" is splashed on the front cover. I was particularly horrified when a woman picked it up in the shop and mused: "I was never that maternal you know."

LADY. Did you kill your kids?

No?

Then trust me, this is not the book to read if you're looking to empathise with the woman in it. There is a difference between a lack of maternal instinct and COLD-BLOODED MURDER. This isn't a book about the issues successful women have in adjusting to home life, or the toll taking care of children can have on a person. It is about a psychopath and should be marketed as such.

Then of course, we come to the narration. Telling a story in first person-present tense is hard enough, but with Noli's lack of narrative ability it turns the already mediocre prose (or... more accurately... words strung together) into a hack job. A reviewer on the author's website likened the narration to Camus' The Outsider.

HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA.

I'm restraining myself... no, am not done:

HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA

Of course, the cliches between husband and wife coupled with amateur dialogue do nothing to help the matter. "Thoughtful issue-raising" aside (and I don't believe we have anything here other than a D-grade version of American Psycho), I don't know who would benefit from reading this book, thus it's '2' status.

(There has to be a certain horrific stigma attached to a novel to attain a '1'. Level 1 is reserved for such tomes as Mein Kampf. Doubtful that we'll ever read this... but it gets an honorary '1' anyway).

Rating: 2/10.

The Yellow Wallpaper (Charlotte Perkins Gilman)

If you have a spare fifteen minutes I would seriously recommend reading this short story. Written in 1892, it is the story of a woman suffering from depression (I suspect post-partum) who is taken to stay in a large country house with her husband for three months in order to recover. Husband John is a physician and his cure for his young wife is to keep her away from her child and any 'stimulating acquaintainces'. She spends most of the three months in a room at the top of the house, decorated with a psychedelic yellow wallpaper.

For the first few weeks the woman is able to talk about her confinement logically, although she has an irrational hatred of the wallpaper. Gradually she begins to see a woman in the patterns of the paper, a woman who is trying to get out. Husband John and the housekeeper Jennie become concerned at her fixation with the wallpaper. Suddenly, the woman is convinced that it is she who is the woman in the wallpaper. She ties herself up with rope and walks around the room in constant circles, carving a groove in the wall with her shoulder because she is pressed so tightly against it.

Husband John comes in and faints to see her like this.

THE END.

Teehee.

I know I've just told you the plot, but that's not the attraction of this story. The writing is fantastic: honest and whimsical prose give way to an unbelievably creepy denouement. The text seems to become faster, the pages turn a lot quicker at the end as the woman's mind speeds towards and then overtakes the line of sanity.

If you can get over the fact that Husband John is a patronising chauvanist and the woman, (even before she goes completely bonkers) is kind of whiney and immature, go sit in a room with bad wallpaper and shot this down like a Patagonian Black Bush.

Rating: 7/10.

The Outlander (Gil Adamson)

Below is a review I wrote for The Outlander awhile ago. You could read it and be inspired to grab Adamson's novel, but you probably just need this: Yeah, the heroine's hard to like, the descriptive prose is a bit overdone and Anthony Hopkins would fit into a number of roles when and if this is made into a film; but this book is special and quite possibly brilliant, so get over the other things.

There.

If you need more convincing, the tosh is below.

"Reading The Outlander was like reading the spawn of Cormac McCarthy and Charles Frazier, the perfect blending of a harsh, North American landscape and a cast of flawed, strange and seemingly miraculous characters.

It is 1903 and Mary Boulton is on the run through Alberta, Canada. She is fleeing her brothers-in-law, red-headed twins intent on exacting revenge for the murder of their younger brother. The twins are rarely referred to by name and Mary is more often than not just 'the widow', creating a mysterious aura that surrounds these three characters and permeates throughout the novel. On her journey Mary meets many whose kidness overwhelms and frightens her, but it is William Moreland who reawakens any humanity the widow may have left in her after the death of her family and the harsh existence she has carved out for herself since.

The momentum which Adamson creates to propel us through Mary's story is constant. The reader must make a concerted effort to slow down and savour the breathtaking and unique voice in which Adamson writes. Mary is an eccentric heroine, a pipe-smoking, halllucinating young woman who, although victimised by her demonised brothers-in-law, may ultimately be outside the boundaries of atonement for what she has done.

Exploring themes of isolation and redemption amongst a stark landscape that Adamson describes with refreshingly new eyes, The Outlander is a hard and unforgiving thriller wrought with the delicate and complicated prose of a master storyteller. This is a book that other books have failed to be in the past and authors will strive to emulate in the future."

Rating: 9/10

January's Book You May Have Missed: When Nietzsche Wept

Gah, just the thought of writing about this book makes me want to rush and read it again, not many novels make me almost sob with gratitude that the author has created such an intelligent, visceral read that I can fully and honestly comprehend and appreciate. I hate those books that you KNOW are brilliant, but wading through waist-high mud is by far the easier option... *cough* Carpentaria (Alexis Wright) *cough*. When Nietzsche Wept: A Novel of Obsession by Irvin D. Yalom was originally published in 1992 and tells the story of Austrian psychologist Josef Breuer and his encounter and subsequent treatment of a mentally incapacitated Friedrich Nietzsche. Sigmund Freud makes a cameo as a young psychoanalyst as does the author Lou Salome. All historical figures I had heard of and studiously avoided their literary tomes whenever they popped up on an English reading list for uni; but brought together in the wake of Nietzsche's (probable but for the sake of semantics, fictional) breakdown they create a tense and emotional iceberg of a story that I couldn't put down. In fact, for a few days afterwards I quite considered myself the amateur psychologist and contemplated a change of career. If you have no interest in psychology, history or intellectual relationships (and are, in fact, completely oblivious to the mental hinderance that your narrow-sightedness has caused) this book probably isn't for you. But considering it came out more than a decade ago, chances are many who would have enjoyed it missed it first time around and should look it up.
Rating: 7/10