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Bezig met laden... Beestendoor Keith Ridgway
Informatie over het werkBeesten roman door Keith Ridgway
Best LGBT Fiction (65) Bezig met laden...
Meld je aan bij LibraryThing om erachter te komen of je dit boek goed zult vinden. Op dit moment geen Discussie gesprekken over dit boek. The book's narrator, whose name we never learn, is an illustrator who begins by recounting a very bad day--a dead mouse in the gutter, a friend's tale of a haunted building that inspires an uneasy feeling about Australia, a close escape from dying in a swimming pool, a stomach-turning encounter with a spider. And tthe day ends with a possibly homicidal encounter with his partner, K., which leads to the narrator packing bags and embarking on a week or so of drifting and disintegration. The narrator is unreliable, sometimes knowingly but always unwillingly--memory and occasionally language itself are disintegrating. This seems to be the result of distance from what's called 'the world': Only what is not human is the world, and not a centimetre of a city has no touch of the human in it. The world though is intruding into the protagonist's consciousness, most obviously in the form of phantom-like animals. The writing is quite good. There are descriptions I won't soon forget, and passages that could easily have slipped into the sophomoric or polemic are instead simply thought-provoking. The book is also funny; Ridgway has a sharp ear for inane claims of PR people, a good eye for small social embarrassments, and he gets in some wonderful digs at performance art and at the conventions of fantasy fiction. Even the end of what is a terribly unsettling story of a disoriented descent is very blackly humourous. And that ending slips in neatly with what's gone before, as do all the snippets of clues throughout. Different kettle of fish to Hawthorn & Child, obviously, and though Hawthorn was good I'm more likely to re-read this one. geen besprekingen | voeg een bespreking toe
A novel of confusion and paranoia, love and doubt, fear and hysteria: unsettling, unhinged, provocative and bestially funny, 'Animals' is for human beings everywhere. Keith Ridgway's third novel is a psychological menagerie of confusion, paranoia, searching and love. Narrated by an illustrator who can no longer draw, it tells of the sudden and inexplicable collapse of a private life, and the subsequent stubborn search for a place from which to take stock. We are surrounded here - by unsafe or haunted buildings, by artists and capitalists who flirt with terror, by writers and actresses and the deals they have made with unreality, and by the artificial, utterly constructed, scripted city in which we have agreed to live out a version of living. But there are cracks in the facade, and there are stirrings under the floorboards, and there are animals everywhere you look, if only you'd dare to look for them. Unsettling, unhinged, provocative and richly funny, 'Animals' is for human beings everywhere. Geen bibliotheekbeschrijvingen gevonden. |
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Google Books — Bezig met laden... GenresDewey Decimale Classificatie (DDC)823.914Literature English English fiction Modern Period 1901-1999 1945-1999LC-classificatieWaarderingGemiddelde:
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The main events are not really solid events at all, and before long you start to wonder how much in just in the narrator's mind, and not really occuring at all... It starts when the illustrator is disturbed at seeing a dead mouse in a gutter and examines it in detail; he is fascinated and upset at his friend's description of a haunted building; he gets locked into a public park after hours and has a run-in with an amicable policeman; he has an encounter with a famous woman which goes all wrong; he has an inexplicable row with his partner and bunks with various friends for a few days, but that all goes awry as well. His friends are experimental artists, architects and writers, all very interesting characters in their own right. One, which never ceased to amuse me, was a man who had created an elaborate imaginary country (centuries of detailed history and all) for the sake of writing anonymously about politics but had never yet penned a political novel; our narrator bluntly points out flaws in this fabricated world and causes that friendship to go sour as well. Threaded through it all is a fascinating look at societal norms and blunders, an examination of details that often go unremarked.
The ending took me completely by surprise. I didn't know what to think. It made me realize how utterly unreliable this narrator was. How much of what he related was just imagined? It's one of those endings that makes you sit and flip your brain back and forth: did what I think just happened, really happen? I was doubly frustrated because I also wanted to know, of course, what happened to his partner, if it really was what the narrator had suggested, because his memory turned out to be unreliable as well. I'm definitely going to have to read this book again to see if I can pick it all apart and read between the lines better.
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