Stephen Schneck (2)Besprekingen
Auteur van The Nightclerk: Being His Perfectly True Confession
Voor andere auteurs genaamd Stephen Schneck, zie de verduidelijkingspagina.
Besprekingen
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Of course you see my 2-star rating. You know already my expectations proved wrong, to the point that I can't even say the Nightclerk was interesting enough to make it worth reading. It's a mess of shallow ideas and gimmicky writing (i.e., think physical shape House of Leaves' text takes--but bad, pointless), two stories--two styles--back to back, related only in Blight's fat role. Up to page 100 it reads like a prose copy of Alain Resnais' Last Year at Marienbad, the narrator nothing more than a camera setting up the scene by swooping down the long corridors of a San Francisco hotel, centering again and again in the lobby where Blight sat, his shifting bulk of 600+ lbs. reading penny dreadfuls and cutting out magazine photos, thinking of Crowleyan magick (for some reason(?)) as he takes payment from prostitutes and their customers; where--in an image I actually quite liked and warranted most of the 2-star positives--shadows creep up from the corners on his rotten fantasies. 100 pages of establishing the setting repeatedly, and then we're introduced to the front-cover sex kitten Katy, and it's this point that the book denegrates into nothing more than cliched pornographic fantasies and rascally attempts at slapstick.
The first half, reminiscent as it is of Resnais and Robbe-Grillet's stunningly original film, is interesting enough, but any lasting impact that could have is ruined by the dated anti-porn satire (remember that this was written in the '60s...) that takes over the last hundred pages.
If you ask me, it's out of print for good reason. Or maybe...maybe I just didn't get it...?
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