Publish and be...
Jun. 22nd, 2009 08:52 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
imomusQuestion: Your first review of your first novel, how exciting is that? Answer: Exciting enough to mention! And publish, damn it!
The review appears (three months before the book is officially released by Dalkey, damn it!) in Dossier, a Brooklyn culture review which also titillates its readers in the new issue with Lou Doillon's breasts. Reviewer Adam Novy is a novelist and poet who teaches literature at Pratt. His students call him "hilarious" with "a dark sense of humor", so I can see why he liked the book. Here's what he wrote.
Dossier issue 3, 2009
The Book of Jokes by Momus
Review by Adam Novy
At the unimagined crossroads of 1,001 Arabian Nights and Truly Tasteless Jokes stands The Book of Jokes, by Scottish songwriter Nick Currie, who goes by the pen-name “Momus.” The speaker of The Book of Jokes, “Sebastian Skeleton,” finds himself in prison, where he’s targeted by a Murderer and a Molester—those are their names—whose dreadful intentions can only be suppressed by Sebastian’s storytelling, which makes him a Scheherazade figure, whose subject is almost exclusively his own family. When Sebastian was a boy, the Skeleton family performed—embodied? experienced?—a particularly gruesome and hilarious array of dirty jokes, as when, for example, Sebastian’s father falls in love with a duck, and then grows jealous of this duck’s duck boyfriend, whose barn he sets on fire, and then parades his mistress duck before his wife, announcing, “This is the pig I’ve been fucking.” (33) And when his wife protests, he says, “I wasn’t speaking to you.”
As Sebastian escapes prison with the Murderer and the Molester, the stories he tells grow complex, self-referential and oblique, and while each one takes the shape of a joke, chapters do not necessarily end there, they press on in unexpected, melancholy forms. Sebastian’s mother, Joan, leaves his father and dates another woman named Joan, while his father subjects him and his sister to escalating abuses I had better not describe, and entertains a priest who tries to exorcise his demons, and who also tells the one about the butcher and the human-eating cat. The Molester and the Murderer confess that they are innocent of their crimes, and later turn out to be lying. Everyone goes chasing their desires and never quite achieves them, and they never really understand themselves, which Momus echoes formally by having the Murderer and the Molester argue throughout the book over whether a man can really be his uncle’s uncle. The Book of Jokes is not a collection of punchlines or tension-building schemes, it’s a flexible and sensitive solution to the problem of how to invigorate conventions like the novel using overlooked materials.
Momus is a slyly articulate stylist with a lovely flair for syntax and the lexical. An example: Sebastian’s mother’s lawyer wears “…a fibule-fastened chiton surmounted by a himation, itself topped off by a jaunty chlamys…” (124) He also has a sensitive instinct for ethics: of Sebastian’s father, he says, “He was consummate hypocrite. Or, as he preferred to put it, a dialectician.” (150) And he finds a way to blend the funny and the horrid into the banal: “My father, meanwhile, spends his time making highly detailed technical drawings with a mechanical pencil. The drawings depict utopian improvements he intends to make to the estate. We know he will never implement these plans, and soon he admits it to himself, turning to his feathered friend instead.” (49) This passage wouldn’t be out of place in Thomas Bernhard; substitute the internet for the duck and you have almost every father in the world.
The Book of Jokes contains scenes of sexual violence that are genuinely shocking, which is Momus’s goal, of course: to transcend every barrier of taste, good and bad. On the other hand, the book offers chances to debate all sorts of questions we don’t usually get to ask, such as, is it worse to describe your father’s coitus with a duck, or your son’s? The Book of Jokes is an absolute gem. Adam Novy
The review appears (three months before the book is officially released by Dalkey, damn it!) in Dossier, a Brooklyn culture review which also titillates its readers in the new issue with Lou Doillon's breasts. Reviewer Adam Novy is a novelist and poet who teaches literature at Pratt. His students call him "hilarious" with "a dark sense of humor", so I can see why he liked the book. Here's what he wrote.
Dossier issue 3, 2009The Book of Jokes by Momus
Review by Adam Novy
At the unimagined crossroads of 1,001 Arabian Nights and Truly Tasteless Jokes stands The Book of Jokes, by Scottish songwriter Nick Currie, who goes by the pen-name “Momus.” The speaker of The Book of Jokes, “Sebastian Skeleton,” finds himself in prison, where he’s targeted by a Murderer and a Molester—those are their names—whose dreadful intentions can only be suppressed by Sebastian’s storytelling, which makes him a Scheherazade figure, whose subject is almost exclusively his own family. When Sebastian was a boy, the Skeleton family performed—embodied? experienced?—a particularly gruesome and hilarious array of dirty jokes, as when, for example, Sebastian’s father falls in love with a duck, and then grows jealous of this duck’s duck boyfriend, whose barn he sets on fire, and then parades his mistress duck before his wife, announcing, “This is the pig I’ve been fucking.” (33) And when his wife protests, he says, “I wasn’t speaking to you.”
As Sebastian escapes prison with the Murderer and the Molester, the stories he tells grow complex, self-referential and oblique, and while each one takes the shape of a joke, chapters do not necessarily end there, they press on in unexpected, melancholy forms. Sebastian’s mother, Joan, leaves his father and dates another woman named Joan, while his father subjects him and his sister to escalating abuses I had better not describe, and entertains a priest who tries to exorcise his demons, and who also tells the one about the butcher and the human-eating cat. The Molester and the Murderer confess that they are innocent of their crimes, and later turn out to be lying. Everyone goes chasing their desires and never quite achieves them, and they never really understand themselves, which Momus echoes formally by having the Murderer and the Molester argue throughout the book over whether a man can really be his uncle’s uncle. The Book of Jokes is not a collection of punchlines or tension-building schemes, it’s a flexible and sensitive solution to the problem of how to invigorate conventions like the novel using overlooked materials.Momus is a slyly articulate stylist with a lovely flair for syntax and the lexical. An example: Sebastian’s mother’s lawyer wears “…a fibule-fastened chiton surmounted by a himation, itself topped off by a jaunty chlamys…” (124) He also has a sensitive instinct for ethics: of Sebastian’s father, he says, “He was consummate hypocrite. Or, as he preferred to put it, a dialectician.” (150) And he finds a way to blend the funny and the horrid into the banal: “My father, meanwhile, spends his time making highly detailed technical drawings with a mechanical pencil. The drawings depict utopian improvements he intends to make to the estate. We know he will never implement these plans, and soon he admits it to himself, turning to his feathered friend instead.” (49) This passage wouldn’t be out of place in Thomas Bernhard; substitute the internet for the duck and you have almost every father in the world.The Book of Jokes contains scenes of sexual violence that are genuinely shocking, which is Momus’s goal, of course: to transcend every barrier of taste, good and bad. On the other hand, the book offers chances to debate all sorts of questions we don’t usually get to ask, such as, is it worse to describe your father’s coitus with a duck, or your son’s? The Book of Jokes is an absolute gem. Adam Novy
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(no subject)
Date: 2009-06-22 09:10 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2009-06-22 09:44 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2009-06-22 09:55 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2009-06-22 10:40 am (UTC)Spandau Ballet play a key role in early eighties British pop. Their journey from "Cut A Long Story Short" to "True" was really emblematic of a more general move from post-punk influenced synthpop to eighties white soul-funk. You can see the same trend in, say, Bowie's progress from "Ashes To Ashes" to "Let's Dance", or Scritti's move from experimentalism to "Wood Beez". I think it's a bit too pat to cite Thatcherism as the cause. Just as playful, plastic pop art followed abstract expressionism in the 60s, so does the "plastic" white soul of Spandau follow the style experiments of the late seventies and early eighties.
WC1/just so you know
Date: 2009-06-22 10:48 am (UTC)What are the chances
Date: 2009-06-22 11:50 am (UTC)Re: What are the chances
Date: 2009-06-22 12:08 pm (UTC)Re: WC1/just so you know
Date: 2009-06-22 12:10 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2009-06-22 03:56 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2009-06-22 04:18 pm (UTC)Lol, I haven't a clue what she got on. Is alienating the readers intentional or can't you help trying to be clever regardless? I mean does Primark even sell this outfit or what? Can't wait for the Guardian review or maybe I will just have to. A loooonnggg time.
(no subject)
Date: 2009-06-22 04:39 pm (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2009-06-22 04:49 pm (UTC)There is something coming up rather soon in The Guardian, but I can't say too much about it at the moment.
(no subject)
Date: 2009-06-22 08:07 pm (UTC)I hope the rest of your book is filled with interesting bits and pieces like this.
(no subject)
Date: 2009-06-23 06:48 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2009-06-23 07:20 am (UTC)(no subject)
Date: 2009-06-23 10:54 pm (UTC)Or shalwar kamiz? ;)