(noah cicero blogged about my review of his book
we had a debate once on his blog about jack kerouac)
i had previously read his poem collection "frowns need friends too" as well as various things on the internet.
i went into this book expecting to like it.
and i did.
this book was fun to read, although it sometimes made me bit nauseous (yes, a combined mental and physical sensation, usually with negative connotations; transcending the mental-physical divide)
it reminded me of the beckett and the absurdists.
the characters are kind of stuck in void.
its pretty deadpan and dry, the whole book
the narrator will say something totally off the wall in the midst of a monotonous monologue about his day
there aren't a whole lot of characters besides the narrator, his roommate, and the "girl from the first floor" who the narrator has sex with eventually.
there isn't a great deal of "plot" in the "traditional" sense.
it is more just an "everyday life" kind of plot.
that is cool, because most people don't live exciting lives, they just live.
the narrator is pretty paranoid, perverse, fucked up insane, kind of.
he reminded me of the protagonists you might find in dostoevsky, the ones who are always contradicting themselves and thinking things that are detached from any "normalcy" and are a bit insane/crazy and a bit dirty/disgusting
the book takes place in pretty impoverished urban conditions (decayed part of chicago)
a favorite line of mine in the book is: (referring to roommate)" It looks like me and him are dust in someone else's carpet and we can't say hello for fear of having to come up with a good reason."
he pretends to be asleep later in the book when he is with his girlfriend/"girl from the first floor" and i liked that part a lot because i can relate to be pretending to be asleep
the book is written in short one-or-two sentence paragraphs of prose and dialogue (much like this blog post)
noah cicero does that in his books sometimes too a lot
if sam pink or noah cicero read this i would love to know why they started to write like that
maybe i will just ask them
y'all should read this book
see you on march 31, 2011
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