Controversial books, a list (not mine)

[fogbank]

Re: Works by writers who had a score to settle with society

7. The Outsider by Albert Camus. One of the 20th century's existential jewels. It is a short unassuming novel through which the Algerian-French writer/philosopher delivers an awesome indictment of society.

You know, this is a book I read, but didn't get. I just didn't see any controversy or 'indictment of society' in it. Just a semi-interesting story written in a convincing voice. Anyone here want to explain to me what I was supposed to get out of this? Maybe I should have gotten the Coles Notes for it.

 

[Pure]

Lauren's initial comments on American Psycho

[start]
Damn. I'm late. I was going to add to that list:

American Psycho, by Bret Easton Ellis - Imaginatively explores the incomprehensible depths of madness and captures the insanity of violence in our time or any other. Patrick Bateman moves among the young and trendy in 1980s Manhattan. Young, handsome, and well educated, Bateman earns his fortune on Wall Street by day while spending his nights in ways we cannot begin to fathom. Expressing his true self through torture and murder, Bateman prefigures an apocalyptic horror that no society could bear to confront. -
[end excerpt]

====

No credit or source is given:

Looking at the publishers website:

http://www.randomhouse.com/vintage/screen/books/psycho.html

About the Book

In American Psycho, Bret Easton Ellis imaginatively explores the incomprehensible depths of madness and captures the insanity of violence in our time or any other. Patrick Bateman moves among the young and trendy in 1980s Manhattan. Young, handsome, and well educated, Bateman earns his fortune on Wall Street by day while sepnding his nights in ways we cannot begin to fathom. Expressing his true self through torture and murder, Bateman prefigures an apocalyptic horror that no society could bear to confront."

=====

So Lauren has not given any critique of her own, but merely copied without acknowledgement. One might ask, Doesn't this, perhaps, give us more reason to think that Lauren didn't read the book, rather than the well- known author and critic (Weldon) she puts down in those terms?

I'd still like to hear her reasons for admiring the book (as really excellent), but suspect we won't be seeing any.

 

[Pure]

One most controversial book is Uncle Tom's Cabin , which apparently sold 300,000 in its first year--and that was a century and a half ago-- and millions in the years after.

Too, the book may have helped end slavery in the US.

 

[SnoopDog]

I highly suggest 'American Psycho' to make that list as a lot of the others did already.

Maybe one could also mention 'Hannibal' by Harris.


Snoopy

P.S.: You all forgot THE most controversial book of all times....The Holy Bible.

 

[fogbank]

P.S.: You all forgot THE most controversial book of all times....The Holy Bible.

Is it that controversial, though? Or does it simply have controversial followers? Other than a bit of non-graphic father-daughter incest and and a murder or two, it's all fairly tame and respectable. 'Love thy neighbour' isn't that horrific an idea.

I definitely know what you mean; huge wars were fought because of Christianity, but I'd suggest that most of that had much more to do with culture and little to do with the book.

ps. Hey, I just realized an esoteric segway between this thread and another philosophical thread currently on the board:
In Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, Adams describes that titular book as being "more controversial than Olon Coluphid's (sp?) trio of philosophical blockbusters, Where God Went Wrong, Some More of God's Greatest Mistakes, and Who is this God Person Anyway?"

(good going, fogbank: first day on the board and you've already established that you're a total geek!)

 

[Guest]

Fogbank:

Fog, I read Camus too long ago, but if you scroll about a third down this page there's very good info on The Outsider/Stranger (everyone still argues about the translation of the title). P.

Camus

 

[Lucifer_Carroll]

Brave New World by Aldous Huxley (Moralist parents have a difficult time understanding ironic critique. I explained personally to one protesting father that he did realize that Huxley was agreeing with him, right? He was a father of a friend's so he only glared at me.)

The Great Gatsby by Fitzgerald. (Don't know why, but it was yanked off the book list a week after we started it (a week after I had finished it and loved it). I thin one of the "Muffy's dads" thought the Lane character struck to close to home or something.)

Harry Potter Series by J.K. Rowling (Aren't protesting Christian parents funny?)

Overall parents seem to like keeping their kids from reading and more importantly from thinking.




Anyway, so many books have been banned by some group of people that it seems like if a book somehow avoids getting any condemnation, it's probably just a bad and worthless book with nothing to say and nothing interesting to say it with. Hell, Farenheit 451 has been censored, burned, and banned before. Mmm, the irony.



P.S. fogbank, way to go with the Adams quote!

P.P.S. "On the Road" by Kerouac and "One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest" by Kesey probably could have gotten up there too. Books about not fitting in, heroes that are far from hero-like, condemnations of societally acceptable behavior, curse words and sexually explicit conversations and actions, whores as heroines, and violence and chaos being advocated as neccesary. Is there anything more for a society to hate?

 

[Guest]

More info:

Books Suppressed or Censored by Legal Authorities

Ulysses by James Joyce ... was barred from the United States as obscene for 15 years, and was seized by U.S Postal Authorities in 1918 and 1930. The lifting of the ban in 1933 came only after advocates fought for the right to publish the book.

In 1930, U.S. Customs seized Harvard-bound copies of Candide, Voltaire's critically hailed satire, claiming obscenity. Two Harvard professors defended the work, and it was later admitted in a different edition. In 1944, the US Post Office demanded the omission of Candide from a mailed Concord Books catalog.
...
Aristophanes' Lysistrata, Chaucer's Canterbury Tales, Boccaccio's Decameron, Defoe's Moll Flanders, and various editions of The Arabian Nights were all banned for decades from the U.S. mails under the Comstock Law of 1873. Officially known as the Federal Anti-Obscenity Act, this law banned the mailing of "lewd", "indecent", "filthy", or "obscene" materials. The Comstock laws, while now unenforced, remain for the most part on the books today; the Telecommunications Reform Bill of 1996 even specifically applied some of them to computer networks. The anti-war Lysistrata was banned again in 1967 in Greece, which was then controlled by a military junta.
...
Leaves of Grass, Walt Whitman's famous collection of poetry, was withdrawn in Boston in 1881, after the District Attorney threatened criminal prosecution for the use of explicit language in some poems. The work was later published in Philadelphia.

Jean-Jacques Rousseau's autobiography Confessions was banned by U.S. Customs in 1929 as injurious to public morality. His philosophical works were also banned in the USSR in 1935, and some were placed on the Catholic Church's Index of Prohibited Books in the 18th century.
...
Jack London's writing was censored in several European dictatorships in the 1920s and 1930s. In 1929, Italy banned all cheap editions of his Call of the Wild, and Yugoslavia banned all his works as being "too radical". Some of London's works were also burned by the Nazis.

South Africa's apartheid regime banned a number of classic books; in 1955, for instance, the New York Times reported that Mary Shelley's Frankenstein was banned there as "indecent, objectionable, or obscene". The regime also banned Anna Sewell's Black Beauty, a story about a horse.

... In the 1950s, according to Walter Harding, Senator Joseph McCarthy had overseas libraries run by the United States Information Service pull an anthology of American literature from the shelves because it included Thoreau's Civil Disobedience.

The Bible and The Quran were both removed from numerous libraries and banned from import in the Soviet Union from 1926 to 1956. Many editions of the Bible have also been banned and burned by civil and religious authorities throughout history.
...
The Savannah Morning News reported in November 1999 that a teacher at the Windsor Forest High School required seniors to obtain permission slips before they could read Hamlet, Macbeth, or King Lear. The teacher's school board had pulled the books from class reading lists, citing "adult language" and references to sex and violence. Many students and parents protested the school's board's policy, which also included the outright banning of three other books. Shakespeare is no stranger to censorship: the Associated Press reported in March 1996 that Merrimack, NH schools had pulled Shakespeare's Twelfth Night from the curriculum after the school board passed a "prohibition of alternative lifestyle instruction" act. (Twelfth Night includes a number of romantic entanglements including a young woman who disguises herself as a boy.)

An illustrated edition of "Little Red Riding Hood" was banned in two California school districts in 1989. Following the Little Red-Cap story from Grimm's Fairy Tales, the book shows the heroine taking food and wine to her grandmother. The school districts cited concerns about the use of alcohol in the story.

full article

 

[Lauren Hynde]

Hi Lauren,

That review is so completely off that it's not even fun to take it apart.

You put your view of Am Psycho's merit with lots of imperiousness and vehemence, and say others haven't read it, don't understand it, and kick our dogs.

What you haven't done is give us any reason to think the book is really excellent.

I never said others don't understand the book. I said, flat out, they (i.e.: Ms. Fay Weldon and you) did not read it. It's as simple as that.

American Psycho is one of the few masterpieces of contemporary literature. In a style that is unparallelled for its precision and control over the language, Ellis creates the most viscerally accurate portrait of our time, of our system of values, of our collective mindset. It's a powerful satire, denouncing the antisocial, the predatory, and the sociopath of America in the 80's. Denouncing all that is violence, that is inhuman, that is indifference about ourselves.

As a woman, I can say without a shred of doubt that American Psycho was the most important, the strongest feminist document I have read to date.

So Lauren has not given any critique of her own, but merely copied without acknowledgement. One might ask, Doesn't this, perhaps, give us more reason to think that Lauren didn't read the book, rather than the well- known author and critic (Weldon) she puts down in those terms?

Tell me something. Was it perhaps the fact that the piece of text you're referring to was separated from my commentary and in italics that tipped you off? That's brilliant, Pure.

Weldon is a hack. The diatribe-posing-as-review that you posted contains so many objective errors of fact that you should feel embarrassed to even stand up for it. The outrageous suggestion - I'll be kind to Ms. Weldon and use the word suggestion - that there is an autobiographical element in American Psycho, gratuitously accusing the author of being a misogynous, cannibalistic sociopath; the outright lie of saying that the publisher is artificially keeping the price of the book up to stop - a hilarious claim by anyone's standards, I'll give her that- to stop densely written, deadpan descriptions from reaching the hands of the greater public otherwise known as wankers; the assertion of the book as being anti-woman, anti-dog, anti-beggar and anti-child, seeing as it contains graphic description of violence towards them, while forgetting to mention that it's also, by that same order of ideas, anti-man, anti-gay, anti-established wealth, anti-stock market, anti-television, anti-Whitney Houston, anti-drugs, anti-ATMs, anti-policemen, anti-family, anti-each and every thing in the world today. Patrick Bateman feels for nothing and no one. He kills, not only "the powerless, the poor, the wretched, the sick in mind, the sellers of flesh for money". His apathy and contempt spread equally amongst the powerful, the rich, the beautiful. Any and everything that isn't Patrick Bateman.

Weldon is a hack. A disgruntled feminist who heard of the buzz, who flipped through a few pages of the book, who passingly read the scenes of violence towards women before putting the book down, with a preconceived notion. Because if a book includes scenes of brutal rape and violence towards women, we all know what that means. Because if the book doesn't have a Hollywood Ending, it isn't American. Because for a book to make the world move just a tiny little step in the right direction, the bad guy has to go down.

Weldon is a hack. Because if she had read the book, she would never have written that in American Psycho 'nobody cares'. 'There is no affect'. 'Nobody takes much notice'. She would have seen beyond the buzz words. She would have seen herself looking back at her. If Weldon had read the book, Pure, she would know that someone does care. The reader.

On a night when one hundred and fifty children are murdered in front of a TV crew and the images of it happening are relegated to the middle of the daily news without a care, don't you dare suggest that Patrick Bateman is anything but the most accurately gruesome portrayal of today's world.

Patrick Bateman has not gone down. Patrick Bateman is still, pretty much alive.

 

[MlledeLaPlumeBleu]

Lauren is dead-eye, fuck all, stone cold on.

Something seems stunningly familiar here, Chloe, baby- I think I've heard this conversation before. I think I've had this conversation before. Wasn't Huey Lewis there? And Dean Cain? I remember a whole lot of Perrier Jouet...

Oh yeah, and one guy who hadn't read the book.

Still squalling about the questionable literary merit of American Psycho?

Still completely without firsthand knowledge whereof you speak?

Christ, Pure- I'll roll up my sleeves and play whack-a-mole with you any day, (especially over the undeniable genius of Ellis) but please:

just lube up and read the book.


mlle

 

[Pure]

Hi Lauren,
Your statements are wildly distorted, but thanks for dilating a bit.

According to you, Weldon is a hack who hasn't read the book and has no idea what it's about.

///Looking at the Random House website where you 'borrowed' your other criticism:

http://www.randomhouse.com/vintage/screen/books/psycho.html


American Psycho
by Bret Easton Ellis

Weldon"American Psycho is a beautifully controlled, careful, important novel. . . . The novelist's function is to keep a running tag on the progress of the culture; and he's done it brilliantly. . . . A seminal book." --Fay Weldon, Washington Post

Isn't it odd that Ellis' publisher, displays *first* among review blurbs, a favorable passage from Weldon? A person so ill informed and who has not read the book.

My best guess is that you haven't carefully read Weldon's review, which is generally favorable (and noted as such by other critics).

I invite others to read it, and judge first if the piece is a 'pan' or a hack job.

Lauren said,
Weldon is a hack. The diatribe-posing-as-review that you posted contains so many objective errors of fact that you should feel embarrassed to even stand up for it. The outrageous suggestion - I'll be kind to Ms. Weldon and use the word suggestion - that there is an autobiographical element in American Psycho, gratuitously accusing the author of being a misogynous, cannibalistic sociopath;

A well known writer and feminist, has a positive opinion, but less so than you, and it's got your knickers in a knot.

She must be a hack.

You mention errors. Taking the first, above, you claim she "outrageously suggests" an autobiographical element:

http://www.geocities.com/Athens/Forum/8506/Ellis/ellishotwired.html
[Interview, Hotwired, 1995]

capasso asks: Was Patrick Bateman in American Psycho based on anyone you know?

Ellis: Partly guys I met on Wall Street, partly myself, partly my father.

Hey, but what does he know. You have *the true reading.*


Weldon is a hack. Because if she had read the book, she would never have written that in American Psycho 'nobody cares'. 'There is no affect'. 'Nobody takes much notice'. She would have seen beyond the buzz words. She would have seen herself looking back at her. If Weldon had read the book, Pure, she would know that someone does care. The reader.

Let me get this straight. Weldon says no one in the novel cares, and you answer, 'the reader cares.' This is one of her errors.

Weldon is a hack. A disgruntled feminist who heard of the buzz, who flipped through a few pages of the book, who passingly read the scenes of violence towards women before putting the book down, with a preconceived notion.

True, a number of feminists denounced it, and tried to have it banned. Apparently you don't notice Weldon's in a different camp.

Let's see, besides the blurb already quoted, we have her saying:

FW: This man Bret Easton Ellis is a very, very good writer. He gets us to a T. And we can't stand it. It's our problem, not his. American Psycho is a beautifully controlled, careful, important novel which revolves about its own nasty bits. Brilliant.

Weldon's critical thoughts appear to have incensed you: "brilliant" "seminal" "important" just don't do it. Weldon doesn't see that Ellis is the greatest, so you have to slag and misrepresent her.

J.

 

[Pure]

Hi Mlle,

At least you're clear and concise:

Still squalling about the questionable literary merit of American Psycho?

I didn't say that. Referring to the present thread only, I questioned its being a 'top' [rate] novel, and its being 'really excellent.' I noted its power. I'd say it's a good novel, not among the top ten of the 1950 - 2000 period.

Still completely without firsthand knowledge whereof you speak?

Actually not. But as with Lauren, you're going after the person, rather than the points. Cleverly and with panache.

just lube up and read the book.

hey i love your insults and lube up to them a lot, but i keep hoping you'll get better at presenting actual arguments about the points under discussion.

if I may quote your comrade in arms:
LH
As a woman, I can say without a shred of doubt that American Psycho was the most important, the strongest feminist document I have read to date.

The fact that the critical and writing community--including feminists and nonfeminists-- are divided on the issues, that some are negative, some positive, and occasionally, some, like Lauren, rapturously positive, seems not to register with you all.

 

[Liar]

Hi Lauren,
Your statements are wildly distorted, but thanks for dilating a bit.

According to you, Weldon is a hack who hasn't read the book and has no idea what it's about.

///Looking at the Random House website where you 'borrowed' your other criticism:

http://www.randomhouse.com/vintage/screen/books/psycho.html


American Psycho
by Bret Easton Ellis

Weldon"American Psycho is a beautifully controlled, careful, important novel. . . . The novelist's function is to keep a running tag on the progress of the culture; and he's done it brilliantly. . . . A seminal book." --Fay Weldon, Washington Post

Isn't it odd that Ellis' publisher, displays *first* among review blurbs, a favorable passage from Weldon? A person so ill informed and who has not read the book.

My best guess is that you haven't carefully read Weldon's review, which is generally favorable (and noted as such by other critics).

I invite others to read it, and judge first if the piece is a 'pan' or a hack job.

I'm not getting into the debate wether Weldon is a hack or not, or if she have read the book.

But why Random House puts a favorable quote from a Washington Post reviewer on their website isn't all that damn hard to figure out.

It sells more copies.

#L

ps. This discussion aside, have you read the book? If not, do. Because when we strip away wether it feminist or not, whatever autobiographical elements there might or might not be etc etc etc, the bottom line is still that it's a damn good book.

 

[Pure]

It *is* a good book, though it made me lose my lunch at a couple points.

There are, however, extended boring and unliterary passages, listing the Brand names of each item of clothing and accessory.

And, excuse the boorish question, but why is it that someone so concerned with possessions, looks, and prestige turns out to be a
'serial killer.'??? How plausible is the connection between the thoughts "What a great Rolex watch I have! Can there be anyone so dapper as myself?" And the thought, "I think I'll torture my 'date' tonight and apply a blowtorch to her eyeballs till they explode."

If you've read about serial killers, hardly any fit this bill of ostentatious luxury, though of course many criminals are highly self absorbed. It's a sort of leftie stereotype that a Rolex can be a mark of a serial killer, as opposed to just a shallow, asshole, who may be into a lot of white collar crime he'll get away with (not too many folks get away with murdering 20 people, except for military figures).

OK. It's the author's 'conceit' or assumption: "Our" [US]materialism is of a piece with depraved, conscienceless serial murder." The author does very well with this assumption. Even brilliantly, as Weldon says.

One could write a novel on the assumption that Texas oilmen are pederasts. It might read well and be a fine novel. And funny and satiric, a bit like "Candy." But it would illuminate neither the inner workings of the oilman's mind [an actual oilman] nor the inner workings of the pederast's mind. Or any connection between these mentalities (on the rare occasions when there is such a connection).

So without detracting from Ellis' writerly skills, as shown in his affectless portrait of an psychopathic killer, it doesn't, imo, hold a candle to Capote's picture of a psychopath--indeed an actual
one-- in In Cold Blood .

 

[Guest]

Pure, this is just an aside, but I find it remarkable that you are so concerned with credulity in a work of satirical fiction. I can't imagine Mr. Bateman can or should be compared to any real life persona. Your entire post is just plain silly if truly a literary exercise in criticism. P.

 

[Pure]

There is a rather detailed analysis of Ellis major works, running over a hundred pages, at

http://www.univ-lille3.fr/ufr/angellier/bibangellier/etudes_recherches/memoire_fenaert.html

"Emptiness in the Novels of Bret Easton Ellis," by Thomas Fenaert

Much is descriptive and analytical; the assessment is positive
(though not unrestrestrainedly so).

Note: I see Lauren Hynde has taken her screenname from an early Ellis novel, a gesture, no doubt, of tribute, if not worship.
Cool.

Further Note: The movie, "American Psycho," by Mary Harron, based on the book, is generally considered an excellent work of art; some say, superior to the book (in part in keeping certain details from the camera's view). I have not seen it.

See review at
http://www.cinephiles.net/American_Psycho/Film-Synopsis.html

 

[MlledeLaPlumeBleu]

S-t-r-e-ee-e-t-ch. You must be very limber.

Sorry Pure, but if you thought I was "attacking the person instead of the points" by insisting that "the person" edify himself firsthand on the subject before making said points, I really can't find a logical common ground with you.

I would think that someone so rabidly besotted with accuracy and delineating tiny flaws would find complete primary subject ignorance a rather large one for a participant in any oppositional conversation. I suppose it depends on whether the transgressor is yourself or the other person.

And no, I don't think you've read the book. One could note that you actually never *said* you did- only inferred it.

Here's what I think: I think you flew to as many websites as you could, reading as many reviews, summaries, excisions, excerpts as possible so that you could toss off some "observations", ostensibly from personal knowledge- such as the laundry listing of labels and a vague description of violence. That would also explain how you were suddenly aware of the source of Lauren's nom de plume [from Rules of Attraction and Glamorama].

There is a rather detailed analysis of Ellis major works, running over a hundred pages

Yes, I'm sure there is.

mlle

Additionally, if you did read the book, and it "made you lose your lunch at points" then I imagine you must dry heave every time the Roadrunner drops an anvil on Wiley Coyote.

The violence is cartoon, absolutely ridiculous, gratuitous and over-the-top.

Ellis' American Psycho is no more about serial killing than Jonathan Swift's A Modest Proposal is about eating children.

 

[Pure]

mlle, thanks for the biographical fiction. you forgot to add the part about my flunking English, being indicted for cruelty to animals, and scouring the internet for unspeakably vile photos of farm girls and horses.

though you are the most focussed (and savage and wonderful) of the three (Perd, Lauren, you), you all have such trouble dealing with substance--merits of the work-- and handling disagreement.

you are correct on one point, however:
you were suddenly aware of the source of Lauren's nom de plume [from Rules of Attraction and Glamorama].

that's true, because the Fenaert study and others mentioned Ellis' early works, which I have not read.

best,

J.
----
PS. Is Fay Weldon a hack? I notice she's got 20 novels to her name, and a couple minor prizes, including Booker short list, but I wonder if that cuts the mustard with you?

Does this feminist 'sister' deserve a hearing, despite her brazen lack of 100% agreement?

Well, you must admit she's a *prolific* hack.

-----

PPS. Rereading your posting I couldn't believe my eyes. I know it's ridiculously petty:

Mlle: // One could note that you actually never *said* you did- only inferred it. //

Could it be that mlle has gotten 'infer' and 'imply' confused?
Holy Smoke! My literary paragon now has a speck of dust on her alabaster foot!

 

[MlledeLaPlumeBleu]

>>mlle, thanks for the biographical fiction. you forgot to add the part about my flunking English, being indicted for cruelty to animals, and scouring the internet for unspeakably vile photos of farm girls and horses.<<

Right, thanks for reminding me. I was trying to be discreet.

Yes, I'm savage, but in a Tarzan/Leatherstocking kind of way; you know, with all the inherent nobility that implies.

I'm completely happy to handle disagreement.

I just don't have to agree with it. Those are kind of the basic rules of adverse contention, right?

I can't say I ascribe particular creedence in someone just because they're seen a whole lot having a whole lot to say. Look at our president.

For that matter, there are a lot of prolific hacks out there... [READ]

No, I didn't say it. That would be unkindly savage. I just thought it.

mlle

 

[MlledeLaPlumeBleu]

>>>Could it be that mlle has gotten 'infer' and 'imply' confused?
Holy Smoke! My literary paragon now has a speck of dust on her alabaster foot!<<

I'm actually quite tan. With grey eyes.

It's very striking.

My mother said so.

You know, right after she told me I'm the smartest girl in the world and that everybody loves me.

And that little boys who try to punch you in the stomach are flirting, in their awkward way.

mlle

 

[Pure]

S-t-r-e-t-c-h

(cartoonish depictions)

mlle:
Additionally, if you did read the book, and it "made you lose your lunch at points" then I imagine you must dry heave every time the Roadrunner drops an anvil on Wiley Coyote.

The violence is cartoon, absolutely ridiculous, gratuitous and over-the-top.
---------

*That's a stretch: Here's a bit of your 'genius' (at studying coroner's reports).

Let's have a poll:

How many find the excerpt Wiley Coyotish, cartoonish, and ridiculous, and how many tend to get sick to the stomach. (Not that that's improper for a novelist to attempt, mind you.)

Bret Ellis, in American Psycho:

Her breasts have been chopped off and they look blue and deflated, the nipples a disconcerting shade of brown. Surrounded by dried black blood, they lie, rather delicately, on a china plate I bought at the Pottery Barn on top of the Wurlitzer jukebox in the corner, though I don't remember doing this. I have also shaved all the skin and most of the muscle off her face so that it resembles a skull with a long, flowing mane of blond hair falling from it, which is connected to a full, cold corpse; its eyes are open, the actual eyes hanging out of their sockets by their stalks. Most of her chest is indistinguishable from her neck, which looks like ground up meat, her stomach resembles the eggplant and goat cheese lasagna at Il Marlibro or some other kind of dog food, the dominant colors red and white, and brown. A few of her intestines are smeared across one wall and others are smashed up into balls that lie strewn across the glass-top coffee table like long blue snakes, mutant worms. The patches of skin left on her body are blue-gray, the color of tinfoil. Her vagina has discharged a brownish syrupy fluid that smells like a sick animal, as if that rat had been forced back up in there, had been digested or something." (p.344.)

-------

 

[MlledeLaPlumeBleu]

It's excessive, and intentional.

I guess satire doesn't make me squeamish.

 

[Guest]

It's excessive, and intentional.
I guess satire doesn't make me squeamish.

Yep, the mention of Pottery Barn gives it away. Made me larf.

Trova

 

[Pure]

and what make the passage such a fine piece of satire, indeed the work of a genius is.....

and what exactly do you think is being satirized besides _Gray's Anatomy_ and Goldberger's _Forensic Pathology_.

 

[MlledeLaPlumeBleu]

>>>and what make the passage such a fine piece of satire, indeed the work of a genius is.....<<<


In a word: context

Which brings us, tail-bitingly, spherically serpentine- right back to my original request.

Read the [fucking] book.

mlle