Acker, KathyBiblio.com
Kathy AckerBiblio.com
In Memorium To Identity
105<p>Synopsis</p><p>"In Memoriam to Identity is a weird violent searing angry work full of pain dislocation desire hate and the raging drive of resistant creation. . . . Kathy Acker has invented a form of secret historiography a language of shock and sensation that provides a vivid disruptive unsettling readout on the psychosocial trauma of our time."--Tim Clark Los Angeles Times Book Review.</p><p>Reviews</p><p>Acker known for her scatological excursions into the demimonde of post-modernism is above all a literalist and a literary one at that. If her concern is the alienation wrought by industrialization she literally appropriates Dickens's Pip as she did in her first novel sassily titled Great Expectations and thrusts him into the complexities of her time. In this new book Acker mourns the childhood innocence mostly sexual lost to socialization. She invokes the writings of Rimbaud and Faulkner blending them with modern angst and not a little political posturing--about AIDS Thatcherism etc. The book's four interlocking stories detail Rimbaud's doomed relationships with his mother and the poet Verlaine Quentin Compson's deluded engagement with his unfolding fate and the tragic exploitation again mostly sexual of several other characters. The tie that binds these narratives is the frenetic struggle to escape from the limitations of the social self. Acker writes with the coldest beauty and the most perfervid excess; she will find the audience that wants nothing in between. <br />Copyright 1990 Reed Business Information Inc.<br /><br />Acker's is not polite fiction nor is it naturalistic. It is however challenging certainly in its style and form but even more in its smart articulated anger and willingness to affront its audience. Appropriating the lives and works of Rimbaud and Faulkner this novel continues the challenge. The novel's first three sections introduce its three story lines: Rimbaud and his complex miserable affair with the older poet Verlaine; Airplane a young woman working in a sex show whose story concerns innocence and wildness and public and private acts; and Capitol the lover of Faulkner's Quentin Compson a girl struggling free of her parents' influence. As Acker's title warns memory and identity are linked. Themes recur and change joining the novel's separate parts until the individual stories themselves become joined and their characters interact. There is much to praise in this difficult novel not least of which is Acker's confident manipulation of narrative technique.<br /><em>- Kevin Ray Washington Univ. St. Louis</em><br />Copyright 1990 Reed Business Information Inc.</p> hardcover
Plot Twist · États-Unis249,00 $US≈ 210,68 €
