Eugene Marten

The premise of this book is that a janitor reuses the waste he collects from the office building where he works. This includes eating the food waste he finds, playing with certain items trashed by the women to get off, and using the scraps in trashcans as reading material. I kinda wish the book had remained on this plane and was a clear exploration of it but it added an uninteresting subplot about thuggish, noisy neighbors which just threw the whole thing into utter incoherence. The prose style is clipped, confused, and irregularly staccato owing to the main character's perspective. However, it just made the text harder to absorb. The only central concern I could find in this story was when he finds the woman's corpse in an office dumpster which just serves as the focus of periodic necrophiliac gross-outs and amounts to what everything else here amounts to - Nothing. The only real positive besides the core idea here is that the book is short and thus an easy and quick read. I would only recommend this if you want a quick read and a simple gross-out.… (mais)

A friend touted this as "probably the best book published in the last 10 years." I understand why: sentence by sentence it is tight, the editing brutal, the story gritty, the style experimental, the characters inscrutable, the ending horrifying.

Jelonnek is a blue-collar loser who happens into something of a heroic position, which is then systematically undermined as he psychically crumples under the weight of his new-found responsibilities. As he says late in the novel, "zero rhymes with hero...zero equals hero but where is the other half?"

Personally, while I can see the virtuosity that my friend praised, I couldn't help but think the writing and editing had a particularly Lishy feel--a "feel" that I find myself increasingly tired of, even while I acknowledge that his influence very often contributes to spectacular works of fiction (ahem Amy Hempel!). Indeed, Marten dedicates Firework to "Gordon" even though it is published by Tyrant, the younger Atticus Lish's preferred (and purportedly unaffiliated) house.

But Gordon's fingers are all over it--not just in the blurb, but in the narrative distance, the punchy sentences, the hyper-precise metaphors. I found this all very distracting, frankly. Each time I picked it up, I had to make it through at least 15 pages until I could ignore the Lish-ticks, and appreciate it on its own terms. Lish is good, but too much Lish is a bad thing; he requires a sort of flattened fiction which rubs me the wrong way.… (mais)

I have friend call amilcar… amilcar is more of a sick fuck than me, he enjoys watching news when there are big accidents so he can laugh at them… amilcar’s idea of a joke is go to Somalia set up a electric fence… get a big table fill with the most delicious food on the planet and put some fans so the smells gets everywhere… cuz he wants to laugh at the starving people getting electrocuted while trying to get to the food… while he eats… amilcar and I use to spend our nights trying to come up with the sickest sexual shit that we could ever imagine… you know funny shit like would you fuck a bitch with no legs, our you perform the black kiss on an old lady for a million pesos and if so describe how the experience would be like, if you were a necrophiliac how dead would you prefer your sex partners to be, just for the hell of it… I’m telling y’all this so y’all know that I’m a sick fuck, I mean seriously I have issues… the main reason why I’m so afraid of psychiatrist and that sort of people is cuz I think that If I don’t say the right thing around them they’ll put me on a psyche ward in no time… now I told y’all this so y’all know when I say must things don’t disturb me I actually mean it hell I find creepy stuff to be very amusing…! But today when Mr. Greg told me that this book has pretty disturbing things I said “nothing disturbs me I’m a sick fuck” I was saying the truth… but I wasn’t expecting this!!! I spend my entire train ride saying out loud WTF?? WAIT DID HE JUST…? OMG!!!!! WHY AM I LAUGHING LIKE THIS!!! THIS IS SICK!!! OMG! I’M TRAUMATIZED!!! And I’ve only read 30 pages…



Yay! Thank the gods (and Steven Erikson) that my fear of necrophilia is gone!!!… (mais)