Brief but trenchant literary and cultural critiques of obscure books. Detailed travelogues of prehistoric stone circles in Northern Scotland. And Penthouse Forum pornography. Yes, that rather sums up this surprisingly funny avant-garde novel.

I’ve read one other book by Stewart Home, Come Before Christ and Murder Love, which is a favorite of mine. This was not quite as enjoyable, but it still got my rocks off. So to speak. I guess I like being challenged (and moderately tortured.) Home seems to be trying to explode the possibilities of the novel in a variety of ways. In this case, as in his other book, he has no interest in creating realistic believable characters. It’s impossible to determine if the words he puts in his characters’ mouths equate to his own views, but one character talks about how he prefers “decentering the bourgeoisie subject” to any irritatingly “realistic” novel. And I think that rings true here. Home is cutting up or disassembling literature, like Burroughs did, and the idea of the self all at the same time. You might even think of this as collage.

So…the story. If it can be called that. Revolves around a female (unconvincingly female–in fact, unconvincingly a real person…and quite intentionally so) who meets a guy (who sounds much like her), and she starts becoming him by reading his books. He may or may not be the man who wrote a book called 69 Things To Do With a Dead Princess and then changed his own identity. Or maybe not. Anyway, she starts reading his books, and they exchange withering critiques of obscure books. Much of their critiques are so brief one could hardly know if they are valid or not. And likely almost no one has read most of the books discussed. (Reminds me of literature professors who write papers about other literary papers in journals that only other literature professors read.) Whilst doing so, these “characters” attempt to retrace the footsteps of the author of 69 Things To Do With a Dead Princess who supposedly toured the ancient stone circles of Northern Scotland with the dead body of Princess Diana who didn’t actually die in a car crash but elsewhere and….and this book is nonfiction. So…this girl and this guy “character” are touring the stone circles with a ventriloquist dummy weighed down with bricks in an attempt to see if there is even any outside possibility that 69 Things To Do With a Dead Princess was true. Oh, and they have the most clichéd, obnoxious and unbelievable pornographic sex with each other, their friends, and absolute strangers along the way.

So, what’s the result? Now, I’m weird, and I like weird books. So take it with a grain of salt. The instant shifts from purely pornographic sex description without a hint of literary effort to abstract literary criticism is what I would call “decon-fucking-structively” hilarious. Yes, you may (or may not) find bits of it erotic, but what that mostly demonstrates is how easy it is to trigger the sex urge, even with the most stereotypical descriptions. It shows the hilarious devaluation and absurdity of both sex and theoretical criticism. He may not intend this, but it also makes me think that analyzing a book is like having sex with it—get under it, get into it. And having sex is like trying to understand a book. That is, an attempt to understand an idea. Or maybe criticism and sex are really about forgetting meaning, because meaning only comes as a gestalt and not in weird little bits. Perhaps he’s making fun of us for trying to understand this book…or anything. And then…

Then there are bits of this book that are so detailed and mundane that they are boring. And intentionally so, I would again suggest. Home is challenging and irritating the “subject.” That is us, the reader. Near the end, a character (or perhaps the author) notes, “The body of a dead princess is like a metaphor for literature.” The main characters are dragging a simulacrum of a dead princess around in order to test the veracity of a book (this book). So one meaning I get out of this read is that literature is an eternal and pointless pursuit of truth. It is never true and nothing is. But we drag our carcasses around life (and literature) in the hopes of proving that, well maybe, something might turn out to have the outside chance of having some truth to it. Maybe.

Or perhaps literature just is a dead princess. Stick a fork in it, she’s done.
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again, haven't read it. the author friended me on myspace and so i got a couple of his books but couldn't make myself read them. i'm not sure why.

if you want it, email me & i'll mail it to you.