Categories
Books Pastiche

Excruciation

As I said to my friend and pupil Pancetti, as we walked on the Via Corso, Rome is the only place a true artist and human can think clearly. Pancetti, firstly my friend, and only then my pupil. My pupils could only become so after first being my friend. Or rather, my pupils would only accept me as their tutor after they accepted me as their friend. And that would only be possible in Rome, the only place a true artist and human can think clearly. Pancetti smiled and agreed. I can think clearly here, in Rome, on the Via Corso, unlike in Austria, that base land of the petite bourgeois. Petite bourgeois Austria, that land of the self-satisfied yeoman, satisfied in all their base passtimes. Lower Austria is the place where all that is high minded goes to stultify and die. No, I will never leave Rome again, I told Pancetti, I will never go from where I can think clearly as an artist and a human and return to self-satisfied Austia, petite bourgeois Lower Austria. Pancetti only smiled and continued to walk on his perfectly polished loafers, bought only from the most expensive shops in the Via Corso. He is so excellently cultured, the very finest human in the world – a human like him could only exist in Rome, never could have arisen in base Lower Austria, to which I shall never go back. I walked down the Via Corso…

Repeat for three hundred pages, and then you get a new paragraph

Categories
Books Fiction Reviews

Review: Extinction

By Thomas Bernhard (1986)

So, finally forced myself to finish Extinction at the weekend. I did not get on with this at all – the whole book felt like an exercise in trying the reader’s patience. It turns out that two continuous paragraphs of hundreds of pages each, consisting entirely of the same criticisms of bourgeois Austria repeated again and again, in really very basic and graceless style – can become tiresome pretty quickly.

I don’t think I’ve read anything as simultaneously affected and leaden.

Categories
Books Humour Reviews

The academy of the overrated

I like to keep things positive when chatting about books, films, music etc if only because there’s just so much negativity available on the internet, and I often get the sense people find it much easier to rip on stuff than talk about something they really love.

On the other hand – it’s great fun. And maybe can tell us more about our tastes. So the Bernhard book got me thinking – what are people’s least favourite books/authors? Who do you think is overrated? Why?

Why? Why are you writing like that?! Stop referring to your hair as your “rug”!

Categories
Books Nonfiction Philosophy Reviews

Review: Feline Philosophy

By John Gray (2020)

So, this continues my frustrating relationship with John Gray, where I can appreciate he’s a good writer (crisp, clear, readable etc) but his basic positions seem … unfounded to me. And he doesn’t seem particularly interested in arguing for them, but just leans on the fact they’re unpopular to make them “unpalatable truths”, or something.