A review by geofroggatt
Babyfucker by Urs Allemann

3.0

In my mission to read as much taboo and transgressive fiction as I can, I stumbled upon this book and I have been avoiding it ever since. After seeing the length, I decided to get this one over with and just bite the bullet and read it. This book, to me, is about the reader being trapped in a deranged mind and trying to decipher a story from his stream of consciousness. Part of the twisted charm of this book is the simple cover and title, and as disgusting and transgressive as it is, people pick it up and read it all the same. Including me. What does that say about people? What does that say about me? This book in itself makes us question the nature of taboo and transgressive fiction and what stories can and should be told. Why do we tell stories like this? Why do we read them? It reinforces the power of words and how we can use and abuse them, how words are more than just words and they hold weight and can change the world in a tangible way. From the first sentence, it would be easy to mistake this book for a cheap attempt at shock through obscenity, but there’s something more here. The stream of consciousness and rambling narrative hides something beneath the obscenity and crass darkness. We follow a man who claims to fuck babies. At first it seems literal, until we slowly come to find that the man is deranged and may not exist in reality and sanity the way that people do. Is this literal? What is real and what is not? This book is not what you think it is… or is it? Are we inside the mind of a deranged man exorcising his guilty intrusive thoughts, or are we piecing together the psyche of a monstrous sexual predator? It almost doesn’t matter. I think this book functions as something more than what the narrative means. This is a reminder of the power of words and literature, how choosing your words carefully can create beautiful or monstrous things. Most of all, I think this book is a grim reminder that monstrous and horrific things cannot be decorated, glamorized, or beautified beyond what they truly are. Great and terrible things are still terrible. The foreword and afterword are necessary to read and understand this story, and I appreciate how it bookended the strange experience of reading this book. While this was an interesting look into an obscene mind, I admit I don’t think most readers would appreciate what this novel is trying to do, and that’s okay too.

Elizabeth Hall interviewed the author and I found his words to be intriguing:

“It wasn’t an idea. It was an image. An image in my head. A vexing image. An image that was just suddenly there. Without reminding me of anyone or anything. Without eliciting any feeling in me. That’s what was vexing. A challenge. And then suddenly the sentence was there. As a response to the image? As an escape? As self-defense? I don’t know. “I fuck babies.” And then there was the decision to attempt to extract something like a story from this terrible sentence.”