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A review by meganmilks
The Marbled Swarm by Dennis Cooper
5.0
MIRROR TRICKS, ALL OF IT!!! i need to read this again to fully grasp 'what happened' both on the referential level and on the level of form -- but was deliriously riveted by the language and syntax play which is frequently hilarious, and very similar to Urs Allemann's BABYFUCKER w/r/t the comically disorienting syntax providing an uncomfortably comfortable distance from the horrors it's describing, though enacted in a much different way, a mode of rather hilariously insufferable linguistic excess.
some favorite moments:
On the off chance my manner hasn't made self-flattery a metaphoric gild to my veritable lily, allow me to infer that on the issue of attractiveness, I could spend many numbing if prettily over-written pages counting the ways in which my beauty is a fact, disputed by no one I've ever met, although I suspect a simple background check might do. 7
*
Were I even half as gay as you imagine, I might have rearranged my scheduled for the next few days and fucked Serge until his epidermal layer collapsed around his neck like an old white sock. 21
a favorite passage:
Didier was nothing much to look at, but his face had possibilities. Think of Leonardo DiCaprio, post-Titanic, and, more specifically, of his head's vast sweeps and curves of unused skin in which his features seem to gang up like the finger hole in a bowling ball. Now drizzle that with Kurt Cobain's scraggly hair at its most unwashed, and you will sort of have the crux of Didier's outstanding issues at your fingertips.
...
So, while I was no more tantalized by him than little girls holding baby dolls are mothers, it seems my wish to leave the house in which Alfonse was so exceptionally imprinted and furiously carved, meaning in everything and everyone, myself included, encouraged me to crowd inside the strange new door with Didier, then walk and crouch and finally crawl behind him down a wooden cave, or so I thought, squeezed and burrowed through unceasing treasuries of spiderwebs and insulation that slowly rubbed the home into the ghost of any structure I had entered in my life, until we found the world's most secret exit, and I used it. 125
some favorite moments:
On the off chance my manner hasn't made self-flattery a metaphoric gild to my veritable lily, allow me to infer that on the issue of attractiveness, I could spend many numbing if prettily over-written pages counting the ways in which my beauty is a fact, disputed by no one I've ever met, although I suspect a simple background check might do. 7
*
Were I even half as gay as you imagine, I might have rearranged my scheduled for the next few days and fucked Serge until his epidermal layer collapsed around his neck like an old white sock. 21
a favorite passage:
Didier was nothing much to look at, but his face had possibilities. Think of Leonardo DiCaprio, post-Titanic, and, more specifically, of his head's vast sweeps and curves of unused skin in which his features seem to gang up like the finger hole in a bowling ball. Now drizzle that with Kurt Cobain's scraggly hair at its most unwashed, and you will sort of have the crux of Didier's outstanding issues at your fingertips.
...
So, while I was no more tantalized by him than little girls holding baby dolls are mothers, it seems my wish to leave the house in which Alfonse was so exceptionally imprinted and furiously carved, meaning in everything and everyone, myself included, encouraged me to crowd inside the strange new door with Didier, then walk and crouch and finally crawl behind him down a wooden cave, or so I thought, squeezed and burrowed through unceasing treasuries of spiderwebs and insulation that slowly rubbed the home into the ghost of any structure I had entered in my life, until we found the world's most secret exit, and I used it. 125