The Persian dwarf and Slave Trader (a crossing between Twin Peaks and Pierre Guyotat) is the grotesque spokesman of the author's viewpoint with regard to culture and art, seen as the only way out for mankind. In his own words: I'd give this book zero stars, but I'm compelled to rate it both as a warning to my fellow readers, and to do my small part to help bring down its overinflated rating. [noble!] i couldn't do it. I do not normally abandon a story that I start but I could not read this book. It was miserable.

This is a postmodern coming-of-age tale. A disgusting, painful, terribly serious tale in which the protagonist undergoes any sort of mental and physical alienation. The book opens with a dialogue that seems to be taken from a French Nouvelle Vague film: a ten (!) year old child named Janey is dumped by her father, who is also her fiancé (yep).The guy can't stand the pressure of a long-term relationship, he needs his space and Janey is preventing him from being himself. By the way, she also suffers from pelvic inflammatory desease, guess why. Among the Mayan ruins of Merida, a disquiting landscape of unintelligible architecture and nature, they go through silences, sex, jealousy, sex, nostalgic memories, sex, incommunicabilty. They both know the romance is over. Most people are what they sense and if all you see day after day is a mat on a floor that belongs to the rats and four walls with tiny piles of plaster at the bottom, and all you eat is starch, and all you hear is continuous noise, you smell garbage and piss which drips through the walls continually, and all the people you know live like you, it's not horrible, it's just . . .Who they are." I'd rather have read the ingredient list on my shampoo bottle than to have wasted my time on this tripe. Great Expectations begins when a young boy, Pip, learns he has come into great expectations. What these expectations actually are, or the change from the total disparity between Pip's ideas of 'expectations' and what is real to Pip's learning to feel, is the narrative of this plagiarized Bildungsroman. This book is totally sensuous.

Customer reviews

Unlike the others, I wasn't appalled by the 'incest' angle because it is clear Janey doesn't have the priviledge of an adult perspective / value judgement on her life: this is life exactly how she has known it & she relays it as such.

Well, at least she did not plagiarise the title from any well-known author. Plagiarism does come into the novel, as we will see, but much of the novel is about the degradation of women. Various critics condemned this work because it is about the continual degradation of a woman and it certainly is not pretty. The story is about Janey. At the start of the novel, she is ten years old and is having an affair with her father, Johnny. The pair live in Merida, Mexico. Her mother died when she was one and regarded her father as boyfriend, brother, sister, money, amusement and father. (One of the many hand-drawn illustrations in the book is for this phrase and shows the bodies of two circumcised men, one with an erect penis, the other with a flaccid penis.) Johnny, however, is now interested in a woman more his own age, Sally. To get rid of Janey he sends her to school in New York. She hangs out with a wild bunch of kids called the Scorpions, has two abortions, the second one of which gives her pelvic inflammatory disease. After earning money by shop-lifting and working in an organic bakery, she is kidnapped by Mr. Linker, a Persian slave trader and taught to be a whore. It is so hard to like this book with its clunky prose, weird drawings, garbled thinking, bizarre narrative, a sex-obsessed protagonist... For all of the ways that this intersects with critical theory, the theorisation of women's writing (think Cixous' écriture féminine, Irigaray, Kristeva) and Lacanian psychoanalysis, it's also dirty and grubby and revelling in its own gleeful rebelliousness and subversive energy. The girl in this story had more agency and voice than any girl I’d ever read or would read in my entire life.” —Lydia Yuknavitch, national bestselling author of Thrust As Ginger’s condition evolves, she starts to grow hair all over her body and sprouts a tail that needs to be bound when she appears in public. Yet she is seen as more attractive, more alive, as she comes into her own, and she becomes more confident than she’d ever dreamed she could be. At the heart of Karen Walton’s excellent script is a metaphor for female adolescent transformation, anxiety, and liberation. It’s thanks to this simple twist on lycanthropy—as well as the dark pop aesthetic of John Fawcett's directing—that the film has become a cult classic. In light of Ginger Snaps’s acutely observed connections between werewolf lore and the well-worn beats of female coming-of-age stories—not least of all the idea that our bodies’ hormonal cycles, like a werewolf’s transformation, are deeply linked to the lunar calendar—it seems strange that this subgenre has not been associated with female adolescence sooner.

About Author

So this is story about Janey, a ten-yea-old girl, half-orphan, living with her father who to her is "boyfriend, brother, sister, money, amusement, and father" - and we might add sexual partner. First he rapes her, then she willingly has sex with him because it makes her feel loved. She is suffering from pelvic inflammatory disease, has her first abortion with 13, her second one a month later. Her father sends her to New York City, where apparrently she lives on her own, joins a gang and later is kidnapped, held captive and taught how to be a prostitute. At the age of 14 she gets cancer and dies. Right now I can speak as directly as I want 'cause no one gives a shit about writing and ideas, all anyone cares about is money." Despite the filth, the obscenity, the nihilism, this is basically a tale of hope. It's a journey through hell that leads nonetheless to some indefinite redemption.

this is sure a sore one to read, but i think anyone with an interest in the times (1977) should read, or force themselves to read it! it is patchy, some of it doesn't work, the opening sequences are very unsettling, it doesn't flow well, but isn't that just like punk? Yes, noted scholars, authors and critics who form the all seeing literary eye that is the 1001 books list, "Why do you hate people who read books? And why do you want to punish them so?"

smells of laziness not genius ... beneath the even headier smell of mendacity because ... nothing more than a practical joke? Whilst I appreciate the non too subtle message of female sexualisation, exploitation and degradation, the curve balls keep coming hard and fast, but always from left field. So, mono-dimensional diatribe, perhaps seeking to numb with repetitive mantra even though the palette of media truncates. I know the list is supposed to represent many novels, genres and styles not for their likeability but for their uniqueness and their gift to literature and the world at large, but come on. Blood and Guts in High School? Really? Yougottabekiddinme! I knew I would love this one. It was written in the stars and I could have shelved it as a fave without even reading it.

I have no idea what I just read. Nothing about this book made sense at all and I do not recommend it. And that hilarious feminist deconstruction of The Scarlet Letter, the Latinate versification – yeah, it's a mash up of many genres & styles. Blood and Guts in High School is about a girl, Janey. She finds her life is not going as planned. She lost her mother at a young age and her father is less than perfect. Janey encounters some disturbing sexual experiences. She just wants to be loved, but life can be cruel. My friends and I have this game. Take an object, any object – what pronouns would it have? Give it a try. A camping chair: they/them. A hot pink bicycle: she/her. Bottoms , the new teen sex comedy about a sapphic fight club: deeeeeefinitely she/they.Culture is our highest form of life. And it is literature more than any other art which enables us to grasp this higher life, for literature is the most abstract of the arts. It is the only art which is not sensual." However I mostly found it embarrassing to read in public because of the smutty line drawings, offensive because of the continual use of foul language or confusing because sentence flow skipped lines of text. Access-restricted-item true Addeddate 2022-02-21 04:13:23 Bookplateleaf 0002 Boxid IA40371105 Camera USB PTP Class Camera Collection_set printdisabled External-identifier Hawthorne had to protect himself so he could keep writing. Right now I can speak as directly as I want 'cause no one gives a shit about writing and ideas, all amyone cares about is money."