Quote from: collapsedhole on July 26, 2017, 05:29:11 PM
thoughts on Gira's "the consumer" book? always been curious about the content.
Reviews look promising:
"When the blurb on the back of a book features a quote from Nick Cave—the man who utilized exactly 236 different terms for vagina and masturbation in his wonderful novel The Death of Bunny Munro—calling your book repulsive, you know you have managed some kind of achievement...
The Consumer is a collection of grotesque and scatologically unsound vignettes written over a span of ten years by the cosmic guru of teeth-gnashing but melodious gothic drone, M. Gira. Like the music gifted to us by the band Swans (which Gira masterminds), the pieces in this collection tackle a wide range of topics guaranteed never to be uttered in any 19th century ladies' salon, such as rape, incest, sodomy, murder, self-mutilation, torture,cannibalism, animal cruelty, pedophilia, necrophilia, coprophagia, gang bangs, masturbation, bestiality and probably a few other indecencies guaranteed to make the tender-hearted reader blush if he or she weren't too busy squirming in their own vomit. But where Gira's music has the boon of lush and magnificent musical arrangements and utterly ear-pleasing post-punk/rock/whatever aesthetics, all we get here is words on the page, which makes for a more precarious experience.
The first half of the collection is a series of short-story-ish pieces composed in the early to mid-90's, and while several are particularly impressive pieces—such as the title story, "The Consumer, The Rotting Pig,"—all of the stories suffer from a heavy reliance on packing every sentence with disturbing imagery, which results in an over-kill of the preposition "like." In general, every story is written in a clinically distant style and relay hallucinatory threads of narrative told (usually) from the 1st person perspective of a self-loathing, mentally and physically impotent male. And while one of Swans great attributes is their mastery of repetition, here it only works well some of the time, making it difficult to distinguish any of the stories between one another.
The real pleasure for me came from the second half of the book, entitled "Various Traps, Some Weaknesses, Etc," which collects much shorter and less over-written snippets of prose penned ten years prior to the first half of the book. Many of the stories in this half feature the same titles as songs from Swans as well as lyrics, giving the impression that these writings were Gira's brainstorms for material to be better realized in musical form. While still pretty much indistinguishable from one another, these pieces are much shorter (some barely longer than a page) and can be read through in a mad dash, which gives the writing a certain heft, like riding across the back of some horrible, galactic beast rutting its way through endless dimensions of flesh, viscera and filth.
The overlying theme of this book is the way in which men and women yearn to consume one another—usually through extreme acts of sexual violence—in order to make up for their own moral and spiritual deficiencies, and Gira certainly goes about his objective correlative with a monomaniacal determination and without compromise. However, I can really only recommend this book for the most diehard of Swans fans (which, devoutly, I am) or for admirers of the most hardcore of transgressive fiction (I enjoy the occasional imbibing of the fucked-up). A profoundly unpleasant book—which is exactly the author's intent.
