Don Quixote: A Novel

by Kathy Acker

In this extraordinary and unique novel, Don Quixote is an indomitable woman on an intractable quest to become a knight and defeat the evil enchanters of modern America.

Genres: Fiction, Feminism, Classics, Novels, Literature, The United States Of America, Contemporary

208 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1986

About the author

Born of German-Jewish stock, Kathy Acker was brought up by her mother and stepfather (her natural father left her mother before Kathy was born) in a prosperous district of NY. At 18, she left home and worked as a stripper. Her involvement in the sex industry helped to make her a hit on the NY art scene, and she was photographed by the newly fashionable Robert Mapplethorpe. Preferring to be known simply as 'Acker' (the name she took from her first husband Robert, and which she continued to use even after a short-lived second marriage to composer Peter Gordon), she moved to London in the mid-eighties and stayed in Britain for five years.

Acker's writing is as difficult to classify into any particular genre as she herself was. She writes fluidly, operating in the borderlands and junkyards of human experience. Her work is experimental, playful, and provocative, engagingly alienating, narratively non sequitur.

Reviews

[Ian "Marvin" Graye · Rating 5 out of 5]

A Post-Modernist Critique of Catholicism and Capitalism

Kathy Acker's “Don Quixote" is not just a consummate post-modernist novel, it's a virtual treatise on the characteristics that define such a novel. Moreover, it advocates a literary form of socio-political activism.

Until the third and last section of the novel, it seemed as if its debt to Cervantes' “Don Quixote" was superficial (perhaps a mere framing device), one that was almost matched by the appropriation of other works and literary techniques, such as “Pale Fire", “The Leopard", and “Pandora's Box" (the Lulu part of the middle section).

However, the last section adapts and reinforces Cervantes’ critique of the institutions of Catholicism, Christianity and religion (discussed in my review of Cervantes' novel earlier this year).

The Hot Mess of Identity

Identity (not to mention love, gender and sexuality) is a core theme of the novel. Characters aren’t singular entities. They have multiple aspects, which decenter and destabilise them in an almost schizophrenic fashion. The subject is fluid, as is the object, so that they flow into each other. (“I can be – whoever I want...I can do anything I can be anyone one day and the next day do be anyone else, even the same one. I'm as unpredictable as these winds.”)

Occasionally, it's difficult to identify and understand who is talking to whom. The reader is entrapped by and in the instability. Kathy Acker decenters and destabilises both the subject and the reader. It's a hot mess. This aggravated me for the first 35 pages, but then I realised this was probably the point, and I had to defer judgement until the end.

Madonna Quixote

In the first section, a pregnant woman decides to have an abortion after the end of her relationship. Deprived of a conventional identity, she co-opts the name of Don Quixote in order to embark on her new journey and adventure. You could almost call her Donna (or Madonna) Quixote.

If you adopt the normal interpretation of Don Quixote, it's ironic that Acker has chosen this character as her model: The woman “knew that this world's conditions are so rough for any single person, even a rich person, that person has to make do with what she can find: this’s no world for idealism.”

The conventional view is that Don Quixote is so idealistic in his pursuit of love that those around him regard him as crazy and insane.

Acker’s woman likewise longs for (or to) love. She asks, “Why can't I just love?” Must you have somebody to love?

The response (a linguistic one) is, “Because every verb to be realised needs its object. Otherwise, having nothing to see, it can't see itself or be. Since love is sympathy or communication, I need an object which is both subject and object...” Only it's problematic when both people are multi-faceted or decentered.

Acker plays with the words “knight" and “night": After the abortion, “All night our nurses’ll watch over you, and in the morning, you'll be a nìght.” In the realm of myth, the male Don Quixote represents light or day, while the female represents darkness or night.

Right Every Wrong

Love, for Acker and her female Don Quixote, has a dual function: “By loving another person, she would right every manner of political, social, and individual wrong: she would put herself in those situations so perilous the glory of her name would resound.”

Acker goes beyond sexual relationships, and explores power and control in a social and political context, even if it is men who are in a position to dominate and subjugate.

Revolution, Chaos and Self-Destruction

In the third section, Don Quixote identifies that people are the victims of “evil enchanters", and seeks to remedy their plight.

We all inhabit “prisons of self-determinacy":

“[We want] to wallow in the outside world. [We wallow] in all the hatred and filth that is outside. Nowadays, only the family stands against hatred and filth. On a political level, hatred is revolution. On a social level, it's chaos. On a personal level, self-destruction. You [exist] in revolution, chaos and self-destruction.”

In a passage that resonates in the context of Brexit, one of the characters predicts:

“If a progressive ‘second revolution' still does not take place in England, then a conservative counter-revolution will; and in that case the movements toward Scottish, Welsh, and even Ulster independence will acquire added progressive impetus and lustre, as relatively left-wing causes saving themselves from central reaction.”

The third section resumes the sexual political journey, before morphing into a more socio-political agenda. It even takes on the family:

“My family protests the way I am. The fact that I am this way. I'm conscious that my refusal, my refusal upon refusal, my double mutiny that mutiny, this momentary attempt of mine to be a whole human, renders me liable to [my family's] disgusting penalties. Like any other rebel slave, perverse rebel, I resolve, now and forever, with total desperation, always to go to all lengths.” (Sancho Panza/St Simeon/the dog)

All Story-Telling is Revolution

So, to be a whole human, one must embrace the personal, the sexual, the social, the political, the rebellious, the revolting, the revolutionary.

Acker's Don Quixote responds, “If pornography is that which incites its listeners to degeneracy, violence, and rioting questioning, what you're telling me is pornographic.”

St Simeon counters that “All stories or narratives, being stories of revolt, are revolt...These stories or revolts are especially revolts against parents. Why? Because parents have control, not only over children, but also – to the extent that adults're products of their childhood – over everyone. In order to live or be human, the self must seize control.”

Yet, it's not as easy as it sounds. Acker’s Don Quixote recognises that:

“I'm a mess. Since I objectively know who I am, this’s who I am. Since I'm a mess or have no control over any of my emotions, these emotions take me over. These emotions're so fierce, I must be controlled. This's why love's control for me.”

Still, she pleads for love and tenderness, even heterosexual kindness and gentleness. “Without the touch of another human being, I'm nothing.” Yet, within pages, she realises that touching the other (a female, this time) is “in some way detrimental to her identity/self-determination/separation-from-me".

The Religious White Men

Ultimately, Don Quixote recognises that “What concerns me, is me.” She believes that religion is the problem. She promises St Simeon the dog that “I will now lead you in a fight against the religious white men and against all the alienation that their religious image-making or control brings to humans.” She is promising to assault Catholic faith in which the Lord declares that “You have to give up your self.”

Religion enchants and enslaves believers:

“In my vision, those who're enchanted, since they're no longer in touch with their own bodies, have no idea what their needs are...

“Since Jesus Christ made his disciples sleep on beds of thorns, religion is enchantment.”

To resist the enchantment, Don Quixote must resort to language, poetry and song:

“It is necessary to sing, that is to be mad, because otherwise You have to live with the straights, the compromises, the mealy-mouths, the reality-deniers, the laughter-killers. It is necessary to be mad, that is to sing, because it's not possible for a knight, or for anyone, to foray successfully against the owners of this world.”

The Language of Freaks

Don Quixote concludes:

“Language being a form of communication is a political occurrence...

“Language presupposes community. Therefore without you, nothing I say has any meaning. Without love or language, I do not exist. We who are freaks have only friendship.

“It is for you, freaks my loves, I am writing and it is about you...I'm talking about the self and others. Where are there possibilities of lives of feeling and touching?”

“This, my first and final dream, is not the dream of capitalism.”

Newly awoke to the world, Kathy Acker used her novel(s) partly to call for and mobilise a political occurrence against religion and capitalism.

It's not clear whether the reference to a "dream" in the title of the novel is to an illusion or a vision. Whatever, it remained unrealized, except in the realm of fiction, at the time of Kathy Acker's death. Which is, at least, a start.


VERSE:
[In the Words of Kathy Acker]

Clues to the Spirit

And at the end of time
Prior to the morning
When even your own home’s backs
Shrink in fear from all skies
Truffled by gun fire,
When your feet fear
The soul’s erosion
And the ground crumbling
Beneath them,
Until the point that
There is no more ground,
When even straights sense
This decay of their world,
We have the clues
To the spirit.

The Real History

Our suffering has been is
And will be the anger,
The real history,
The hammer and wrench
By which we, inch by inch,
Forge the glorious orb of our sun.

There is You, Knight

Because with every night's onset
The sun sinks below its horizon,
Because there are no more new stories,
No more tracks, no more memories:
There is you, knight.

Awoke to the World

Since I am no more, forget Me.
Forget morality.
Forget about saving the world.
Make Me up.
I closed my eyes,
Head drooping,
Like a person drunk
For so long
She no longer knows
She's drunk,
And then, drunk,
Awoke to the world
Which lay before me.

Freak Flag Flying

Even freaks need homes,
Countries, language,
Communication.


SOUNDTRACK:

Soul II Soul - "A Dream's A Dream"

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VE18q...

Soul II Soul - "Holding On"

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0YKTo...

[Lee Foust · Rating 5 out of 5]

Although it's weird, my project of reading Kathy Acker's novels backwards in time, and so my reading of the movement from novel to novel is perhaps bassackward, I sensed an interesting shift between Don Quixote and its follow up Empire of the Senseless. While these two novels stand out, for me, in Acker's oeuvres as the two narrative (rather than thematically-organized) novels--this one framed by Cervantes's classic and Empire... by the classic misadventures of a separated couple of an ancient Greek romance and all of that genre's many Medieval romance and novelistic offspring--there's a thoughtfulness and absence of violence that marks this novel from the author's last four--from Empire... to Pussy, King of the Pirates. Even though pirates do appear here--quite briefly at the end--they're not rampaging in violent taboo-breaking mayhem as they do in the novels to follow. Even My Mother: Demonology, the only one of the latter novels bereft, if I recall correctly, of violent revolution and piracy, has so much personal, S&M violence, that it fits in fine with the latter stage of Acker's fiction--I guess we could call them the mid-1980s to mid-1990s novels or, the mature Grove Press years.

How do I read this shift? Well, the bullying and horror of the Reagan years, homelessness, and general economic desperation were becoming more than evident in the U.S.A. by 1985-6 when Don Quixote was being written and published. I, myself, wrote my first novel in 1986, exploring the possibility of armed struggle against the new cultural fascism but rejecting it for a more personal, internal revolution through art in my own works to follow. Perhaps '86 was that watershed year when we pacifists turned violence loose inside of ourselves and our art when the fascists came that much closer and we felt threatened. Whatever the reason, I loved this novel for its more reasoned, reasonable, and entertaining strategies having less to do with the violence and violent taboo breaking so evident in Empire of the Senseless. Not that the world situation wasn't all the more dire as Acker went on to write Empire..., and that the strategy wasn't wholly necessary, I just prefer this approach as a reader.

Admittedly, there are a few dead spots in this conglomerate novelistic construction--part and parcel to Acker's cut up and appropriating style. But the opening and closing sections are such fabulous meditations on politics, gender issues, religion, and American history, while, at the same time, capturing and adapting the spirit of the original Don Quixote's magic, that they are among Acker's best pages. Also, the chorus of dogs and other characters actually bring Don Quixote closer to Mikhail Bakhtine's definition of a novel as a dialogic rhetorical exercise. Here points of view are juxtaposed, confronted, re-routed, re-arranged, untied, re-thought, and always left unresolved. I like such thoughtful writing--a series of overlapping and self-contradictory phrases, in the end. This is why art so easily outstrips propaganda--it argues against itself. It makes you think rather than tries to convince you to believe something--which always turns out to be a scam in the end: some old man's capitalist scheme to get your money.

[emily · Rating 4 out of 5]

‘This is a nuclear world so if you're not sci-fi, you're not canine.’

Acker disrupts the borders between prose and poetry in her book, but more ‘prose’ than poetry than (for instance) Maggie Nelson’s Bluets. The context and tone are far more intense than I’d imagined; poetically intense, on the verge of ‘raging’. Having read Acker, I can see how she is a rather ‘influential’ writer but not an easy one to ‘follow’. It makes me think of Kraus (Torpor), and how Kraus must have been heavily ‘influenced’ by Acker’s writing (even though, in my opinion, Kraus’ work felt like a failed or weak imitation). But as I’ve mentioned earlier, it’s certainly not easy to mimic Acker’s style – it’s very distinctive and powerfully so. But I can also get why one would want to try as her ‘style’ is truly impressive.

‘The world beyond time. The bloody outline of a head on every desk in the world. The bloody outline of alienated work. The bloody outline of foetuses. There's no more need to imagine. Blood is dripping down our fingertips while we're living dreams. When the living have woken wake will wake up, the veins of the night are metal. Her head is the foetuses of nuclear waste . . .’

Do I understand every single thing that Acker has packed into her book? No. And that has more to do with me than Acker. I’m not well-read enough, and too ignorant about the historical and political context that Acker has used and (to be honest) ripped apart into a Frankenstein-ey mess. But I can imagine I’d be able to appreciate Acker’s writing a whole lot more if I was more aware/conscious of it all. This may or may not have to do with me completely forgetting what I’d learned about the Cold War during sixth forms because I was much too obsessed with tennis then. As in – watching tennis tournaments (from Djokovic to Rafa; but no longer a ‘fan’ of either now that I don’t play and/or watch tennis anymore). Prior to writing this review, I’d written many pages worth of it, but had to put that aside because most of it was too personal and irrelevant to Acker’s book. I wasn’t in a particularly good mood when I was finishing the book, but it (ironically) brought me a sense of strange comfort. Make of that what you will.

'All she ever used to do was read books.'

'You're right,' the Leftist, who refused to drink in pubs, replied. 'She had no relations to other people. She didn't like them and she was aphasic.'
The Liberal: 'If she's evil, we must be evil too. No man's an island.'

'What about women?' asked the feminist, but no one listened to her. While the Leftist, who never listened to anyone but himself, answered, 'Books or any forms of culture're so dangerous, for they turn people mad, for instance Baudelaire or other pornographers, only our upper classes must be allowed to indulge in them.’

Shamelessly transgressive and well precise. Political criticism and satire in fiction can so easily be written astray; and become/be presented in a rant-ey, self-indulgent manner. Not with Acker. I’m in awe of how she has embedded so many different matters and ‘historical events/figures’ into her writing without turning her book into something dense/heavy or unpalatable and lacking clarity. Acker’s writing is undoubtably ‘explicit’. All of that with a side of nuclear waste, dildos, blood, and abortions. Not for everyone, but if you have the stomach for it, you’ll be in for a treat.

‘"What if," the bitch, (excuse me, dog), continues, "by 'love' you meant I was allowed to want you? Then we'd both be objects and subjects. Then sexual love would have to be the meeting-place of individual life and death."

‘Fucking, food, and dancing. This is the American Revolution.’

The blurbs were quite deceptive (in my opinion). They were suspiciously presented in such a brief and unclear way anyway. But that actually worked in the (new) readers’ favour. Perhaps, to know less about the book before reading it enhances the reading experience for this one. Just don’t go in with the expectation that you’ll understand all of it and be sure that you’ll be okay with that. Definitely a book that is interesting enough to return to at a later date. Acker’s exploration of ‘love’ isn’t of the conventional, ‘Hallmark’ sorts. I can’t precisely describe what she’s trying to say about it without having to write a few pages of just me rambling about it and going nowhere with it. Despite the ambiguities in Acker’s writing, the core of it lies within the importance of ‘human’ feelings. The ‘dog’ in the book is anthropomorphised to emphasise that. That bit felt slightly Bob-Waksberg (Someone Who Will Love You in All Your Damaged Glory but more in the sense of 'BoJack Horseman') to me, so there’s nothing to complain about.

‘I can't give you any papers because I don't have an identity yet. I didn't go to Oxford or Cambridge and I'm not English. This's why your law says I have to stay in this inn overnight. As soon as you dub me a knight - by tomorrow morning - and I have a name, I'll be able to give you my papers.'

The receptionist, knowing that all women who're about to have abortions're crazy, assured the woman her abortion'ld be over by nighttime. 'I, myself,' the receptionist confided, 'used to be mad. I refused to be a woman the way I was supposed to he. I travelled all over the world, looking for trouble. I prostituted myself, ran a few drugs - nothing hard - , exposed my genitalia to strange men while picking their pockets, broke-and-entered, lied to the only men I loved, told the men I didn't love the truth that I could never love them, fucked one man after another while telling each man I was being faithful to him alone, fucked men over, for, by fucking me over, they had taught me how to fuck them over. Generally, I was a bitch.’

‘Then I learned the error of my ways. I retired . . . from myself. Here . . . this little job . . . I'm living off the income and property of others. Rather dead income and property. Like any good bourgeois,' ending her introduction. 'This place,' throwing open her hands, 'our sanctus sanitarium, is all of your place of safety. Here, we will save you. All of you who want to share your money with us.' The receptionist extended her arms. 'All night our nurses'll watch over you, and in the morning,' to Don Quixote, 'you'll be a night.' The receptionist asked the knight-to-be for her cash.’

‘I'm broke.'
'Why?'
'Why should I pay for an abortion? An abortion is nothing.'
'You must know that nothing's free.’

[Melanie · Rating 5 out of 5]

I'd been curious about Kathy Acker; I knew of her work by reputation only, but she once did an interview with Alasdair Gray that I found interesting and insightful, so I guess I was already favorably predisposed. And thus, when I was having dinner at a friend's house and saw some of Acker's books on her husband's shelves--her husband being the more po-mo half of the couple--I called in a favor ("How many of my Julian Barnes books do you have in your possession right now?") and borrowed them.

Well. Whoa.

For one thing, I was reading this book in parallel with my friend's husband's annotations, which...is actually something I recommend. Not necessarily reading Michael's annotations (although they're quite good), but following along with the marginalia and underlinings of someone you sort-of-but-don't-really know. I mean, if we're talking postmodern, it's hard to get much more fragmented and post- than that.

But the book itself is an experience, too. Acker's writing is spiky, prickly, and so are her ideas (about sex, about gender, about power, about literature). And as someone who's read a goodly amount of postmodern/experimental fiction, I'm surprised to say that her use of the various standard techniques (parody, pastiche, etc.) actually worked on me as a reader--that is, the text was unsettled and unsettling, destabilized, all of that exciting stuff that can sometimes get lost in fancy typographical tricks and footnotes or whatever.

I'll have to read more of her work, obviously, but I'm almost afraid to because Don Quixote was so...I don't know. Stunning, maybe? I feel a bit stunned by it at the moment. It's not a bad feeling to have.

[Justine · Rating 3 out of 5]

3.5*

Absolutely loved the beginning part and Acker's way with language is fantastic. Just lost me a bit in the middle and parts of the third act. Look forward to reading more of her.

[Griffin Alexander · Rating 4 out of 5]

'The carcass of wood comically perched on cement paws I call "home". The style of its hair is corrugated iron that exists in the sun like skins being dried. In the diningroom, nailheads glisten from the rough floor, lines of pine and shadow run across a ceiling; the chairs are phantom; the light leaks out a gray light; the cockroaches buzzing seem about to hurt. . .
'This's vision because it's what I see.'

ADDENDUM: to be read in concurrence with Borges' story "Pierre Menard, Author of the Quixote" and then to be considered: what it means if the writing (and thereby reading) of this book were taken on in the same manner as Menard's own project.

[nethescurial · Rating 5 out of 5]

Asks so many fascinating questions in such a slim page count, dissembles and annihilates and reconstructs gender like it's nobody's business, takes the establishment to task maybe better than the vast majority of authors are even capable of...Acker's galaxy brain is way beyond my pay grade to analyze all of this so I'll just let the reading do most of the talking, like "Empire" it's radically subversive in every way, never kowtows to any status quo understanding and never stops being thought-provoking and interesting, as well as heartbreaking, disturbing and at times radically funny. Acker is probably the author who best encapsulates late 20th century postmodernism, obviously the definition has always been nebulous but if the definition we use is the one where it appears the author attempts to fit their entire understanding of the world in a book's pages, it's maybe better than most. Not sure I loved it quite as much as "Empire" but it's not any less interesting and mind-stimulating and circles around as many if not more fascinating philosophical questions whose answers are left appropriately open-ended. I am so fucked up by illness recently that I no longer care about writing good reviews, cuz I know I can't do this justice anyway, read it.

[Rand · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is the second (or third, I forget now) abortive reading of a melding of aborted texts which opens with the narrator's abortion.

I guess I am done with it for now, until I resume my aborted reading of Cervantes.

[Red · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book is great, but between this and Judith Butler, I should probably just read a block of plutonium and get a more genuinely dense reading experience.

[Celil · Rating 4 out of 5]

Don Kihote'nin kürtaja gittiği bir kitaptı!? Kathy Acker'in işleri, Beat kuşağının bir uzantısı gibi görülse de, ben bu hikâye özelinde geçen yıl okuduğum bazı şeylere benzettim. Mesela hemen aynı dönemde Almanya, İtalya dolaylarında geçen Ulli Lust'ın bir Özgür Kız hikâyesi "Today is the Last Day of the Rest of Your Life" vardı. Ulli Lust'ın röportajlarında, ben pek Kathy Acker sevgisinden bahsettiğini işitmesem de, kendisine bayağı bir öykündüğünü düşünüyorum. Aynı şekilde benim çok sevdiğim sert konuşmacı/yazar Fran Lebowitz var. Onun gençlik hallerini hatırladım. Dumanaltı bir mekân, elde sigara, mikrofona yaklaşıp tek hamlede on beş kişiyi deviren Fran Lebowitz; az sonra buradaki Don Kihote'ye dönüşecektir. Gardınızı alın derim... bla bla bla...

Ve zamanında ne kadar cesur yayıncılar varmış. Bugün olsa aynı kitabı seçerler miydi, diye düşünmeden edemiyorum. Müstehcenliğin çok ötesinde bir edebiyat var orada...

[Peter · Rating 5 out of 5]

a wild ride. I loved this book, but it really only holds up as a crazy proto-postmodern feminist punk piece of history. outside of the lens of understanding a point in cultural history, this book is absolute drivel. My main compulsion to read this comes from the fact I am also reading her biography, which is probably a better introduction to her than her oeuvre. Don Quixote gets an abortion and spends about a hundred pages incoherently talking with her dog companion about having sex as a woman. Richard Nixon meets the Angel of Death and talks about capitalism and nuclear waste.

[Delia Rainey · Rating 4 out of 5]

don quixote named herself on an abortion clinic table, and with her lover dog, travels history and dreams. it makes sense that "don quixote" was kathy acker's next book after "blood and guts" because it's just as good, if not better. the recurring imagery of hospitals and the constant grappling with death spooked me out, thinking of her future cancer, which would kill her almost 10 years later. i don't know if i'm supposed to think about acker's biographical information while reading her work, but i can't help it. i search for her in here constantly, and i find her sometimes -- needing love and touch, entering S&M bars, consistent S&M fantasies that feel stuck in her mind, considering her fraught yet upper-class childhood, women's desire and punishment for that, discussing how her writing had no one to compare to before sylvere (semiotexte) brought theory into the scene, and accentuating her feelings on the violence of the american government. some of the aphorisms and beautiful sentences in here feel so important to my life. it's possible they are stolen from other texts, but i don't care. she is the bearer of these revelations for me:

"It's not history, which is actuality, but history's opposite, death, which shows us that women are nothing and everything."
"Is sensuality less valuable than rational thought?"
"I want writing in the world. Is courting writing courting death?"
"The American Revolution or American freedom is a mask of death. Our nihilism and dying must be the mask of our revolution."
"When dying takes all the time, there is no time."
"My only sexuality is fear of everything I know as human. My sexuality is wanting not to exist."
"I was desperate to find some way how to live. These people here teach me nothing but isolation. I turn back to my book. To anything that teaches me about somewhere else, for there's nothing in this country but death."

[Lars Meijer · Rating 4 out of 5]

‘Human power comes, at least partly, from sexuality.’

[Sean A. · Rating 4 out of 5]

rambling, ambling free-form cut-up collage-esque narrative that somewhat revolves around a post modern female knight. the grail-quest theme never seemed adequately enough addressed to me, however i really enjoyed the jagged poetry of 'don quixote', how gloriously nothing made sense and the surreal format itself.

[j · Rating 4 out of 5]

Like Acker smashed a hall of mirror and dumped all the shards in a transparent plastic bag. An aching mess of personal and cultural detritus where influence and plaigirism are sometimes indistinguishable from original thought. Despite the title, the most prominent specter is not Cervantes but William S. Burroughs. A lengthy section in the middle is derived from Wedekind, and in the latter third Acker pulls a lot from 'Juliette' by the Marquis de Sade.
Prose as poetry. Tangents about early American puritanism appreciated. Top notch all around.

[Paul · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is closer to a 3.5
It takes a bit for both the author and the reader for that matter to find the rhythm of the book. It's interesting and at times intentionally funny once it does.

[fletcher · Rating 5 out of 5]

what a ride. the Quixote is one of my favourite stories and this ranks right up there with Pierre Menard's Quixote.

[Julie Wallace · Rating 5 out of 5]

I can understand how this book may be off putting to certain individuals. However, I found the entire novel entrancing. I dare not say more. This is a book I found so much fun reading even if it has some themes that are realistically dark.

I know this may be a novel that was written for a generation that was not my own, but It still impacted me and I am overjoyed that I have been exposed to Kathy Acker. I will seek her out in the future.

[Sean · Rating 5 out of 5]

What a fucking sock in the chest.

To quote Pete and Pete "It's like someone punched [my:] soul."

[Michael Jose · Rating 5 out of 5]

Must Read.

[Drew · Rating 4 out of 5]

"Living here in disease and being diseased strangely bring us closer to each other..." As this quote clearly suggests, Kathy Acker revels in the sordid in her philosophical novel which reworks Cervantes by reimagining the knightly quest for love from a masochistic female perspective (with a dog as a sidekick) then does the same with Shaw's "Pygmalion" before launching into highly sexualized digressions about the corrupt administrations of presidents Nixon and Reagan. Her critique of capitalism is unrelenting and appropriately crass for Acker is making a persuasive case that the universally desired human intimacy can't be anything but perverse in a culture of pure materialism. Although the quotes attributed to English philosopher Thomas Hobbes went over my head (I've never read him), I did catch the references to the Marquis de Sade's "Justine, or the Misfortunes of Virtue" and heard echoes of Genet. (But when don't I?) As for the pornographic sections (and there are a few!), you may not want to read them on a subway but Acker is making an important point about how seeking validation through bodily pleasures is a dead end to which we're maddeningly drawn.

[Paul-Tristan Auguin · Rating 3 out of 5]

The highs are high and the lows are hard to get through. It's my first Acker book, and my first experimental postmodern poetic novel (except for DeJong's Modern Love, perhaps?), so some parts went way above my head. It didn't help that I read this rather short book over the course of a month. When it hits though, it's radiant; the language is evocative and unique, breathing life to the knight's meandering reflections on the search for love in a patriarchal society that sees danger in its emancipatory power. The use of literary references reminded me of Late Godard (e.g. Adieu au Langage) in how cryptic and personal they are.

[Ryan · Rating 4 out of 5]

Picked this up based on Sara Schulman's recommendation in Gentrification of the Mind. She loves Eileen Myles, too, and I'd place this in the same category as their work (New York punk-poetry dykes of a certain generation). I swear I read it cover-to-cover and still, I couldn't really tell you what it's about (the blurb on the back of my copy also struggles with this), but that doesn't mean I wouldn't recommend it. It's more akin to poetry than prose -- it's an abstract sensual experience, an evocation of a seedy, but emotionally-fraught, world.

[Anna Daly · Rating 1 out of 5]

It's possible that I'm being slightly harsh with this rating seeing as it's been a few years since I read it for my English Lit course and the whole book is all over the place as it is, so definitely not helped by my fading memory. However, I do very specifically remember hating every minute of it, so I'm going to go with that feeling. It honestly was just boring and I didn't care for the way it was written, feminist retelling or not.

[nur · Rating 3 out of 5]

No sé qué he leído ni cómo haré una monografía sobre ello. Me ha costado muchísimo seguir la lectura, digresiones larguísimas, me confundía constantemente de personajes, si hablaba de un sueño al rato me olvidaba que lo narraba era un sueño... La obra en general parece un sueño, una cacao mental. Una locura, supongo que son así las novelas posmodernas? Indiferente no te dejan seguro :)

[JJ]

This is the one that sort of made me really understand the process and the concept of Acker's writing. I wish I had read it earlier in order of publication but I couldn't find a copy... and the copy I got was a bootleg!!!

[Kayla Rose · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book feels like it was created as therapy for the author to help her deal with her traumatic experiences and the reader just along for the ride. It can be confusing at times, but beautiful to see the inside of this individual's mind and how she copes with what life throws at her.

[Flow Pouet · Rating 5 out of 5]

Un livre puissant !

[Nancy Wilson · Rating 3 out of 5]

Not sure what I just read fantstical descriptions in hopeless negativity. Sureal, felt a little lost and was glad it was over.

[Sarah · Rating 4 out of 5]

I read this book on a plane. Don't do that. Actually, I take it back: do. It's a good way to tell if someone is reading over your shoulder.