What do you think?
Rate this book
The Garbageman
176 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1972
1 person is currently reading
58 people want to read
About the author
Juan Butler
5 books1 followerJuan Butler (1942–1981) was a Canadian writer who was born in London, England. His three novels are Cabbagetown Diary: A Documentary (1970), The Garbageman (1972), and Canadian Healing Oil (1974). Butler suffered acute disappointment when the latter—the one he considered his best—proved an abysmal seller. In his later years he struggled with his mental health. He died by his own hand, in Toronto, at the age of 38.
Ratings & Reviews
Friends & Following
Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!
Community Reviews
Displaying 1 - 4 of 4 reviews
June 7, 2020
fans of jan karon are hereby warned: this book is not for you.
stuart ross recommended this book to me and bill thompson plucked it out of canada and sent it my way. so two canadians are to blame for my current dark thoughts.and this song, also from canada, may as well be the soundtrack for this book:
i am not too proud to admit that this book confused me. oftentimes the "shove the reader into the mind of a lunatic" literature is fascinating. the contrast between thought and deed can be handled so well - the precision of the impulse and the splatter of the effect. usually these narratives are presented in a way that explains what someone like this is thinking - the reasoning behind their crimes - their personal manifesto about "who upsets me and what i do to them and why."
it started out fine - boy-man wakes up, has various violent hallucinations/fantasies - many involving a cat, eats toast, feel persecuted but also omnipotent. fine. but then the action shiiiiifts and we are in spain for some drunken con and murder games. is this the same character? are we in a more protracted fantasy now? the thoughts seem more lucid, less paranoid, but who knows what that means; since we don't know where we are in the character's life, temporally. i assume it is the same character because small details recur, but it could just as easily be a pastiche of some kind. and this shifting occurs several more times throughout the book, and many acts of violence are spread all over the page and the world. but where?? when?? and ultimately, "why??" because i need a reason for my violence - i was raised on law and order - give me a motive. don't give me some lame "daddy didn't love me" or "mommy touched me" backstory, but give me something, yeah? this was technicolor violence interspersed with half-baked philosophy and social criticism and historical atrocities with no origin story. i refuse to enjoy a book about blind evil loosed upon the world - evil for evil's sake is boring; take your mere anarchy and shove it.
this is how i often feel watching hoity toity art cinema. don't just give me disjointed imagery, no matter how visually compelling - tell me a motherfucking story, yo! this intrigues me enough to make me want to read one more book by him, but if it is another masturbatory bloodbath with political tints, i will send it back to canada and say good riddance to it.
garbageman seems to be an echo of the literature of robbe-grillet or gide - where the violence is a result of cultural alienation or emasculation but the violence is not muted and classy like in those, so it seems more gratuitous. i know there must be a purpose to it, but it is opaque to me.
i know i have probably talked about this to (your, collective) boredom, but nick cave managed an incredible feat with the creation of euchrid eucrow. that character was a perfect example of rage and insanity brewing out of extreme repression: born mute but full of a cumbersome intelligence to poor white trash drunken abusers, he accepts what he sees as his divine mission to rule and exterminate. simple. tidy. gruesome. genius.
and say what you will about american psycho, at least the violence in that was necessary, in strictly character development and plot escalation criteria.
and the ever inescapable fact of butler's having hanged himself in an asylum before he was 40 - does something like this, arising from a supremely troubled mind, need to have literary merit, or can it be read simply as lurid curiosity, like a crime scene photograph?? do the same standards of criticism apply?
i have no answers. i read it, i will read another; he only wrote three, so maybe someday i will have something more enlightening for y'all.
back to holiday baking!
come to my blog!
stuart ross recommended this book to me and bill thompson plucked it out of canada and sent it my way. so two canadians are to blame for my current dark thoughts.and this song, also from canada, may as well be the soundtrack for this book:
i am not too proud to admit that this book confused me. oftentimes the "shove the reader into the mind of a lunatic" literature is fascinating. the contrast between thought and deed can be handled so well - the precision of the impulse and the splatter of the effect. usually these narratives are presented in a way that explains what someone like this is thinking - the reasoning behind their crimes - their personal manifesto about "who upsets me and what i do to them and why."
it started out fine - boy-man wakes up, has various violent hallucinations/fantasies - many involving a cat, eats toast, feel persecuted but also omnipotent. fine. but then the action shiiiiifts and we are in spain for some drunken con and murder games. is this the same character? are we in a more protracted fantasy now? the thoughts seem more lucid, less paranoid, but who knows what that means; since we don't know where we are in the character's life, temporally. i assume it is the same character because small details recur, but it could just as easily be a pastiche of some kind. and this shifting occurs several more times throughout the book, and many acts of violence are spread all over the page and the world. but where?? when?? and ultimately, "why??" because i need a reason for my violence - i was raised on law and order - give me a motive. don't give me some lame "daddy didn't love me" or "mommy touched me" backstory, but give me something, yeah? this was technicolor violence interspersed with half-baked philosophy and social criticism and historical atrocities with no origin story. i refuse to enjoy a book about blind evil loosed upon the world - evil for evil's sake is boring; take your mere anarchy and shove it.
this is how i often feel watching hoity toity art cinema. don't just give me disjointed imagery, no matter how visually compelling - tell me a motherfucking story, yo! this intrigues me enough to make me want to read one more book by him, but if it is another masturbatory bloodbath with political tints, i will send it back to canada and say good riddance to it.
garbageman seems to be an echo of the literature of robbe-grillet or gide - where the violence is a result of cultural alienation or emasculation but the violence is not muted and classy like in those, so it seems more gratuitous. i know there must be a purpose to it, but it is opaque to me.
i know i have probably talked about this to (your, collective) boredom, but nick cave managed an incredible feat with the creation of euchrid eucrow. that character was a perfect example of rage and insanity brewing out of extreme repression: born mute but full of a cumbersome intelligence to poor white trash drunken abusers, he accepts what he sees as his divine mission to rule and exterminate. simple. tidy. gruesome. genius.
and say what you will about american psycho, at least the violence in that was necessary, in strictly character development and plot escalation criteria.
and the ever inescapable fact of butler's having hanged himself in an asylum before he was 40 - does something like this, arising from a supremely troubled mind, need to have literary merit, or can it be read simply as lurid curiosity, like a crime scene photograph?? do the same standards of criticism apply?
i have no answers. i read it, i will read another; he only wrote three, so maybe someday i will have something more enlightening for y'all.
back to holiday baking!
come to my blog!
August 14, 2010
i don't know quite what to say about this novel. It's fairly well written,in an unusual style, but i found the whole book to be fairly disturbing and some of it so ultra-violent that i found it difficult to read at all. perhaps the fact that the author hanged himself in a mental institution in 1981 at the age of 39 had something to do with the content of the book. very unsettling indeed, at least for me.those with a stronger stomach may not be bothered at all.
February 21, 2013
Juan Butler has to be one of the most obscure writers I have come across, which is saying a lot since I find myself naturally drawn toward non-linear post-modern drug narratives and stream of consciousness travelogues. Generally when I encounter an author I have never heard about I rush straight to the library to read his/her novels google and google the shit out of them. I have exhausted my research skills, Juan Butler is by far a very perplexing man, and the lack of information about him on the internet is bewildering.
The novel opens with a question
QUESTION:
Tell me, in the anarchist society that you envisage, where all men will be fee, where no one will ever be in a position to impose his will upon his fellow man, where "doing your own thing" will be the norm rather than the exception, where creative leisure - as opposed to material success - will disappear and economic controls will exist on a purely voluntary basis, who will pick up the garbage?
ANSWER:
The garbageman.
Never has schizophrenic socio-path intrigued me, as Juan Butler does, I wish there existed a picture of this obscure man, I would like to put a face to paranoia. So despite the extreme brutality of murder and sexual assault, I am actually shocked to say that my stomach was indeed able to handle the images of ultra-violence , perhaps better than the crowed 1972 (yeah so what ? I am a Gen Y partying goer with slight nihilistic Fem Lib epicurean attitude toward life. so yeah… hyper-sexualization and violence in the era of internet kiddy porn, Ted Bundy, Dexter, and Girls Gone Wild; de-sensitization is accurate reality already; 40 years ago there wasn’t a demand for pole dancing classes, right?!?).
I can’t remember who said it?
If everybody grows up with high self-esteem, who is going to dance in our strip clubs?
What's going to happen to our porno industry?
These women don't just grown on trees.
It takes lots of drunk dads missing dance recitals before you decide to blow a goat on the internet for fifty bucks.
I had a teacher in secondary IV and V, who provoked his students to be aware, yet lacked awareness himself. Fucking hypocrite. Anyways issues with my moronic pseudo-journalist teacher (who idolized Mel Gibson and couldn’t touch his shoulders due to some teenage accident) aside, I think the best writers in society are the ones who document society with utter conviction, writers who have a voice however disturbed that voice may be. So perhaps Butler’s Fred Miller would turn people off and make people cringe their teeth like they just finished smelling a decaying body) but the best books (in my sardonic opinion) are the ones that disgust you and provoke thought.
The emotions of Fred Miller are indeed disturbing by any standards, but these emotions were those garnered by a schizophrenic mad man hell bent on critiquing Canadian society. Didn’t Bukowski, Eliot, Pound, Auden, and Ginsberg do the same ? I think Juan Butler needs more recognition in the Canadian Literary canon. Could Juan Butler be the “Torontonian that could” (but can’t because he is dead? Having committed suicide in 1981) Is he a secret pleasure that little know about? Perhaps a forgotten literary gem? Better than Naked Lunch? In my opinion, YES YES YES. For those anarchist and/or cynical and/or neurotic and/or those not afraid of literature and willing to step out of their comfort zone, for those mad men and mad women out there reading this (if this ever gets read…) I urge you to grab a copy of Juan’s obscure book and be sure to lend it to your friends… come on ? didn’t the 90’s teach us to pay it forward?!?
The novel opens with a question
QUESTION:
Tell me, in the anarchist society that you envisage, where all men will be fee, where no one will ever be in a position to impose his will upon his fellow man, where "doing your own thing" will be the norm rather than the exception, where creative leisure - as opposed to material success - will disappear and economic controls will exist on a purely voluntary basis, who will pick up the garbage?
ANSWER:
The garbageman.
Never has schizophrenic socio-path intrigued me, as Juan Butler does, I wish there existed a picture of this obscure man, I would like to put a face to paranoia. So despite the extreme brutality of murder and sexual assault, I am actually shocked to say that my stomach was indeed able to handle the images of ultra-violence , perhaps better than the crowed 1972 (yeah so what ? I am a Gen Y partying goer with slight nihilistic Fem Lib epicurean attitude toward life. so yeah… hyper-sexualization and violence in the era of internet kiddy porn, Ted Bundy, Dexter, and Girls Gone Wild; de-sensitization is accurate reality already; 40 years ago there wasn’t a demand for pole dancing classes, right?!?).
I can’t remember who said it?
If everybody grows up with high self-esteem, who is going to dance in our strip clubs?
What's going to happen to our porno industry?
These women don't just grown on trees.
It takes lots of drunk dads missing dance recitals before you decide to blow a goat on the internet for fifty bucks.
I had a teacher in secondary IV and V, who provoked his students to be aware, yet lacked awareness himself. Fucking hypocrite. Anyways issues with my moronic pseudo-journalist teacher (who idolized Mel Gibson and couldn’t touch his shoulders due to some teenage accident) aside, I think the best writers in society are the ones who document society with utter conviction, writers who have a voice however disturbed that voice may be. So perhaps Butler’s Fred Miller would turn people off and make people cringe their teeth like they just finished smelling a decaying body) but the best books (in my sardonic opinion) are the ones that disgust you and provoke thought.
The emotions of Fred Miller are indeed disturbing by any standards, but these emotions were those garnered by a schizophrenic mad man hell bent on critiquing Canadian society. Didn’t Bukowski, Eliot, Pound, Auden, and Ginsberg do the same ? I think Juan Butler needs more recognition in the Canadian Literary canon. Could Juan Butler be the “Torontonian that could” (but can’t because he is dead? Having committed suicide in 1981) Is he a secret pleasure that little know about? Perhaps a forgotten literary gem? Better than Naked Lunch? In my opinion, YES YES YES. For those anarchist and/or cynical and/or neurotic and/or those not afraid of literature and willing to step out of their comfort zone, for those mad men and mad women out there reading this (if this ever gets read…) I urge you to grab a copy of Juan’s obscure book and be sure to lend it to your friends… come on ? didn’t the 90’s teach us to pay it forward?!?
March 30, 2015
This book is a collection of four parts, partly inter-linked but not really.
Part one is the narrator at home in suburbia with his parents and his brother, who we don't see. The narrator has hallucinations of killing his cat and writes occasionally in non-linear English:
"Jimmy my kid brother is: a groovy hip swinging out-front outasight where it's at with it very together kid. He drops acid cranks speed shoots morphine snorts coke blows grass tokes up on hash pops downers does up on opium flips out on mescaline eats peyote buttons flashes on morning glory seeds gets stoned on STP blows his mind on MDA gets off on horse trips on psilocybin. Does all these heavy wow too much mind blowing things to his head day after day after day. Gets the bread for them by middling fronting boosting hustling ripping off bumming borrowing. He's cool. Always makes out. Always has coin for dope and chemicals. Hard shit and soft shit. Just like all the other kids in the district."
Nothing much happens in this section.
Cut abruptly to section 2, and I mean abruptly. There is no chapter or story divisions here. Suddenly we're in Spain and the narrator, who may be the same person as part one, talks about blending in with locals, living on a writer's grant from the Canadian Government and the story focuses on American sailors coming in to town for the night and the local's preparations. This is the best part of the book, well, before you see where it's going anyway. There are moments with the same sarcastic humour as Cabbagetown Diary: A Documentary here:
"This guy's as friendly to women as terminal cancer and as loud as a tank without a muffler."
The scene culminates with a violent murder, possibly the most violent I've ever read, and I had to skip sections of the description. This kind of put me off the rest of the book.
Sudden break and we're in Paris now for part 3, no connection or explanation of how we got there. A similar scene to part two plays out with a similar violent end I couldn't read all of.
A final sudden break to part 4 and we're in a mental institution north of Toronto. I would imagine there was some push in the early 1970's towards an anarchist movement and that is reflected here in this section. It really dates the book and brings it down. Anarchy now seems a youthful idea from a person who hasn't fully thought it through, and a rebellion of all ideas rather than the bad ones. This ties in a little to the title, with a reference to people in mental institutions being treated like human garbage, hence "The Garbageman", but the idea is very brief and half-baked. There is a reference in this section tying it back to sections 2 and 3 but it's a paragraph and easily missed.
In the end the book feels like a plea for tolerance of mental patients by a mental patient that has committed two murders and lost his grip on reality. Not really a strong argument. There are a few coherent sections but this is a weak follow-up to Cabbagetown and I'm worried what this means for Healing Oil, which I have still to read.
Part one is the narrator at home in suburbia with his parents and his brother, who we don't see. The narrator has hallucinations of killing his cat and writes occasionally in non-linear English:
"Jimmy my kid brother is: a groovy hip swinging out-front outasight where it's at with it very together kid. He drops acid cranks speed shoots morphine snorts coke blows grass tokes up on hash pops downers does up on opium flips out on mescaline eats peyote buttons flashes on morning glory seeds gets stoned on STP blows his mind on MDA gets off on horse trips on psilocybin. Does all these heavy wow too much mind blowing things to his head day after day after day. Gets the bread for them by middling fronting boosting hustling ripping off bumming borrowing. He's cool. Always makes out. Always has coin for dope and chemicals. Hard shit and soft shit. Just like all the other kids in the district."
Nothing much happens in this section.
Cut abruptly to section 2, and I mean abruptly. There is no chapter or story divisions here. Suddenly we're in Spain and the narrator, who may be the same person as part one, talks about blending in with locals, living on a writer's grant from the Canadian Government and the story focuses on American sailors coming in to town for the night and the local's preparations. This is the best part of the book, well, before you see where it's going anyway. There are moments with the same sarcastic humour as Cabbagetown Diary: A Documentary here:
"This guy's as friendly to women as terminal cancer and as loud as a tank without a muffler."
The scene culminates with a violent murder, possibly the most violent I've ever read, and I had to skip sections of the description. This kind of put me off the rest of the book.
Sudden break and we're in Paris now for part 3, no connection or explanation of how we got there. A similar scene to part two plays out with a similar violent end I couldn't read all of.
A final sudden break to part 4 and we're in a mental institution north of Toronto. I would imagine there was some push in the early 1970's towards an anarchist movement and that is reflected here in this section. It really dates the book and brings it down. Anarchy now seems a youthful idea from a person who hasn't fully thought it through, and a rebellion of all ideas rather than the bad ones. This ties in a little to the title, with a reference to people in mental institutions being treated like human garbage, hence "The Garbageman", but the idea is very brief and half-baked. There is a reference in this section tying it back to sections 2 and 3 but it's a paragraph and easily missed.
In the end the book feels like a plea for tolerance of mental patients by a mental patient that has committed two murders and lost his grip on reality. Not really a strong argument. There are a few coherent sections but this is a weak follow-up to Cabbagetown and I'm worried what this means for Healing Oil, which I have still to read.
Displaying 1 - 4 of 4 reviews