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Candide et lubrique
« Je ne suis pas du tout un gros bonnet, ni un truand. Je ne suis pas un tombeur. Les filles m’ont toujours intimidé. Dans le rôle du macho de première, je suis à peu près aussi crédible que les nanas blanches qui posent sur des photos en faisant des signes de gang. Ce n’était vraiment pas normal pour moi de me réveiller sans savoir comment j’étais arrivé là. »
Le héros de Candide et lubrique est un jeune homme bien sous tous rapports. Marié à une femme qu’il aime, ce garçon rêveur vit chez ses parents et cultive son image d’ex-enfant prodige. Un matin, il se réveille dans le lit de sa meilleure amie, inconsciente après ce qui semble avoir été une nuit d’excès en tout genre. Premier faux-pas d’une série de mauvais choix – volontaires ou guidés par un Destin farceur ? – qui mettront son équilibre psychique à rude épreuve, d’adultères en abus de drogues, d’orgies en braquages au pistolet à eau..
Dans cette fable en forme de cauchemar éveillé, qui rappelle parfois l’admirable De l’assassinat considéré comme un des beaux-arts de Thomas De Quincey, Adam Thirlwell déploie toute son insolence et son ironie pour décrire un monde en proie à toutes les violences, toutes les folies.
Le héros de Candide et lubrique est un jeune homme bien sous tous rapports. Marié à une femme qu’il aime, ce garçon rêveur vit chez ses parents et cultive son image d’ex-enfant prodige. Un matin, il se réveille dans le lit de sa meilleure amie, inconsciente après ce qui semble avoir été une nuit d’excès en tout genre. Premier faux-pas d’une série de mauvais choix – volontaires ou guidés par un Destin farceur ? – qui mettront son équilibre psychique à rude épreuve, d’adultères en abus de drogues, d’orgies en braquages au pistolet à eau..
Dans cette fable en forme de cauchemar éveillé, qui rappelle parfois l’admirable De l’assassinat considéré comme un des beaux-arts de Thomas De Quincey, Adam Thirlwell déploie toute son insolence et son ironie pour décrire un monde en proie à toutes les violences, toutes les folies.
379 pages, Kindle Edition
First published January 28, 2015
15 people are currently reading
425 people want to read
About the author
Adam Thirlwell
36 books91 followersAdam Thirlwell was born in 1978 and grew up in North London. He is a fellow of All Souls College, Oxford and assistant editor of Areté magazine.
His first novel, 'Politics', a love story with digressions, was published in 2003, and his second book, 'Miss Herbert: A Book of Novels, Romances & Their Unknown Translators, Containing Ten Languages, Set on Four Continents & Accompanied by Maps, Portraits, Squiggles, Illustrations, & a Variety of Helpful Indexes', in 2007. 'Miss Herbert' won a 2008 Somerset Maugham Award. His third novel is 'The Escape' (2009).
In 2003, Adam Thirlwell was named by Granta magazine as one of twenty 'Best of Young British novelists'. He lives in Oxford.
His first novel, 'Politics', a love story with digressions, was published in 2003, and his second book, 'Miss Herbert: A Book of Novels, Romances & Their Unknown Translators, Containing Ten Languages, Set on Four Continents & Accompanied by Maps, Portraits, Squiggles, Illustrations, & a Variety of Helpful Indexes', in 2007. 'Miss Herbert' won a 2008 Somerset Maugham Award. His third novel is 'The Escape' (2009).
In 2003, Adam Thirlwell was named by Granta magazine as one of twenty 'Best of Young British novelists'. He lives in Oxford.
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 42 reviews
March 9, 2015
There’s that friend of yours, the logorrhoeic loudmouth always on cue with the perfect witticism at the right time, equipped with an anecdote for all occasions (that you suspect he practices in the mirror at home), forever present at all social moments to release another stream of verbal sophistication leaving you cowering in the corner, wondering if you ever learned the alphabet properly, or learned to speak at a post-toddler level, and there’s this friend of yours who, after too many drinks, loses control of this verbal prowess, permitting each thought to emerge unedited and to spin on for twelve minutes too long, until everyone round the table begins exchanging desperate glances, checking their phones, and inventing reasons to leave, locked in unspoken battle for the right moment to stand up and flee, until you alone remain in the bar, nodding along to the now incoherent and awkwardly personal material he is unselfconsciously unloading into your ear, allowing you time only to nod or express a syllable of assent or consolation, before you too check your phone and contrive some way of leaving, despite this person being your only real friend, and the one person you admire and respect, and that his lack of awareness around this drunken prattle problem is the one characteristic that endears you to him the most, because you simply envy the pre-drunk society wit side, and that this friendship leaves you unfulfilled, lonely, and increasingly alienated in your very narrow and ultimately tragic life—that person narrates this novel.
October 11, 2023
"I had this vision of a book in which I would record my total experience, and I knew how it should sound: with all the tones that no one ever admires, the Gruesome, Tender, Needy, Sleazy, Boring, the Lurid and the Cute. In such tones I would tell me kawaii tale"
My 3rd book from the Goldsmiths shortlist, and as with Magnus Mills, an author whose books I have had issues with in the past.
Thirlwell draws knowledgeably on a wide range of very worthy influences, particularly from continental Europe (Gombrowicz, Proust, Doestevsky, Hamsun, Kundera etc) but doesn't live up to their standards. He can come across as a poor imitation of Milan Kundera, although, to be fair, one sanctioned by the great man himself.
And I'm clearly not alone in my doubts. Of the 930 books on my Goodreads' shelves, only 10 have a worse average rating from Goodreads readers than Lurid and Cute's (2.79 at the time of writing), [and for 4 of the other 10 I'm the only reviewer]. Albeit dividing opinion isn't necessarily a bad thing as last year's Booker and Goldsmiths shortlisted J proves - almost as poor a rating, but one of my, as well as two distinguished juries', books of 2014.
Enough of my preconceptions - would this novel prove the pleasent surprise that Magnus Mills's did?
Lurid this novel most definitely is - e.g. a drug fuelled orgy scene followed by a visit to a massage parlour - but cute? More a case of irritating. Actually the full quote in the novel from which the title is taken is much more representative of the tone of the book, but presumably the title "Gruesome, Tender, Needy, Sleazy, Boring, Lurid & Cute.” was rejected by the publishers as less commercial.
It's not that Thirlwell is a bad writer. It's just that he, rather deliberately, even, writes provocatively bad books.
The narrator's tale is packed with trite 'witticisms' - describing a painting he looked at upside down: ("Jesus was standing on his halo, beside a very bright Madonna - I mean the religious kind, not the disco version") and largely clunky similes ("fate was all around me like the crimping on a beer-bottle top.").
Yes that is the narrator's, not Thirlwell's voice, but it's the voice to which the reader is forced to listen. Thirlwell himself refers to his style as 'ruthless levity', and it reminded me of Joshua Ferris's dreadful To Rise Again At a Decent Hour from the 2014 Booker shortlist. And turning to the back of the book, what do I find? A tribute to this novel's 'satisfying ironies and verbal dexterity' from none other than Ferris himself.
And 'verbal dexterity' isn't even accurate - if anthing Thirlwell has deliberately chosen to make the narrator's voice ineloquent, with sentences such as "The only thing that's made me unlike other people is that me I think much more."
He knows the narrator is unlikeable and even has him, while rebuking himself, implicitly rebuke the reader at one point "I'm aware that the entire history of art is about removing the likeable from the picture, it's only the philistine spectators like Nelson who say: Jeez, there was no one in the movie you'd want to like hang out with"
Thirlwell, having found the narrator's voice, dropped his previous plan to give the narrator a name (which had been intended to distance the narrator and author) and even changed the description of the character to physically resemble himself (the narrator's wife tells him his problems are "psychosemetic") , deliberately increasing the temptation to identify author and narrator.
The text of the story is broken up every few pages by annoying bold sub-headings, designed to tell the story in miniature: e.g. the first chapter (24 pages) "in which our hero wakes up", "to discover his transformation", "whose reality he tries to doubt", "with blood all over the picture", "which creates small traps and impasses", "in the manner of many catastrophic myths", "but nevertheless he does his best" & disappears from the bloody scene" - complete with lack of punctuation. They are Kunderaesque except Milan does it much better and Tom McCarthy uses a similar approach in Satin Island, complete with digital numbering, but again more effectively.
The setting is a mishmash ("Mescal diners", "Strange pets, not quite possums or small lemurs but almost", "In every garden people hung these elegant paper lanterns", "People filling the streets with their cortados and their umbrellas", "the Cricket stadium", "Koalas or pigeons were playing in the jacaranda trees"), per Thirlwell himself 'a non- or impossible place', intended to represent global suburbia ("when you travel to any city of your choice you can find yourself at home, just as long as you get out far enough, not too far but just enough" - which the narrator seems to see as a simile for marriage). Artistically a valid approach, but it felt that A Little Life did it better, and again it seems designed primarily to provoke.
The narrator suffers, again deliberately, from a gap between his perception of himself as a deep thinker and the reality of his observations:
"In my impressions of the world I am super-subtle. Were I ever to be a super-hero, I would be a super-hero of thinking"
MY MOTHER
Let's not try to analyse everything to death, shall we. Just this once
ME
But what else can I do?"
Thirlwell takes the epigraph for his novel from Hamsun's Hunger, and the narrator makes a clear suggestion that his tale is the 21st Century equivalent of this and Dostoevsky's Notes from the Underground:
"Maybe in some far off century if you wanted to reinvent the social contract, you would have done it with more squalor, living underground in isolation, and losing yourselves in crazy monologues and financial worry and hunger, but in this very bright time it also seemed that you could do it more softly - just in this desire to create a more adventerous existence: with friendships, love affairs, extra or extended families."
Indeed one suspects Thirlwell sees the novel equally as a 21st century update of The Unbearable Lightness of Being. But this isn't another Kundera - for all the similarities, it couldn't be further from the lyricism of his prose. To give more contemporary references from the Booker and Goldsmiths awards, it's instead a combination of the worst of Satin Island, Little Life and To Rise at a Decent Hour
Overall, I can, just, understand why the Goldsmith Jury chose this for their shortlist, and I can see what Thirlwell was trying, if failing, to do (especially helped by the following interview in the excellent Paris Review http://www.theparisreview.org/blog/20...), but the fact remains that it was neither an enjoyable nor an enlightening book to read.
My 3rd book from the Goldsmiths shortlist, and as with Magnus Mills, an author whose books I have had issues with in the past.
Thirlwell draws knowledgeably on a wide range of very worthy influences, particularly from continental Europe (Gombrowicz, Proust, Doestevsky, Hamsun, Kundera etc) but doesn't live up to their standards. He can come across as a poor imitation of Milan Kundera, although, to be fair, one sanctioned by the great man himself.
And I'm clearly not alone in my doubts. Of the 930 books on my Goodreads' shelves, only 10 have a worse average rating from Goodreads readers than Lurid and Cute's (2.79 at the time of writing), [and for 4 of the other 10 I'm the only reviewer]. Albeit dividing opinion isn't necessarily a bad thing as last year's Booker and Goldsmiths shortlisted J proves - almost as poor a rating, but one of my, as well as two distinguished juries', books of 2014.
Enough of my preconceptions - would this novel prove the pleasent surprise that Magnus Mills's did?
Lurid this novel most definitely is - e.g. a drug fuelled orgy scene followed by a visit to a massage parlour - but cute? More a case of irritating. Actually the full quote in the novel from which the title is taken is much more representative of the tone of the book, but presumably the title "Gruesome, Tender, Needy, Sleazy, Boring, Lurid & Cute.” was rejected by the publishers as less commercial.
It's not that Thirlwell is a bad writer. It's just that he, rather deliberately, even, writes provocatively bad books.
The narrator's tale is packed with trite 'witticisms' - describing a painting he looked at upside down: ("Jesus was standing on his halo, beside a very bright Madonna - I mean the religious kind, not the disco version") and largely clunky similes ("fate was all around me like the crimping on a beer-bottle top.").
Yes that is the narrator's, not Thirlwell's voice, but it's the voice to which the reader is forced to listen. Thirlwell himself refers to his style as 'ruthless levity', and it reminded me of Joshua Ferris's dreadful To Rise Again At a Decent Hour from the 2014 Booker shortlist. And turning to the back of the book, what do I find? A tribute to this novel's 'satisfying ironies and verbal dexterity' from none other than Ferris himself.
And 'verbal dexterity' isn't even accurate - if anthing Thirlwell has deliberately chosen to make the narrator's voice ineloquent, with sentences such as "The only thing that's made me unlike other people is that me I think much more."
He knows the narrator is unlikeable and even has him, while rebuking himself, implicitly rebuke the reader at one point "I'm aware that the entire history of art is about removing the likeable from the picture, it's only the philistine spectators like Nelson who say: Jeez, there was no one in the movie you'd want to like hang out with"
Thirlwell, having found the narrator's voice, dropped his previous plan to give the narrator a name (which had been intended to distance the narrator and author) and even changed the description of the character to physically resemble himself (the narrator's wife tells him his problems are "psychosemetic") , deliberately increasing the temptation to identify author and narrator.
The text of the story is broken up every few pages by annoying bold sub-headings, designed to tell the story in miniature: e.g. the first chapter (24 pages) "in which our hero wakes up", "to discover his transformation", "whose reality he tries to doubt", "with blood all over the picture", "which creates small traps and impasses", "in the manner of many catastrophic myths", "but nevertheless he does his best" & disappears from the bloody scene" - complete with lack of punctuation. They are Kunderaesque except Milan does it much better and Tom McCarthy uses a similar approach in Satin Island, complete with digital numbering, but again more effectively.
The setting is a mishmash ("Mescal diners", "Strange pets, not quite possums or small lemurs but almost", "In every garden people hung these elegant paper lanterns", "People filling the streets with their cortados and their umbrellas", "the Cricket stadium", "Koalas or pigeons were playing in the jacaranda trees"), per Thirlwell himself 'a non- or impossible place', intended to represent global suburbia ("when you travel to any city of your choice you can find yourself at home, just as long as you get out far enough, not too far but just enough" - which the narrator seems to see as a simile for marriage). Artistically a valid approach, but it felt that A Little Life did it better, and again it seems designed primarily to provoke.
The narrator suffers, again deliberately, from a gap between his perception of himself as a deep thinker and the reality of his observations:
"In my impressions of the world I am super-subtle. Were I ever to be a super-hero, I would be a super-hero of thinking"
MY MOTHER
Let's not try to analyse everything to death, shall we. Just this once
ME
But what else can I do?"
Thirlwell takes the epigraph for his novel from Hamsun's Hunger, and the narrator makes a clear suggestion that his tale is the 21st Century equivalent of this and Dostoevsky's Notes from the Underground:
"Maybe in some far off century if you wanted to reinvent the social contract, you would have done it with more squalor, living underground in isolation, and losing yourselves in crazy monologues and financial worry and hunger, but in this very bright time it also seemed that you could do it more softly - just in this desire to create a more adventerous existence: with friendships, love affairs, extra or extended families."
Indeed one suspects Thirlwell sees the novel equally as a 21st century update of The Unbearable Lightness of Being. But this isn't another Kundera - for all the similarities, it couldn't be further from the lyricism of his prose. To give more contemporary references from the Booker and Goldsmiths awards, it's instead a combination of the worst of Satin Island, Little Life and To Rise at a Decent Hour
Overall, I can, just, understand why the Goldsmith Jury chose this for their shortlist, and I can see what Thirlwell was trying, if failing, to do (especially helped by the following interview in the excellent Paris Review http://www.theparisreview.org/blog/20...), but the fact remains that it was neither an enjoyable nor an enlightening book to read.
December 18, 2020
If I’d been smart I would have given up on Adam Thirlwell’s Lurid & Cute about ten pages into the novel. But for some reason I kept thinking that the paranoid and obsessive thoughts of Thirlwell’s protagonist would reach a crescendo, that there would be a moment where the penny would drop and I’d understand what this book was actually about. If that moment happened then I was on a different bus because aside from a handful of evocative passages, Lurid & Cute would have to be the most pointless and indulgent novel I’ve read this year.
What’s ironic about this is that I read Lurid & Cute straight after finishing and loving Satin Island a novel that’s also been decried by some (AKA readers’ on Goodreads and Amazon) as an aimless book that’s too clever for its own good. And yet I loved Satin Island partly because it’s a book about ideas, partly because of the penultimate chapter (you’ll need to read my review) and partly because McCarthy foreshadows early in the novel – or report – that he won’t be providing the reader with any epiphanies or resolutions. In contrast I found Lurid & Cute pointless because while it does have a structured plot the events which occur and the way they are expressed are dull and unengaging.
The novel opens with Edison Lo, our first person protagonist, waking up in a hotel room beside his sleeping friend Romy who also happens to not be his wife. After a short jaunt outside – where Ed kvetches about how much he loves his wife, and how sleeping with Romy was wrong, but also how much he really likes her – he comes back to the hotel to find his friend bleeding from her nose. At first Ed believes that Romy is dead and so he panics about how he’ll dispose of her body, but when she shows signs of life he panics about how he’ll get her to the hospital without his wife Candy finding out. Ed’s overwhelming sense of anxiety, which is written as stream of consciousness with splashes of screenplay-style dialogue (and which according to one literary critic is stylistically reminiscent of Milan Kundera and Haruki Murakimi) sets the tone for the rest of the novel.
After this frenetic, neurotic opening we learn that Ed is unemployed and living with his wife at the home of his rich parents. Much of his angst derives from the fact that he can’t find anything meaningful to do with his day – well, aside from having an affair. When an old friend, Hiro, pops into Ed’s life, things go from aimless to aimless but now with added fake guns. Hiro, it would seem has this penchant for holding up hair salons and bars with facsimile weapons. Ed, with nothing better to do, follows along with Hiro’s crazy hobby.
At this point you should be getting a clear picture of the sort of novel Lurid & Cute is. If you need additional evidence then I should probably add that the book features a Jewish mother constantly nagging Ed about his lifestyle choices and long, drawn out passages were Ed expresses his guilt and anxiety at both loving his wife and not wanting her to leave him while also utterly adoring Romy. Add in a dash of the classic male fantasy – an orgy where Candy and Romy fuck each other while Ed watches – and I think you can start to draw some accurate conclusions about the book sight unseen.
While I read Lurid & Cute I wondered whether the novel was a parody of the middle class white person angst narrative; that Thirlwell was lampooning the sort of highbrow fiction that drapes itself in off-putting structure, manic prose and characters that bear no relation to anyone alive or dead. But as I continued to slog through Ed’s neuroses, specifically the way his mind wanders back to the same topics again and again, I realised that Lurid & Cute wasn’t a satire at all. It was just a truly dreadful novel.
Andrew Ervin ends his New York Times review of Lurid & Cute stating:
"In inhabiting the narrator’s deranged mind so well, and sharing it with us, Adam Thirlwell offers his own evidence for a literary truth: that great characters need not be likable, only fascinating."
I agree that characters need not be likable, but Ed is as far from fascinating as I am from winning next year’s Man Booker prize. If there is a literary truth in this novel it’s that privileged characters like Ed who can exist on the goodwill of their rich parents and patient wife are as innovative and complex and intriguing as a prawn cocktail.
What’s ironic about this is that I read Lurid & Cute straight after finishing and loving Satin Island a novel that’s also been decried by some (AKA readers’ on Goodreads and Amazon) as an aimless book that’s too clever for its own good. And yet I loved Satin Island partly because it’s a book about ideas, partly because of the penultimate chapter (you’ll need to read my review) and partly because McCarthy foreshadows early in the novel – or report – that he won’t be providing the reader with any epiphanies or resolutions. In contrast I found Lurid & Cute pointless because while it does have a structured plot the events which occur and the way they are expressed are dull and unengaging.
The novel opens with Edison Lo, our first person protagonist, waking up in a hotel room beside his sleeping friend Romy who also happens to not be his wife. After a short jaunt outside – where Ed kvetches about how much he loves his wife, and how sleeping with Romy was wrong, but also how much he really likes her – he comes back to the hotel to find his friend bleeding from her nose. At first Ed believes that Romy is dead and so he panics about how he’ll dispose of her body, but when she shows signs of life he panics about how he’ll get her to the hospital without his wife Candy finding out. Ed’s overwhelming sense of anxiety, which is written as stream of consciousness with splashes of screenplay-style dialogue (and which according to one literary critic is stylistically reminiscent of Milan Kundera and Haruki Murakimi) sets the tone for the rest of the novel.
After this frenetic, neurotic opening we learn that Ed is unemployed and living with his wife at the home of his rich parents. Much of his angst derives from the fact that he can’t find anything meaningful to do with his day – well, aside from having an affair. When an old friend, Hiro, pops into Ed’s life, things go from aimless to aimless but now with added fake guns. Hiro, it would seem has this penchant for holding up hair salons and bars with facsimile weapons. Ed, with nothing better to do, follows along with Hiro’s crazy hobby.
At this point you should be getting a clear picture of the sort of novel Lurid & Cute is. If you need additional evidence then I should probably add that the book features a Jewish mother constantly nagging Ed about his lifestyle choices and long, drawn out passages were Ed expresses his guilt and anxiety at both loving his wife and not wanting her to leave him while also utterly adoring Romy. Add in a dash of the classic male fantasy – an orgy where Candy and Romy fuck each other while Ed watches – and I think you can start to draw some accurate conclusions about the book sight unseen.
While I read Lurid & Cute I wondered whether the novel was a parody of the middle class white person angst narrative; that Thirlwell was lampooning the sort of highbrow fiction that drapes itself in off-putting structure, manic prose and characters that bear no relation to anyone alive or dead. But as I continued to slog through Ed’s neuroses, specifically the way his mind wanders back to the same topics again and again, I realised that Lurid & Cute wasn’t a satire at all. It was just a truly dreadful novel.
Andrew Ervin ends his New York Times review of Lurid & Cute stating:
"In inhabiting the narrator’s deranged mind so well, and sharing it with us, Adam Thirlwell offers his own evidence for a literary truth: that great characters need not be likable, only fascinating."
I agree that characters need not be likable, but Ed is as far from fascinating as I am from winning next year’s Man Booker prize. If there is a literary truth in this novel it’s that privileged characters like Ed who can exist on the goodwill of their rich parents and patient wife are as innovative and complex and intriguing as a prawn cocktail.
January 27, 2015
Lurid & Cute – A Challenging Read
The anal retentive literary set in London, those that are so out of touch with the book buying public in the rest of the UK, will love Lurid & Cute. They have twice voted him Granta Best Young British Novelist but Adam Thirlwell still divides opinion some as a great talent others in the realm of the emperor’s new clothes, I am somewhere between the two opinions.
Lurid & Cute is not an easy read but then experimental literature never is, so if you like paragraphs, the Oxford comma and general conventions of writing then this is a book you need to avoid. To some this will seem to avant garde to be a real novel but there is a story under all the experimental writing. Lurid & Cute does push the boundaries of literature in the way it is written but I would remind people that English in both written and oral forms is always evolving and Thirwell is deep in this process of constant evolution of the novel.
Adam Thirwell in Lurid & Cute is challenging us with tales of suburban sex and violence and our attitude towards it there are at times comedy mixed with noir. Our nameless narrator wakes up in a hotel room with a woman who is not his wife, who may also be dead and things go downhill for the narrator from there. The story is set in a nameless suburb that could be anywhere in the world but there seems to be flavours of LA, and London amongst others.
What may put off many readers is that we are stuck inside the mind of the narrator who treats his wife and his mistress with equal disdain who seems to suffer from narcotic paranoia mixed heavily with narcissistic tendencies. It could be argued that narrator is a depiction of men who have wives and mistresses which would be hard to argue against.
If you are looking for a book with a strong plot then this is not the book for you. If you are able to read this with an open mind and willing to take the journey that Thirwell sets and the experimentation then this is a pleasure admittedly hard work but a pleasure all the same. If you want to see a novel’s boundaries pushed and experimented with then this is the book for you.
The anal retentive literary set in London, those that are so out of touch with the book buying public in the rest of the UK, will love Lurid & Cute. They have twice voted him Granta Best Young British Novelist but Adam Thirlwell still divides opinion some as a great talent others in the realm of the emperor’s new clothes, I am somewhere between the two opinions.
Lurid & Cute is not an easy read but then experimental literature never is, so if you like paragraphs, the Oxford comma and general conventions of writing then this is a book you need to avoid. To some this will seem to avant garde to be a real novel but there is a story under all the experimental writing. Lurid & Cute does push the boundaries of literature in the way it is written but I would remind people that English in both written and oral forms is always evolving and Thirwell is deep in this process of constant evolution of the novel.
Adam Thirwell in Lurid & Cute is challenging us with tales of suburban sex and violence and our attitude towards it there are at times comedy mixed with noir. Our nameless narrator wakes up in a hotel room with a woman who is not his wife, who may also be dead and things go downhill for the narrator from there. The story is set in a nameless suburb that could be anywhere in the world but there seems to be flavours of LA, and London amongst others.
What may put off many readers is that we are stuck inside the mind of the narrator who treats his wife and his mistress with equal disdain who seems to suffer from narcotic paranoia mixed heavily with narcissistic tendencies. It could be argued that narrator is a depiction of men who have wives and mistresses which would be hard to argue against.
If you are looking for a book with a strong plot then this is not the book for you. If you are able to read this with an open mind and willing to take the journey that Thirwell sets and the experimentation then this is a pleasure admittedly hard work but a pleasure all the same. If you want to see a novel’s boundaries pushed and experimented with then this is the book for you.
abandoned
March 20, 2015Gave up. Will try again one day. Just didn't have the momentum, time and energy to get through it.
December 16, 2022
dreary doesn't cut it. it's devoid of life. it's smug. it is so completely self-absorbed it probably orbits around itself.
September 24, 2015
It seems only fair that I begin this review by telling you why this review should not be trusted. First of all, and most importantly, I did not read all of this book. I didn't even read most of this book. Overcome by hatred and disdain, I found the book increasingly interminable. The first few times I picked up the book I was still able to power through multiple pages at a time, but every subsequent reading has become shorter and shorter. It became clear to me that I was stuck in a mathematical graph that ensured I would be stuck reading this book forever – and so I quit. The prospect of having this book hanging over me was simply too harrowing. This bad book made me into a bad reader.
Second caveat to this review: my hatred is somewhat irrational. I fully admit that my hatred of the book does not entirely reflect the book's (lack of) quality. Don't get me wrong: I think this book is terrible. But it might just be that this book and its many particular quirks make up the literary Kryptonite to my Superman. This book rubbed me the wrong way in all sorts of ways I can imagine being highly personal to me, without reflecting in any way you or anybody else will feel about it. I cannot fully explain why I didn't simply feel annoyed by the book, but why I actively hated it.
I'd tell you what the plot of the book is, but the plot doesn't matter. I'd tell you about the characters, but they don't matter. The only thing Lurid & Cute is about is the writing. The awful annoying writing style that feels far too in love with itself to be anything other than infuriating. It's inaccessible for the sake of being inaccessible. It consists of verbiage so dense and yet devoid of true meaning that the book becomes intellectual only in the driest, academic sense of the word. Interesting only to the truly uninteresting. I've picked a random sentence so that you can get some real sense of what I'm talking about here:
“But while I did enjoy myself very much, exploring my conversations with Romy which were now heavy with the talk of apertures and openings, or if not direct talk then the intimation that such talk was on the brink of substitution, it was also true that there was this darkness I could not ignore, among the brightness, like the black circle left in your eyes if you've been suddenly just dazzled.”
I promise you that this sentence is representative of all the sentences in this book. Not all are quite as long, but all are equally dreary and lifeless. I realize that the sentence by itself is no great sin. It's serviceable. But keep in mind that the book has no paragraph breaks except for dialogue. Multiple pages absolutely filled with square blocks of this text will test any reader's patience, I would think.
I suppose the easy comparison would be to David Foster Wallace. Another writer known for complexity of style, but where Wallace complements and even infuses his sometimes obtuse style with an emotional richness that completely fits and makes sense – Thirlwell simply flounders on making anybody seem remotely human or even interesting. Wallace creates a world that may not be the most accessible, but completely draws you in. At times, sure, you can't help but see an idea or a sentence so writerly that you picture Wallace at a desk really working hard. Lurid & Cute only seems to exist for every sentence to remind you that Thirlwell is really great. The only true image these sentences evoked from me is a perfect vision of Thirlwell's smug grin. It just feels like he's trying to hit you in the face with his brain, and really it begs the question: who cares?
Once I file this review I will be able to scroll to this book on my Kindle and click left. My Kindle will then present me the option of removing this title from my device and I will approve with vigor. That, I already know, will bring me such an unadulterated feeling of joy that committing myself to reviewing this book won't have been a complete waste.
Written by Roy den Boer
Second caveat to this review: my hatred is somewhat irrational. I fully admit that my hatred of the book does not entirely reflect the book's (lack of) quality. Don't get me wrong: I think this book is terrible. But it might just be that this book and its many particular quirks make up the literary Kryptonite to my Superman. This book rubbed me the wrong way in all sorts of ways I can imagine being highly personal to me, without reflecting in any way you or anybody else will feel about it. I cannot fully explain why I didn't simply feel annoyed by the book, but why I actively hated it.
I'd tell you what the plot of the book is, but the plot doesn't matter. I'd tell you about the characters, but they don't matter. The only thing Lurid & Cute is about is the writing. The awful annoying writing style that feels far too in love with itself to be anything other than infuriating. It's inaccessible for the sake of being inaccessible. It consists of verbiage so dense and yet devoid of true meaning that the book becomes intellectual only in the driest, academic sense of the word. Interesting only to the truly uninteresting. I've picked a random sentence so that you can get some real sense of what I'm talking about here:
“But while I did enjoy myself very much, exploring my conversations with Romy which were now heavy with the talk of apertures and openings, or if not direct talk then the intimation that such talk was on the brink of substitution, it was also true that there was this darkness I could not ignore, among the brightness, like the black circle left in your eyes if you've been suddenly just dazzled.”
I promise you that this sentence is representative of all the sentences in this book. Not all are quite as long, but all are equally dreary and lifeless. I realize that the sentence by itself is no great sin. It's serviceable. But keep in mind that the book has no paragraph breaks except for dialogue. Multiple pages absolutely filled with square blocks of this text will test any reader's patience, I would think.
I suppose the easy comparison would be to David Foster Wallace. Another writer known for complexity of style, but where Wallace complements and even infuses his sometimes obtuse style with an emotional richness that completely fits and makes sense – Thirlwell simply flounders on making anybody seem remotely human or even interesting. Wallace creates a world that may not be the most accessible, but completely draws you in. At times, sure, you can't help but see an idea or a sentence so writerly that you picture Wallace at a desk really working hard. Lurid & Cute only seems to exist for every sentence to remind you that Thirlwell is really great. The only true image these sentences evoked from me is a perfect vision of Thirlwell's smug grin. It just feels like he's trying to hit you in the face with his brain, and really it begs the question: who cares?
Once I file this review I will be able to scroll to this book on my Kindle and click left. My Kindle will then present me the option of removing this title from my device and I will approve with vigor. That, I already know, will bring me such an unadulterated feeling of joy that committing myself to reviewing this book won't have been a complete waste.
Written by Roy den Boer
January 27, 2018
I think I read one of Adam Thirlwell's other novels about ten years ago, and I have to admit that I can't now remember anything about it, although I have the ghost of a memory that I'd been quite impressed by it. This, and perhaps its sweet-shop cover made me pick up Lurid and Cute in the library.
Let's just say that it's my first big 'miss' of the year. I ploughed on to the end because if you're going to write a bad review of a book, the least you owe the author is to finish it. But I really can't quite figure out what the point of this book is. Maybe people who are not me would find the central character, a kind of Ignatius T. Reilly moved forward fifty years to some non-specific but western and presumably Anglophone location (I had the sense, while reading it, that it might have been Los Angeles, but it could equally easily have been London or Sydney – apologies if it was lack of attention on my part that missed some give-away as to the location) and given a role in a re-make of Less Than Zero with the rich parents, an apparently attractive wife, an affair on the side with another woman who ends up nearly dying at the beginning of the book (for reasons that, again, unless I was not paying sufficient attention, were never terribly clear).
My problem with the narrator is not so much that he was not likeable – I'm perfectly at home with books being narrated by characters whom I would cross the road to avoid – as that he didn't seem to bear any relation to any living human being whom I had ever met. Possibly that's just because I've not spent much time around the idle rich (I googled the author, and it's possible that with his public school background, he has a rather better idea of what they are like) but I just did not find either the narrator or the other central characters in the story (at least as he describes them, and I concede that he is most likely a very unreliable narrator) to come off the page as a real human being. Which might be ok if I at least found him funny, a reasonably entertaining caricature. But I just found him to be a rambling cardboard cut-out of a windbag.
All that said, there were occasional flashes of inspiration. Odd little observations that brought a smile to my face. Not nearly enough of them to justify a novel, but enough to make it a two-star rather than a one-star book.
July 22, 2015
I enjoyed this book strangely almost, thought of giving it a 4, although the guy was a self absorbed nincompoop of thought and motivation, I did enjoy the prose a lot and the fact that he was so conscious of his own moral lethargy and argued over it endlessly as with most else that he did. I like the style as in a long neurotic rant you could get past the narrator and bearing him as I did then this is a nice interesting read and takes on living today in this reality, definitely not a beach read, deals with issues of infidelity, happiness and sadness, I guess I saw him as a sort of modern man the same way as people see Updike's Rabbit and although he was irritating at times I allowed him to tell his story. As a writer myself I was interested in the style of prose that took you within the inner life of this man and his humorous vaccilations and ruminations that I'm not so sure are so uncommon in today's world, and at times we all act selfishly as this man does, if not in action, then in thought. It was almost as if he let play out all the scenarios we sometimes see or imagine in our daily lives and relationships. Although I could see why people could be rubbed the wrong way by a essentially selfish and self absorbed narrator it is a worthy chronicle of life in my view and succeeds as a novel.
August 12, 2015
The thing is that there's a plot in this book but it is obfuscated behind a drug-addled, self-obsessed, neurotic, passive, genius asshole that's completely unreliable. So, as the reader we have no sense of what's actually occurring nor how we might want to feel about it. This is a fascinating state to be in and the dipping and diving, rope-a-dope language of the narrator is beautiful to behold even as you sense his inexorable self-destruction. It's not a masterpiece. It's difficult to read. It's infuriating. It's stunning. It's probably quite a deft example to be used in some post-grad deconstruction of perspective and narratorial motives. Definitely a book for a certain few but one I've glad to have read.
December 8, 2016
So so. Gets off to a good start but gradually the super modern breathlessness of it all palls. And then some. If you've read Less Than Zero then you've read this. Story Of My Life? Then you've read this. A Confederacy Of Dunces? You've read this. Catcher In The Rye? Norwegian Wood? You're getting the picture.
Well written, pretentious, derivative, trendy, inconsequential, I have read better tweets, and many better books.
Well written, pretentious, derivative, trendy, inconsequential, I have read better tweets, and many better books.
June 19, 2015
gave up halfway through and skimmed to the end. i get the joke, and it's funny for 20-30 pp, but it doesn't stop. it just keeps going, like a speedy man-child who never met a problem.
Read
December 3, 20205 sterren om de andere reviews goed te make
Read
January 10, 2025Dreadful.
September 1, 2023
This is a book that brought to mind the value of libraries (how sad that they continue to be so badly underfunded). If I'd borrowed it, I wouldn't have felt the need to read beyond the first 50 pages (my usual tolerance boundary).
Never mind, my time wasn't wasted entirely because I won't be reading any more of its ilk.
I found myself considering the work of writers I enjoy who construct casts of unlikable characters: John Irving, Iris Murdoch, Iain Banks, Dickens (of course), for instance. The difference is that they find a way of making you care about unlikable people. I cared for no one in Lurid & Cute. (I'm sure this says more about me than it does about the writer.)
Never mind, my time wasn't wasted entirely because I won't be reading any more of its ilk.
I found myself considering the work of writers I enjoy who construct casts of unlikable characters: John Irving, Iris Murdoch, Iain Banks, Dickens (of course), for instance. The difference is that they find a way of making you care about unlikable people. I cared for no one in Lurid & Cute. (I'm sure this says more about me than it does about the writer.)
May 3, 2022
I couldn’t get through this book. It was entertaining at first but ultimately read as an ADHD fever dream. The narration was so schizophrenic I kept getting distracted, both by the writing style and other things happening around me while reading. In other words, the writing was so frenetic that I couldn’t latch into any of it.
November 3, 2016
Un roman difficile à critiquer. Quatre étoiles pour de nombreuses phrases fines, compliquées, amusantes et vraies ; deux étoiles pour un ennui profond qui s'installe assez rapidement et une complaisance assumée mais pénible. Il n'empêche que je me souviendrai sûrement du roman.
May 17, 2018
Boring
I would not recommend this book. It is boring. The only good thing about is that the author could transmit depression and obsessive thinking.
I would not recommend this book. It is boring. The only good thing about is that the author could transmit depression and obsessive thinking.
August 28, 2018
Basically, a 358-page monologue of a not very nice person. Occasionally there are interesting insights, but too few, in my view, to warrant wading through this book.
May 18, 2020
Predictably hip contemporary fiction
August 26, 2023
Really, just 356 pages of word salad stream of consciousness from a schizophrenic. Tedious and unrewarding.
May 15, 2019
Estridente y dulce es una novela decepcionante, tanto por el escaso empaque de la historia como por el estilo plomizo en la escritura de Adam Thirlwell.
Reseña completa en Vagando por Urano
https://vagandoporurano.blogspot.com/...
Reseña completa en Vagando por Urano
https://vagandoporurano.blogspot.com/...
July 6, 2015
About one-third of the way through I was resigned to the fact this book was never going to lift off, that it would remain a rather monotonous, scrambled and forever digressing and qualifying interior monologue. Some of the protagonists's musings I found interesting and made me think a little, but I really wouldn't have thought there was enough here to make a book. There's very little plot, the few events that do actually occur are carried out in this vague and insubstantial world that exists outside the protagonist's head. The style of humour is so understated it barely makes an impression. I could sometimes tell when things were intended to be funny but they were funny only in the most coldly ironic way. You never actually laugh. The writing is very simple and yet the way the character drones on makes you often drift away and stop paying attention to what he's saying. I was left with the impression the novel was the product of priveleged middle-class guilt and if it did have anything profound to say then it was lost on me.
June 26, 2016
Eine gute Erziehung und ein guter Job. Eine schöne Frau, einen Hund und ein Haus in den Suburbs: unser postmoderner Held besitzt alles. Doch dann steht ihm der Sinn nach Nervenkitzel: Gefühle für eine Frau, die nicht seine ist, eine Orgie und mehrere Schusswechsel. Eine Ereigniskette intolerablen Ausmaßes nimmt ihren Lauf.
„Grell & Süß“ ist auf jeden Fall ein Roman, der seinen eigenen Ton hat und sich damit von vielen anderen Büchern abhebt. Der Ich-Erzähler schwafelt viel. Manchmal zu viel. Seine Metaphern und Vergleiche sind dabei zudem nicht immer gelungen, wie ich finde, es gibt aber auch coole Zitate, ganz interessante Gedankengänge und einige Stellen zum Schmunzeln.
Mir hat die Stimmung, die beim Lesen des Buches aufgekommen ist, gefallen – als wenn der Protagonist mit einem in der Kneipe sitzen und einfach selbstgefällig vor sich hinlabern, seine eigenen Entscheidungen rechtfertigen und schönreden würde.
Negativpunkt für mich: Zwischenzeitlich wirkt das alles doch etwas sehr ziellos...
„Grell & Süß“ ist auf jeden Fall ein Roman, der seinen eigenen Ton hat und sich damit von vielen anderen Büchern abhebt. Der Ich-Erzähler schwafelt viel. Manchmal zu viel. Seine Metaphern und Vergleiche sind dabei zudem nicht immer gelungen, wie ich finde, es gibt aber auch coole Zitate, ganz interessante Gedankengänge und einige Stellen zum Schmunzeln.
Mir hat die Stimmung, die beim Lesen des Buches aufgekommen ist, gefallen – als wenn der Protagonist mit einem in der Kneipe sitzen und einfach selbstgefällig vor sich hinlabern, seine eigenen Entscheidungen rechtfertigen und schönreden würde.
Negativpunkt für mich: Zwischenzeitlich wirkt das alles doch etwas sehr ziellos...
January 10, 2016
A novel that wasn’t quite in my range, I am still really impressed by the way this novel comes across as a weird work of moral philosophy. It’s a retrospective narration from a character who lacks a clear moral center—at the novel’s open, he’s taken too many narcotics and slept with his best female friend, and it goes downhill from there into sexual depravity and armed robbery. But throughout, we are very close the self-rationalizing narrator as he tries to explain his behavior. And it’s striking stuff, very tight in terms of the language Thirwell uses—it’s a complex tapestry, and the impression it gives you is that the whole book was written in a rush at one sitting, though that’s not possible. But I thought the satire, while funny, maybe could’ve been more pointed. And as compelling as an act of philosophy, in reverse, it might be, it wasn’t altogether a compelling story, even though it had some solid set pieces.
June 14, 2015
This is a rather Insular book about a man and his thoughts basically, a few things do happen along the way during its telling. Thirlwell is said to be a 'great find' in the Media, and we've seen his like a time or two I'd say, still I'd rather see his next book show some real plot and less Navel gazing, the author does have a voice, but how he develops it over the next coming years will tell if he can transcend to greater waters.
This isn't a Must read by any means and many of you will be bored whilst reading it as it is a lot of tedium.
Best for you to read a Kindle Sample to see if you can give it a go.
This isn't a Must read by any means and many of you will be bored whilst reading it as it is a lot of tedium.
Best for you to read a Kindle Sample to see if you can give it a go.
February 1, 2016
It has its moments. But I could never get interested in the book long enough to read in more than fits and starts. Romy and Candy are one-dimensional women. You don't ever see them as real, which may have been Thirwell's intent - show everything through the narrators point of view. But it does not make for quality reading. Some of the other tricks are sophomoric. Hiro (Hero, get it?). Overall there is just too much going wrong here.
June 1, 2015
I'm not sure how this found its way in to my tbr list. Perhaps it got confused with the one above or below it.
I stuck with it until about half way through but it's really not my thing.
Just read three very average books in a row, so need a string come back. Back to some old favourites I think.
I stuck with it until about half way through but it's really not my thing.
Just read three very average books in a row, so need a string come back. Back to some old favourites I think.
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