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Sissy
Sissy is an hilarious, epic romp of a novel encompassing, in its burlesque scope, our modern crisis of masculinity, the banality of City work, our retreat into virtual lives and the alienating effects of modern technology, with plenty of variegated sexing in-between. Sissy is an anti-hero antidote to Don Juans; a modern masculine counterweight to, and sad manifestation of, the internet-induced fright of the real: a thirty-something wimp by day – surreally re-born of his long-suffering mother each morning – and a would-be-gangsta by virtual night. The novel is a virtuosic attack on the notion of the male Romantic Hero written in a language that is rich and flamboyant; enjoyably, hilariously, baroque, while at the same time an extraordinary reclamation of the narrative epic form for the woker ‘now’.
The novel's cast of characters includes a household of progressive eastern EU migrants, a violently activist feminist performance artist, and, in various disguises, a self-consciously Nabakovian and deeply sinister narrator who manipulates and duels with Sissy throughout, making observations via remote-controlled Gecko-cam, while distracted by a foot fettish. Its intricate subplots include a quest for and repatriation of thirteen magical feet, a reminder of the role of the non-British in the Battle of Britain, a disastrous wedding in Eastern Europe and a final, terrible revelation.
Ben Borek is unique: no-one else writes like this, or can write like this. His vision is dark but also, almost inexplicably, obscurely warm and deeply humane.
The novel's cast of characters includes a household of progressive eastern EU migrants, a violently activist feminist performance artist, and, in various disguises, a self-consciously Nabakovian and deeply sinister narrator who manipulates and duels with Sissy throughout, making observations via remote-controlled Gecko-cam, while distracted by a foot fettish. Its intricate subplots include a quest for and repatriation of thirteen magical feet, a reminder of the role of the non-British in the Battle of Britain, a disastrous wedding in Eastern Europe and a final, terrible revelation.
Ben Borek is unique: no-one else writes like this, or can write like this. His vision is dark but also, almost inexplicably, obscurely warm and deeply humane.
220 pages, Paperback
First published April 4, 2019
2 people are currently reading
78 people want to read
About the author
Ben Borek
3 books3 followersBen Borek grew up in South London. His novel in verse, Donjong Heights, published by Egg Box, was a cult hit back in 2008 and his poetry has been published in City State (Penned in the Margins), London, A History in Verse (Harvard University Press), and Dear World and Everyone in it (Bloodaxe).
He has read his work at festivals throughout the UK and Europe and audio of his work is available at the Archive of the Now (archiveofthenow.org).
He lives in Warsaw with his partner and son and is employed variously as a copywriter, editor, translator and voiceover artist.
He has read his work at festivals throughout the UK and Europe and audio of his work is available at the Archive of the Now (archiveofthenow.org).
He lives in Warsaw with his partner and son and is employed variously as a copywriter, editor, translator and voiceover artist.
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Displaying 1 - 7 of 7 reviews
August 16, 2022
Sissy by Ben Borek is the first book in the new Republic of Consciousness Prize bookclub which curates some of the finest fiction from small independent presses in the UK and Ireland and helps raise funds for this wonderful literary prize. See https://www.republicofconsciousness.c... and https://www.patreon.com/republicofcon...
And it is also one of the first four fiction titles issued by a new publishing house:
Using Don Juan as its inspiration, Sissy is a mock heroic epic poem of life in 21st century London.
Our eponymous hero is a 30-something office worker (physically in The City, somewhere off Cheapside, but not actually a bank), living in Lewisham. By day he is something of a wimp (hence the narrator's nickname for him), five foot nothing, with no romantic or sexual relationships and indeed such a mother's boy that he literally sleeps inside his mother's womb each night (yes, you did read that right). But by night, playing Second Life, he is Neno Brown, a gang boss to be feared.
A second story line concerns a North London household of leftish intellectual Eastern Europeans. One of their number is on a mission to find (quite how is never clear) the feet of thirteen dead pilots and repatriate them for burial. The men were all born in one West Ukraine village on the same day (but of different parents), each born with exactly seven toes. Having escaped both Soviet and Nazi troops in WW2, they fled to the UK where the took part, and died, in the Battle of Britain.
Another character is the same household is making a piece of performance art about Western men who hook up online with Eastern European women, and she entices Sissy to be her first victim/subject on the Slavic Beauties website.
And the novel's narrator, who lives on a barge based in Vauxhall, and himself has a strong foot fetish, isn't so much an omniscient narrator as one who is able to keep track of what is going on by transforming himself literally into a fly on the wall, or into an extra in a scene (e.g. the waiter in a restaurant where Sissy and his Slavia Beauty first meet) or hacking into Sissy's computer or via spycams concealed in geckos, all devices he uses to both advance the plot but also to voyeuristically watch the characters sleep, eat and have sex.
And all this is told in rhyming verse, with frequent digressions into brackets and lengthy footnotes (also in verse). It beings
I write this from my floating second home,
My calm retreat when Vauxhall’s sunny climes
Grow too hot-headed for my tender dome
(A vast cathedral full of golden chimes,
Which needs the river air to circulate
Throughout its sparkling naves, the placid weight
Of tidal-pull massaging from below
To let my fizzing cerebellum lull
Into a state where it is keen, but slow
And ready to compose). The gold-leaf hull
Now gently cuts the brown film of the Thames
And sprays a modest spindrift laced with gems
Of froth, which flicker, spectrum-like, to give
A billowing and nacreous effect
Encoded with the acronym ROYGBIV.
My second home, I wrote. You now suspect
I designate it thus to circumvent
A bill or two? But no. Our parliament
Has never seen my buttocks on its benches
(And if it ever did, the scarlet leather
Is where I’d sit, not in the squalid trenches
Of spin where any change in tabloid weather
Demands a shift in policy and speeches
As cloying as a plate of sugared leeches,
As tart as a carafe of puréed rind.)
So, no, my status is affirmed – your guide
Throughout this story, which shall soon unwind
For both of us – this is a real-time ride
Through disparate lives: a provident donation
From Calliope, I just take dictation.
I glide beneath the beams of Albert Bridge.
Adorned with blinking blubs, they rise in two
Loose cones to form an undulating ridge
Of fairy light which fights the spreading blue –
A battle that the thousand fading eyes
Are doomed to lose against the waking skies
With Sisyphean, quotidian recurrence,
This crepuscule is sacrosanct to me,
When London’s only effervescent currents
Are liquid and beneath me, when I’m free
To let my narrative, unbothered, rove
Through increments of indigo and mauve.
It is brilliant done and fascinating, although not that easy to follow given the elaborate prose and rather complex and magic-realist plot: I could have done with a simple prose introduction to each chapter ('In which are heroes....' style) or a reader's guide.
But the next best thing was this excellent review and introduction from the RoC Prize's own James Tookey: https://www.3ammagazine.com/3am/sissy/
One to look out for on next year's RoC Prize. 3.5 stars
Further extracts:
https://www.3ammagazine.com/3am/sissy...
(the opening chapter)
http://intercapillaryspace.blogspot.c...
(the tale of the 13 young men)
And it is also one of the first four fiction titles issued by a new publishing house:
Boiler House Press is a new publisher of fiction, non-fiction, poetry, and everything in-between.Sissy certainly breaks the mould, albeit follows to an extent in the footsteps of the author's previous cult novel-in-verse Donjong Heights (2008).
We are based at the University of East Anglia, home of the world-renowned Creative Writing MA, and a burgeoning world centre for creative-critical writing studies.
We are passionate about writing that breaks a mould; that surprises; that plays with-and-between the creative and the critical. We want to open and excite your mind.
Using Don Juan as its inspiration, Sissy is a mock heroic epic poem of life in 21st century London.
Our eponymous hero is a 30-something office worker (physically in The City, somewhere off Cheapside, but not actually a bank), living in Lewisham. By day he is something of a wimp (hence the narrator's nickname for him), five foot nothing, with no romantic or sexual relationships and indeed such a mother's boy that he literally sleeps inside his mother's womb each night (yes, you did read that right). But by night, playing Second Life, he is Neno Brown, a gang boss to be feared.
A second story line concerns a North London household of leftish intellectual Eastern Europeans. One of their number is on a mission to find (quite how is never clear) the feet of thirteen dead pilots and repatriate them for burial. The men were all born in one West Ukraine village on the same day (but of different parents), each born with exactly seven toes. Having escaped both Soviet and Nazi troops in WW2, they fled to the UK where the took part, and died, in the Battle of Britain.
Another character is the same household is making a piece of performance art about Western men who hook up online with Eastern European women, and she entices Sissy to be her first victim/subject on the Slavic Beauties website.
And the novel's narrator, who lives on a barge based in Vauxhall, and himself has a strong foot fetish, isn't so much an omniscient narrator as one who is able to keep track of what is going on by transforming himself literally into a fly on the wall, or into an extra in a scene (e.g. the waiter in a restaurant where Sissy and his Slavia Beauty first meet) or hacking into Sissy's computer or via spycams concealed in geckos, all devices he uses to both advance the plot but also to voyeuristically watch the characters sleep, eat and have sex.
And all this is told in rhyming verse, with frequent digressions into brackets and lengthy footnotes (also in verse). It beings
I write this from my floating second home,
My calm retreat when Vauxhall’s sunny climes
Grow too hot-headed for my tender dome
(A vast cathedral full of golden chimes,
Which needs the river air to circulate
Throughout its sparkling naves, the placid weight
Of tidal-pull massaging from below
To let my fizzing cerebellum lull
Into a state where it is keen, but slow
And ready to compose). The gold-leaf hull
Now gently cuts the brown film of the Thames
And sprays a modest spindrift laced with gems
Of froth, which flicker, spectrum-like, to give
A billowing and nacreous effect
Encoded with the acronym ROYGBIV.
My second home, I wrote. You now suspect
I designate it thus to circumvent
A bill or two? But no. Our parliament
Has never seen my buttocks on its benches
(And if it ever did, the scarlet leather
Is where I’d sit, not in the squalid trenches
Of spin where any change in tabloid weather
Demands a shift in policy and speeches
As cloying as a plate of sugared leeches,
As tart as a carafe of puréed rind.)
So, no, my status is affirmed – your guide
Throughout this story, which shall soon unwind
For both of us – this is a real-time ride
Through disparate lives: a provident donation
From Calliope, I just take dictation.
I glide beneath the beams of Albert Bridge.
Adorned with blinking blubs, they rise in two
Loose cones to form an undulating ridge
Of fairy light which fights the spreading blue –
A battle that the thousand fading eyes
Are doomed to lose against the waking skies
With Sisyphean, quotidian recurrence,
This crepuscule is sacrosanct to me,
When London’s only effervescent currents
Are liquid and beneath me, when I’m free
To let my narrative, unbothered, rove
Through increments of indigo and mauve.
It is brilliant done and fascinating, although not that easy to follow given the elaborate prose and rather complex and magic-realist plot: I could have done with a simple prose introduction to each chapter ('In which are heroes....' style) or a reader's guide.
But the next best thing was this excellent review and introduction from the RoC Prize's own James Tookey: https://www.3ammagazine.com/3am/sissy/
One to look out for on next year's RoC Prize. 3.5 stars
Further extracts:
https://www.3ammagazine.com/3am/sissy...
(the opening chapter)
http://intercapillaryspace.blogspot.c...
(the tale of the 13 young men)
February 23, 2024
Have you ever read a novel where the main protagonist climbs out of his mother’s womb every morning? oh and is nebbish individual by day but has a psychotic sexed up internet persona by night? how about a world where a ruthless Central European artistic couple plan to create an army of zombies? oh and it’s narrated by someone who uses a plastic gecko with a camera inside?
Oh yes the story is documented in verse : a/b/a/b/c/c
Welcome to the madcap and insane world of Ben Borek (and there’s a footnote on how to pronounce his name – in verse, of course) Sissy is a bonkers novel with twists and turns at every page. It’s also a ton of fun to read.
I am a huge fan of boundary breaking novels, the stranger, the better but I also like depth, which sometimes is lacking. Not so with Sissy. If one uncovers the weirdness one discovers that Sissy is a novel which criticises internet culture and machismo. There’s also a couple of political jabs for good measure.
Sissy is an all-rounder of a novel. It satisfies the intellectual part of your brain and also provides quite a few belly laughs in the process. I can guarantee that Sissy is a one of a kind reading experience and an unforgettable one.
Oh yes the story is documented in verse : a/b/a/b/c/c
Welcome to the madcap and insane world of Ben Borek (and there’s a footnote on how to pronounce his name – in verse, of course) Sissy is a bonkers novel with twists and turns at every page. It’s also a ton of fun to read.
I am a huge fan of boundary breaking novels, the stranger, the better but I also like depth, which sometimes is lacking. Not so with Sissy. If one uncovers the weirdness one discovers that Sissy is a novel which criticises internet culture and machismo. There’s also a couple of political jabs for good measure.
Sissy is an all-rounder of a novel. It satisfies the intellectual part of your brain and also provides quite a few belly laughs in the process. I can guarantee that Sissy is a one of a kind reading experience and an unforgettable one.
October 9, 2021
The phrase "labor of love" can sometimes feel like a backhanded compliment - one which suggests that a book belies a certain amount of artistic struggle or overreach that went into its creation, or else that it lacks audience appeal outside of the author him- or herself. It can, if disingenuously deployed, come off sounding a little condescending; a little judgy; a little smug.
But!
Other times, it means something else entirely. Something rare, and enormously special. Sometimes (and this being one of them) it denotes a level of care and patience and daring originality; a commitment to a specific, and somewhat esoteric vision with no guarantee of commercial success, and the will to harness and hone that vision into something virtually flawless; something too brilliant to ignore. And so, when I say that Ben Borek's Sissy is a towering, thrilling, monumental labor of love, that is what I mean. It's also just about the funniest fucking thing I've read all year.
Written entirely in verse (ABABCC sestet stanzas, to whom it may concern), Sissy tells the tale of a profoundly growth-stunted, 21st century British lad - one who is literally birthed every morning from his mother's womb, and after putting in his daily 8 hours at an aggressively nondescript office drudge job, returns to his cozy uterine apartment (complete with Morrissey posters) every night. There he leads an Alex DeLarge-esque second life online as a virtual gangster lothario who takes what he wants and answers to no one. No one, that is, until he gets hooked by a catfishing anarchist performance artist via a mail-order bride website and embarks on an ill-fated quest for love (or at least lust) that leads him clear across the continent and back. Invoking Lord Byron and Irvine Welsh in about equal measure, Sissy pulls off the incredible trick of joining two wildly disparate literary pantheons simultaneously, while also taking the piss a bit out of both.
Borek's mastery of language(s) is sublime, and his poetry barrels forward with a kind of fluid pugnacity, bobbing and weaving between voices, tongues, and dialects as he crafts verse after verse of unexpected, creative, and hilariously multisyllabic rhymes like some hyperliterate battle rapper (Lin Manuel Miranda's got nothing on this guy, but boy what I wouldn't give to see Sissy staged and performed aloud). Likewise, his scathing dissection of modern masculinity (or lack thereof) and his seamless alignment of contemporary concerns with classical sensibilities bakes a degree of timelessness right into the text. Sissy is a true "the more things change, the more they stay the same" proposition, and while I won't spoil the ending, I will say that if men are still behaving this badly (or worse) 50 years down the road, this book will most assuredly be part of the canon that tracked our continued decline.
In all of these ways, Sissy is a labor of love in the absolute best sense of the term - a book that undoubtedly took heroic amounts of time and effort, but reads like it spilled forth from quill and ink via one long, mad spell of divine inspiration. A book that will challenge your very notion of what books are still allowed to do and be. Indeed, a book that must be read to be believed.
But!
Other times, it means something else entirely. Something rare, and enormously special. Sometimes (and this being one of them) it denotes a level of care and patience and daring originality; a commitment to a specific, and somewhat esoteric vision with no guarantee of commercial success, and the will to harness and hone that vision into something virtually flawless; something too brilliant to ignore. And so, when I say that Ben Borek's Sissy is a towering, thrilling, monumental labor of love, that is what I mean. It's also just about the funniest fucking thing I've read all year.
Written entirely in verse (ABABCC sestet stanzas, to whom it may concern), Sissy tells the tale of a profoundly growth-stunted, 21st century British lad - one who is literally birthed every morning from his mother's womb, and after putting in his daily 8 hours at an aggressively nondescript office drudge job, returns to his cozy uterine apartment (complete with Morrissey posters) every night. There he leads an Alex DeLarge-esque second life online as a virtual gangster lothario who takes what he wants and answers to no one. No one, that is, until he gets hooked by a catfishing anarchist performance artist via a mail-order bride website and embarks on an ill-fated quest for love (or at least lust) that leads him clear across the continent and back. Invoking Lord Byron and Irvine Welsh in about equal measure, Sissy pulls off the incredible trick of joining two wildly disparate literary pantheons simultaneously, while also taking the piss a bit out of both.
Borek's mastery of language(s) is sublime, and his poetry barrels forward with a kind of fluid pugnacity, bobbing and weaving between voices, tongues, and dialects as he crafts verse after verse of unexpected, creative, and hilariously multisyllabic rhymes like some hyperliterate battle rapper (Lin Manuel Miranda's got nothing on this guy, but boy what I wouldn't give to see Sissy staged and performed aloud). Likewise, his scathing dissection of modern masculinity (or lack thereof) and his seamless alignment of contemporary concerns with classical sensibilities bakes a degree of timelessness right into the text. Sissy is a true "the more things change, the more they stay the same" proposition, and while I won't spoil the ending, I will say that if men are still behaving this badly (or worse) 50 years down the road, this book will most assuredly be part of the canon that tracked our continued decline.
In all of these ways, Sissy is a labor of love in the absolute best sense of the term - a book that undoubtedly took heroic amounts of time and effort, but reads like it spilled forth from quill and ink via one long, mad spell of divine inspiration. A book that will challenge your very notion of what books are still allowed to do and be. Indeed, a book that must be read to be believed.
Read
May 8, 2019This is an amazing book. Written entirely in stanzas rhyming ababcc. I’d call this a sextilla or sextuplet format, but the syllabic measures are not the same.
Regardless, the demands of the form and the rhyme scheme make for some witty, erudite, funny and surprising combinations.
I loved the use of slavic language and, even, Cyrillic spellings of Marks and Spencers and Chanel no. 5. Borek so perfectly captures the broken English of a language challenged Slav in London, despite his strict guidelines.
I wished I knew more about London neighborhoods. I was looking up Cricklewood and Brompton in wikipedia for background info. There were plenty of words I looked up too. Toward the end, it got a bit like work for me.
This is an amazing effort, and mostly engaging.
Regardless, the demands of the form and the rhyme scheme make for some witty, erudite, funny and surprising combinations.
I loved the use of slavic language and, even, Cyrillic spellings of Marks and Spencers and Chanel no. 5. Borek so perfectly captures the broken English of a language challenged Slav in London, despite his strict guidelines.
I wished I knew more about London neighborhoods. I was looking up Cricklewood and Brompton in wikipedia for background info. There were plenty of words I looked up too. Toward the end, it got a bit like work for me.
This is an amazing effort, and mostly engaging.
December 22, 2019
Sissy works in London. He's timid and shy. He lives with his mother and at night he crawls inside her womb (where he has a desk, wi-fi, a computer) and each morning is literally re-birthed. Yes, you read that correctly. In the evenings, from his computer, he logs onto the Second Earth videogame and plays a mean gangster called Neno Brown. Feeling lonely, he decides to try and find love on the Slavic Beauties website.
Meanwhile, a group of leftist Polish intellectuals in London constitute the main sub-plots. One of them, Wassily, is attempting to find and take back to Poland the feet of several dead Polish ex-servicemen, each of whom had seven toes, so that he can bury and repatriate the feet. Another of the group embarks on an art project to ensnare unsuspecting men and record their sexual adventures.
All of this is narrated by a shape-shifting narrator with a foot fetish who lives in a houseboat, and it is all also written in rhyming sesta rima poetry, which lets Borek quote Eliot, Shakespeare, Nabokov, Larkin and plenty more besides.
There's so much for a reader to get excited about here, so much imagination and so many rich ideas at work about masculinity, the internet, art, the experience of Polish immigrants; but I should say that I didn't love Sissy.
I should also say that the synopsis of this book sounds a lot more fun than the reading experience of it actually is - largely I think this is because of the choice of form, which (while I love writers who place constraints on themselves) I just think makes the text often stodgy and needlessly opaque. I didn't hate it, and there's some great moments (the first "birthing" of Sissy is a fantastic "what the actual fuck am I reading" moment) but I felt that there's some squandered potential here.
Meanwhile, a group of leftist Polish intellectuals in London constitute the main sub-plots. One of them, Wassily, is attempting to find and take back to Poland the feet of several dead Polish ex-servicemen, each of whom had seven toes, so that he can bury and repatriate the feet. Another of the group embarks on an art project to ensnare unsuspecting men and record their sexual adventures.
All of this is narrated by a shape-shifting narrator with a foot fetish who lives in a houseboat, and it is all also written in rhyming sesta rima poetry, which lets Borek quote Eliot, Shakespeare, Nabokov, Larkin and plenty more besides.
There's so much for a reader to get excited about here, so much imagination and so many rich ideas at work about masculinity, the internet, art, the experience of Polish immigrants; but I should say that I didn't love Sissy.
I should also say that the synopsis of this book sounds a lot more fun than the reading experience of it actually is - largely I think this is because of the choice of form, which (while I love writers who place constraints on themselves) I just think makes the text often stodgy and needlessly opaque. I didn't hate it, and there's some great moments (the first "birthing" of Sissy is a fantastic "what the actual fuck am I reading" moment) but I felt that there's some squandered potential here.
July 13, 2021
A modern epic (literally)
Homer for the terminally online: oedipus as incel cowers in yonic grotto, sung by omniscient insecta.
Please read immediately.
Homer for the terminally online: oedipus as incel cowers in yonic grotto, sung by omniscient insecta.
Please read immediately.
June 30, 2023
The slayage was exceptional. This is like TS Eliot if he was yass & if he had absolutely 0% respect for traditional masculinity. Also if he was funny. Great book.
Displaying 1 - 7 of 7 reviews