What do you think?
Rate this book
The Passion Artist
A classic of dark eroticism from one of the great American writers of the twentieth century.
192 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1979
4 people are currently reading
213 people want to read
About the author
John Hawkes
109 books191 followersJohn Hawkes, born John Clendennin Talbot Burne Hawkes, Jr., was a postmodern American novelist, known for the intensity of his work, which suspended the traditional constraints of the narrative.
Born in Stamford, Connecticut, and educated at Harvard University, Hawkes taught at Brown University for thirty years. Although he published his first novel, The Cannibal, in 1949, it was The Lime Twig (1961) that first won him acclaim. Later, however, his second novel, The Beetle Leg, an intensely surrealistic western set in a Montana landscape that T. S. Eliot might have conjured, came to be viewed by many critics as one of the landmark novels of 20th Century American literature.
Hawkes died in Providence, Rhode Island.
Born in Stamford, Connecticut, and educated at Harvard University, Hawkes taught at Brown University for thirty years. Although he published his first novel, The Cannibal, in 1949, it was The Lime Twig (1961) that first won him acclaim. Later, however, his second novel, The Beetle Leg, an intensely surrealistic western set in a Montana landscape that T. S. Eliot might have conjured, came to be viewed by many critics as one of the landmark novels of 20th Century American literature.
Hawkes died in Providence, Rhode Island.
Ratings & Reviews
Friends & Following
Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!
Community Reviews
Displaying 1 - 12 of 12 reviews
June 20, 2017
The Sentences of John Hawkes
Check this out for waffle words, pufferie and unreliability:
"We feel, first of all, that we—you and I—that we can’t miss it: fineness, excellence, quality; it is there like an address at the end of some elaborate directions we’ve been given: larger, more bovine, than life; and we believe that although, conceivably, others may be obtuse or spiritually absent on occasion, certainly we (it is ourselves, after all, of whom we speak) won’t overlook Eden, Etna, or their equivalences; yet—alas!—at one time or other we surely shall: We shall fall asleep in the train window while, beneath the trestle, a painted canyon opens like a lily; we shall blink in the middle of a beautiful pirouette; blunder into the wrong street and never find the duomo; pick the squid out and shove it to the side of our plate; yawn in the face of the vast Pacific; sneeze on the president’s hand as he fastens the medal to our chest; quarrel about love in Syracuse and thereby miss Sicily, a land our embittered memory can’t return to; yet, similar incidents will happen often: Ancient, medieval, modern history, as well as present life, continually repeats and records such oversights, such nodding, such detumescence; there is a coolness that clings to us sometimes even when we are wrapped in flames and pretending to be a phoenix."- William H. Gass
"When it comes to the engravement of the sentence, no one now writing can match him." - William H. Gass
If you're an author who eschews plot, you'd want to ensure your sentences make up for it. Unfortunately, too many of Hawkes' sentences fail to live up to the extravagant hyperbole of his scotch and popcorn-swollen drinking buddy, Bill Gass, even if they're almost equally long as the above example of his (one sentence, can you believe it, replete with semi-colons).
The problem occurs when the prose descends into mannerism and affectation in the absence of any other motivating force that holds it together. When it does, which is too often, it's difficult to pass it off as style. It's so clumsy, I can't believe it's intentional, except he duplicates the same mannerisms, often within a few pages, as if he were a cat proudly offering yet one more dead mouse or bird to its owner.
In All This Detail...
Hawkes (a teacher of creative writing at Brown University for thirty years) has a habit of linking long phrases and clauses of description that just seem to go on and on, until finally he gets self-conscious of the fact or realises that even his (or our) pupils would gasp (or boggle):
"His small perfectly round gold-rimmed spectacles, his two ill-fitting suits of black serge, his black turtleneck shirts, his pointed shoes that were always worn at the heels and covered with a faint dusting of powdered concrete from the walls of unfinished buildings, his more than normal height, his lantern jaw, the imperious angle at which he raised his chin, the head of excessively trimmed black hair that suggested the hair painted on a manikin, the single steel canine in his mouthful of teeth, the womanly whiteness of the skin that covered the flesh of his deceptively masculine large frame, the nearly hostile tension of the ruthlessly exacting black eyes, the soft white hands bare except for the gold band emblematic of the formalities of the distant ritual in which he had discovered elation, the cheap steel pen and pencil always clipped into the breast pocket of the sinister black suit coat jacket: in all these details he himself clearly recognised the strange good looks of his youth preserved in the austerity of his middle age, recognised all the hallmarks of the born pedant wedded to those of the petty genius of the police state." (4)
And within a page, he repeats the same blunder:
"A canvas awning, a few outdoor chairs and tables, the darkness and acidic aroma of the small interior behind the backs of those sitting with crossed knees and facing the street, the sounds of glass and china, the sounds of the small ancient machines producing coffee or alcoholic drinks, the sounds of the proprietor's voice or the sudden comic sounds of the paws of his little dog, the occasional sandwich of bread and cheese on a heavy plate, a song coming from the radio behind the bar, the rancid smell of burning cigarettes, the progress of a blinded fly, the scraping of one of the outdoor chairs: in all this was implicit the boredom and security of time passing as it was expected to pass, indifferently, without meaning , without the threat of impending unwanted change or even disaster." (5)
In all this was implicit the boredom of words passing as they were expected to pass, indifferently, without meaning, without the threat of impending plot or narrative.
Or...Or...Or
And now comes the recurring conjunction approach (patent pending) to excessive sentence length construction:
"Not once did he lose possession of himself, whether standing at the graveside with the boyfriend, their arms about each other's shoulders, or shaking hands with the priest, whose large black headgear made him think of superstition and long nights, or nodding when the boy friend offered to take Mirabelle for several hours, or noticing a cat feeling a trickle of fresh earth lodging between his shoe and sock, or hearing the small toneless bell that was still tolling for Claire whose casket was in the ground." (8)
Within You, Without You...
But wait! There's more!
"He knew only too well that the city in which he lived was without trees, without national monuments, without ponds or flower gardens, without even a single building to attract visitors from other parts of the world." (11)
Beyond the Beyond...
How might the unwary reader escape?
"Beyond all this, beyond the four rooms, beyond the low white walls of the cemetery, beyond the fuel pumps and the motorcycle drivers in their leather suits and enormous smoke-blackened goggles, lay an endless flat countryside that was like boot to foot or shawl to shoulder to the small city." (12)
For dog's sake, if this is the alternative, give me a plot (even if it's in a cemetery)! Gimme fiction! (Not just all these long sentences whose purpose and effect is no more than length itself.)
Just As...
"But just as his foot touched the metal step, just as his free hand took hold of the open door, just as he was on the verge of climbing inside the van, it was then that he was arrested by the shouted sound of his name." (47)
And so it seems that, just as this reader was reduced to pleading for some plot, Hawkes relented, though not without some of his mannerisms. Here, at l(e)ast, the repetition draws attention to the progress of the protagonist via his actions. There is momentum, hopefully towards something. But what?
The Darkness
...towards the darkness. Most of the action occurs in the cold and the darkness. We know, because Hawkes keeps telling (not showing) us. The darknesss...the darknesss...It was horrible. The horror! The horror! I stopped counting the number of times the word appeared after a while, because it had become a distraction to read the word so many times within the space of a few pages (sometimes up to four times per page).
The Captive, Captivated (An Homage to Hania or An Ode to Stiff Little Twigs)
"Throughout his final days and hours, which were also his days and hours in the women's prison, La Violane, there were occasions when Konrad Vost thought himself unable to bear the humiliation of being a hostage. Nonetheless he entered La Violane feeling only recognition, relief, and the special pleasure that always attends the inevitable when it finally occurs. After all, the closing of the darkest gate is like a burst of light, and Konrad Vost found himself exactly where he had always wished to be without knowing it: in the world of women and in the world of the prison, where the more dangerous rudiments of common knowledge are unavoidable and where he would receive the punishment he deserved and desired, in confinement, for his acts of innocence as well as for his ultimate inability to be always right, always correct.
"Konrad Vost was led back into La Violane like an animal on a rope. For all his suffering, he was only too well aware, even then, of chronology, of the crossing of public axis and private axis like two rotten sticks. Could a person such as himself ever be brought to even a rudimentary knowledge of submission, domination, the question of woman? As he lurched once again through the garden of ruined flowers, he was conscious of the fact that he did not know.
"It was then that the night came suddenly to the world beyond the prison, and that the light died in the room where he stood, and that he heard the sounds of more than one person climbing the stairs to the door that was locked, chained, and covered with sheets of nailed tin. The sounds of the footsteps rose in the darkness, clattered abruptly to silence outside the door, and after a pause were followed by the noises of opening lock and falling chain that have always signaled food, reprive, or death sentence to all those crouching in the dungeons forever sunken into the darkness of both the inner and the outer lives of everyone.
"In the next instant, when the door had been flung back, he thought that two people had come to interrogate him or to provide for his needs: the tall handsome woman who was now unarmed, and the small woman he dared not hope to recognise.
"The tall handsome woman wore a black cotton gown and a hood over her head. As soon as he felt one of her hands on his left shoulder and the other on the sleeve of his right arm, he understood that whatever else they intended, he was to be undressed. The tall woman was already drawing open his stiff black jacket and pulling it off his shoulders. He assisted her efforts. With no hesitation the woman stripped him of the soiled jacket which she dropped on the floor beside the rope. The serene fingers pulled the black shirt loose at the waist and removed it. The gown smelled of lavender.
"The tall woman was as indifferent to the smells of the room and to the littered garments that were tokens of lust and torment as she was to his bare chest, and waxen effort to retain some semblance of pride in the midst of submission. As soon as he felt the cool fingers on his arm, he turned and took the few steps necessary to reach the bed, where he seated himself on the mattress. The tall woman knelt at his feet. To her, he understood, there was no such thing as indignity. He closed his eyes.
"Now, carefully, she raised her head, placed her hand on his naked chest and pushed him back on the mattress.
"Still kneeling beside the rusted bed, though having risen upright on her knees, she unfastened the several crude buttons of his trousers, until they fell loose on his thighs. Then she placed her hands far apart on the edge of the mattress and, still, tall on her knees, leaned forward and with her large mouth began kissing the cold white nakedness of his groin. In the light of the lamp he lay rigid, staring into the darkness beyond the light and listening for the brittle cracking sounds in his shoulders and in the top of his spine, receiving in this locked room of a woman's prison the gentle deliberate attentions of a person he did not know. The smell of the kerosene was only another fragrance like the smell of her plum-coloured hair. Never in his life had a woman devoted such attention and such concentration to the thin hard nakedness of his genitals. Now he wished only that the woman might lift her handsome face that he might dwell on it. But she did not. The movements of her face and mouth were continuous.
"But now the tall woman was in fact raising her head, pausing, giving him the gift of majestic consciousness that shone in her eyes. He looked so long into the eyes of the raised head that he was not in fact prepared for the shifting of the woman's body or his own. In the midst of his shock and pleasure, he was now refusing what he knew was inevitable inside himself, fighting the greedy mouth as the child fights the bladder in the night. But then it began, in darkness. He exploded, without exertion, across her glistening wet lips. The little trumpeter had come.
"The tall woman stood up and sat beside Konrad Vost on the mattress. 'Now, it's my turn,' she said. He knelt, obligingly, on the floor where she had before him. He parted her gown below her hips, and was momentarily surprised to see genitals just like his own, only larger. Then he felt the light pressure of her hand on the back of his head, and he descended, mouth open, lips moist and eyes closed...Now, finally he was about to learn his first lesson in submission."
Dead Twigs
"[He is one of] the species, which surrounds itself with lies, and calls the lies culture, the way squirrels build their nests of dead twigs and fallen leaves, and then hide inside."
I'm going to go outside and bury this book under my persimmon tree. What an engravement that would be!
SOUNDTRACK:
March 26, 2017
Check this out for waffle words, pufferie and unreliability:
"We feel, first of all, that we—you and I—that we can’t miss it: fineness, excellence, quality; it is there like an address at the end of some elaborate directions we’ve been given: larger, more bovine, than life; and we believe that although, conceivably, others may be obtuse or spiritually absent on occasion, certainly we (it is ourselves, after all, of whom we speak) won’t overlook Eden, Etna, or their equivalences; yet—alas!—at one time or other we surely shall: We shall fall asleep in the train window while, beneath the trestle, a painted canyon opens like a lily; we shall blink in the middle of a beautiful pirouette; blunder into the wrong street and never find the duomo; pick the squid out and shove it to the side of our plate; yawn in the face of the vast Pacific; sneeze on the president’s hand as he fastens the medal to our chest; quarrel about love in Syracuse and thereby miss Sicily, a land our embittered memory can’t return to; yet, similar incidents will happen often: Ancient, medieval, modern history, as well as present life, continually repeats and records such oversights, such nodding, such detumescence; there is a coolness that clings to us sometimes even when we are wrapped in flames and pretending to be a phoenix."- William H. Gass
"When it comes to the engravement of the sentence, no one now writing can match him." - William H. Gass
If you're an author who eschews plot, you'd want to ensure your sentences make up for it. Unfortunately, too many of Hawkes' sentences fail to live up to the extravagant hyperbole of his scotch and popcorn-swollen drinking buddy, Bill Gass, even if they're almost equally long as the above example of his (one sentence, can you believe it, replete with semi-colons).
The problem occurs when the prose descends into mannerism and affectation in the absence of any other motivating force that holds it together. When it does, which is too often, it's difficult to pass it off as style. It's so clumsy, I can't believe it's intentional, except he duplicates the same mannerisms, often within a few pages, as if he were a cat proudly offering yet one more dead mouse or bird to its owner.
In All This Detail...
Hawkes (a teacher of creative writing at Brown University for thirty years) has a habit of linking long phrases and clauses of description that just seem to go on and on, until finally he gets self-conscious of the fact or realises that even his (or our) pupils would gasp (or boggle):
"His small perfectly round gold-rimmed spectacles, his two ill-fitting suits of black serge, his black turtleneck shirts, his pointed shoes that were always worn at the heels and covered with a faint dusting of powdered concrete from the walls of unfinished buildings, his more than normal height, his lantern jaw, the imperious angle at which he raised his chin, the head of excessively trimmed black hair that suggested the hair painted on a manikin, the single steel canine in his mouthful of teeth, the womanly whiteness of the skin that covered the flesh of his deceptively masculine large frame, the nearly hostile tension of the ruthlessly exacting black eyes, the soft white hands bare except for the gold band emblematic of the formalities of the distant ritual in which he had discovered elation, the cheap steel pen and pencil always clipped into the breast pocket of the sinister black suit coat jacket: in all these details he himself clearly recognised the strange good looks of his youth preserved in the austerity of his middle age, recognised all the hallmarks of the born pedant wedded to those of the petty genius of the police state." (4)
And within a page, he repeats the same blunder:
"A canvas awning, a few outdoor chairs and tables, the darkness and acidic aroma of the small interior behind the backs of those sitting with crossed knees and facing the street, the sounds of glass and china, the sounds of the small ancient machines producing coffee or alcoholic drinks, the sounds of the proprietor's voice or the sudden comic sounds of the paws of his little dog, the occasional sandwich of bread and cheese on a heavy plate, a song coming from the radio behind the bar, the rancid smell of burning cigarettes, the progress of a blinded fly, the scraping of one of the outdoor chairs: in all this was implicit the boredom and security of time passing as it was expected to pass, indifferently, without meaning , without the threat of impending unwanted change or even disaster." (5)
In all this was implicit the boredom of words passing as they were expected to pass, indifferently, without meaning, without the threat of impending plot or narrative.
Or...Or...Or
And now comes the recurring conjunction approach (patent pending) to excessive sentence length construction:
"Not once did he lose possession of himself, whether standing at the graveside with the boyfriend, their arms about each other's shoulders, or shaking hands with the priest, whose large black headgear made him think of superstition and long nights, or nodding when the boy friend offered to take Mirabelle for several hours, or noticing a cat feeling a trickle of fresh earth lodging between his shoe and sock, or hearing the small toneless bell that was still tolling for Claire whose casket was in the ground." (8)
Within You, Without You...
But wait! There's more!
"He knew only too well that the city in which he lived was without trees, without national monuments, without ponds or flower gardens, without even a single building to attract visitors from other parts of the world." (11)
Beyond the Beyond...
How might the unwary reader escape?
"Beyond all this, beyond the four rooms, beyond the low white walls of the cemetery, beyond the fuel pumps and the motorcycle drivers in their leather suits and enormous smoke-blackened goggles, lay an endless flat countryside that was like boot to foot or shawl to shoulder to the small city." (12)
For dog's sake, if this is the alternative, give me a plot (even if it's in a cemetery)! Gimme fiction! (Not just all these long sentences whose purpose and effect is no more than length itself.)
Just As...
"But just as his foot touched the metal step, just as his free hand took hold of the open door, just as he was on the verge of climbing inside the van, it was then that he was arrested by the shouted sound of his name." (47)
And so it seems that, just as this reader was reduced to pleading for some plot, Hawkes relented, though not without some of his mannerisms. Here, at l(e)ast, the repetition draws attention to the progress of the protagonist via his actions. There is momentum, hopefully towards something. But what?
The Darkness
...towards the darkness. Most of the action occurs in the cold and the darkness. We know, because Hawkes keeps telling (not showing) us. The darknesss...the darknesss...It was horrible. The horror! The horror! I stopped counting the number of times the word appeared after a while, because it had become a distraction to read the word so many times within the space of a few pages (sometimes up to four times per page).
The Captive, Captivated (An Homage to Hania or An Ode to Stiff Little Twigs)
"Throughout his final days and hours, which were also his days and hours in the women's prison, La Violane, there were occasions when Konrad Vost thought himself unable to bear the humiliation of being a hostage. Nonetheless he entered La Violane feeling only recognition, relief, and the special pleasure that always attends the inevitable when it finally occurs. After all, the closing of the darkest gate is like a burst of light, and Konrad Vost found himself exactly where he had always wished to be without knowing it: in the world of women and in the world of the prison, where the more dangerous rudiments of common knowledge are unavoidable and where he would receive the punishment he deserved and desired, in confinement, for his acts of innocence as well as for his ultimate inability to be always right, always correct.
"Konrad Vost was led back into La Violane like an animal on a rope. For all his suffering, he was only too well aware, even then, of chronology, of the crossing of public axis and private axis like two rotten sticks. Could a person such as himself ever be brought to even a rudimentary knowledge of submission, domination, the question of woman? As he lurched once again through the garden of ruined flowers, he was conscious of the fact that he did not know.
"It was then that the night came suddenly to the world beyond the prison, and that the light died in the room where he stood, and that he heard the sounds of more than one person climbing the stairs to the door that was locked, chained, and covered with sheets of nailed tin. The sounds of the footsteps rose in the darkness, clattered abruptly to silence outside the door, and after a pause were followed by the noises of opening lock and falling chain that have always signaled food, reprive, or death sentence to all those crouching in the dungeons forever sunken into the darkness of both the inner and the outer lives of everyone.
"In the next instant, when the door had been flung back, he thought that two people had come to interrogate him or to provide for his needs: the tall handsome woman who was now unarmed, and the small woman he dared not hope to recognise.
"The tall handsome woman wore a black cotton gown and a hood over her head. As soon as he felt one of her hands on his left shoulder and the other on the sleeve of his right arm, he understood that whatever else they intended, he was to be undressed. The tall woman was already drawing open his stiff black jacket and pulling it off his shoulders. He assisted her efforts. With no hesitation the woman stripped him of the soiled jacket which she dropped on the floor beside the rope. The serene fingers pulled the black shirt loose at the waist and removed it. The gown smelled of lavender.
"The tall woman was as indifferent to the smells of the room and to the littered garments that were tokens of lust and torment as she was to his bare chest, and waxen effort to retain some semblance of pride in the midst of submission. As soon as he felt the cool fingers on his arm, he turned and took the few steps necessary to reach the bed, where he seated himself on the mattress. The tall woman knelt at his feet. To her, he understood, there was no such thing as indignity. He closed his eyes.
"Now, carefully, she raised her head, placed her hand on his naked chest and pushed him back on the mattress.
"Still kneeling beside the rusted bed, though having risen upright on her knees, she unfastened the several crude buttons of his trousers, until they fell loose on his thighs. Then she placed her hands far apart on the edge of the mattress and, still, tall on her knees, leaned forward and with her large mouth began kissing the cold white nakedness of his groin. In the light of the lamp he lay rigid, staring into the darkness beyond the light and listening for the brittle cracking sounds in his shoulders and in the top of his spine, receiving in this locked room of a woman's prison the gentle deliberate attentions of a person he did not know. The smell of the kerosene was only another fragrance like the smell of her plum-coloured hair. Never in his life had a woman devoted such attention and such concentration to the thin hard nakedness of his genitals. Now he wished only that the woman might lift her handsome face that he might dwell on it. But she did not. The movements of her face and mouth were continuous.
"But now the tall woman was in fact raising her head, pausing, giving him the gift of majestic consciousness that shone in her eyes. He looked so long into the eyes of the raised head that he was not in fact prepared for the shifting of the woman's body or his own. In the midst of his shock and pleasure, he was now refusing what he knew was inevitable inside himself, fighting the greedy mouth as the child fights the bladder in the night. But then it began, in darkness. He exploded, without exertion, across her glistening wet lips. The little trumpeter had come.
"The tall woman stood up and sat beside Konrad Vost on the mattress. 'Now, it's my turn,' she said. He knelt, obligingly, on the floor where she had before him. He parted her gown below her hips, and was momentarily surprised to see genitals just like his own, only larger. Then he felt the light pressure of her hand on the back of his head, and he descended, mouth open, lips moist and eyes closed...Now, finally he was about to learn his first lesson in submission."
Dead Twigs
"[He is one of] the species, which surrounds itself with lies, and calls the lies culture, the way squirrels build their nests of dead twigs and fallen leaves, and then hide inside."
I'm going to go outside and bury this book under my persimmon tree. What an engravement that would be!
SOUNDTRACK:
March 26, 2017
March 20, 2020
John Hawkes obfuscates a very thin plot and flat characters with mellifluous prose. He does this in his other books, but the main character of this one partakes in infantile fantasies for the majority of the pages, slobbering, excreting, and generally having what Hawkes might have thought was an erotic epiphany at the time, but which was really nothing except random self-indulgence and ordinary teenage excretion. What happens cannot be said to be relevant, interesting or sensical if you bother to expend time and energy determining what exactly is happening beneath all of the circuitous, grasping, saccharine lyricism. Only read if you are mesmerized by John Hawkes' dastardly, grievous, chortling surrealism or looking for a poetically written piece of smut.
January 15, 2016
John Barth said this was Hawkes' best novel since Second Skin. I haven't read everything in between the two, but Second Skin is my favorite of his that I've read so far. Plus this is dystopian Hawkes, so I couldn't resist. This was his eighth novel, and the prose is a bit more conventional than in his earlier work, which could be good or bad, depending on your preferences. Though more formal in their construction, his sentences can still take the breath away, and his command of language remains ironclad. Thematically, he continues trolling around in the depths. Here, a man named Konrad Vost lives in a bleak city dominated by a women's prison, in which his estranged mother is confined. Vost is a widow and he's losing touch with his daughter. He works as a pharmacist's assistant and spends much of his spare time grieving for his wife. It takes much of the novel to unravel all the whys and heretofores of Vost's situation, which is what keeps it interesting. Something big eventually happens that changes everything, diverting Vost from his worn routines. He makes some poor decisions but over time Hawkes reveals where Vost is coming from. Along the way, Hawkes probes at the divide, real or imagined, between women and men. He also explores erotic love and the influence of childhood events on adult actions. It's a deep and dark read, but a rewarding one.
At dusk he knew with certainty what he had known at noon and dawn: that now he was fit to live only in the darkness, and that the darkness within himself was always expanding, always contracting, never the same, always the same.
November 16, 2007
Dark and bizarre fairy tale or allegory in the Kafka vein that starts out in a relatively straight forward third person narration before derailing into a world of rioting women’s prison, trauma, fear, bestiality, mad doctors, erotic guilt, all delivered in Hawk’s deadpan Beckett like poetic prose.
June 24, 2010
My first impression was that this was going to be just empty writer's-workshop wordplay, but boy was I wrong. He's self-consciously wordcrafty, but he's so damn good at it he completely wins you over. Lots of trauma and bleakness, so be warned.
January 2, 2018
זה לא שלא ידעתי מה מצפה לי. אפשר לומר שניחשתי בדיוק את חוויית הקריאה הצפויה למן ההתחלה. ואולי זו חלק מן הבעיה. היה חסר בספר הזה קצת משהו שיפתיע אותי, משהו עודף שייתן ערך לקריאה עצמה מעבר למה שהיה ברור מלכתחילה. ואולי אני קצת מגזים?
פעם ספרות אמריקאית פוסט מודרנית הייתה מרתקת אותי. ההתלהבות קצת עברה עם השנים. אז כיצד להתייחס לספר שעוד נמצא בשוליים של הספרות מסוג זה? אז ציפיתי מראש למשהו קצת קפקאי, אקספרימנטאלי, אקסצנטרי, ומלא סצנות קשות ודוחות של אלימות וסקס. וגם קבלתי מנה גדושה מכל אלו. קראתי כבר קודם באינטרנט (וגם בסוף הספר באחרית הדבר של המתרגם) כי הוקס נודע בקביעתו כי "אויביו האמיתיים של הרומן הם העלילה, הדמות, הרקע והנושא". דווקא מבחינה זו הספר הוא יחסית סטנדרטי וכנראה לא מייצג ספרים מוקדמים יותר שלו, גם אם לא חסרים כאן פלאשבקים, וקו עלילה מבולגן.
אין כאן ממש אפיון עמוק של דמויות (דמות אחת למען האמת). זה יותר עיצוב ספרותי של תיאוריות פסיכולוגיות. הרבה אלגוריות. קראתי לאחרונה ביקורת של דורותי פארקר לאיזה ספר שהיה גם הוא אלגורי, בה טענה "שאלגוריה זה טוב ויפה, רק שהיא אינה מזהה אלגוריות אפילו אם מניחים אותן ממש מול פרצופה". אז אני לא קיצוני עד כדי כך, אבל גם אין לי כוח לפרש כל פרט ופרט ביזאריים. ויש הרבה כאלו. הרומן הוא קליידוסקופי למדי אם להשתמש בדימוי – רוצה לומר – צבעוני, גדוש וכל דבר משתקף וחוזר לאורך הספר במטמורפוזות של צורות רבות ושונות. מבנה כזה זה לעיתים יפה ומרשים ולעיתים טרחני.
הכתיבה עצמה עושה שימוש בתיאורים קפדניים ומטאפורות שמערבבות דימויים שונים ומשונים. לפעמים זה עובד ואפקטיבי מאוד ואז הכתיבה ממש טובה – בעיקר בסצנות הילדות שהן פסגת הספר. לפעמים זה לא מתפענח ואז הכל נשאר סתום וסתמי, כמו תרגום לא מוצלח משפה משונה.
ושוב הכל אקסצנטרי מאוד מוזר ורב דמיון. לפעמים זה מרתק. אבל אם אתה מתכונן מראש לספרות שחלק עיקרי ממנה הוא להיות אקסצנטרי ומזעזע אז בסוף אתה בעצם מתאכזב - במיוחד כאשר העלילה אינה העיקר (וכפי שציינתי דווקא יש כזו). למרות שהוקס יודע לכתוב טוב ואפילו טוב מאוד.
סצנות המין והאלימות יכולות להיות לעיתים דוחות במיוחד. מזכירות קצת סרטים של פיטר גרינווי, אבל בצורה ספרותית יותר.
התרגום טוב.
בקיצור הספר יכול להתאים לאחר שקראתם יותר מידי ספרות מסוג מסוים (רומנטי, קליל, בהיר) ומתחשק לכם לגוון במשהו קודר וקשה וקצת קשה לפיענוח.
3.5-4 כוכבים.
פעם ספרות אמריקאית פוסט מודרנית הייתה מרתקת אותי. ההתלהבות קצת עברה עם השנים. אז כיצד להתייחס לספר שעוד נמצא בשוליים של הספרות מסוג זה? אז ציפיתי מראש למשהו קצת קפקאי, אקספרימנטאלי, אקסצנטרי, ומלא סצנות קשות ודוחות של אלימות וסקס. וגם קבלתי מנה גדושה מכל אלו. קראתי כבר קודם באינטרנט (וגם בסוף הספר באחרית הדבר של המתרגם) כי הוקס נודע בקביעתו כי "אויביו האמיתיים של הרומן הם העלילה, הדמות, הרקע והנושא". דווקא מבחינה זו הספר הוא יחסית סטנדרטי וכנראה לא מייצג ספרים מוקדמים יותר שלו, גם אם לא חסרים כאן פלאשבקים, וקו עלילה מבולגן.
אין כאן ממש אפיון עמוק של דמויות (דמות אחת למען האמת). זה יותר עיצוב ספרותי של תיאוריות פסיכולוגיות. הרבה אלגוריות. קראתי לאחרונה ביקורת של דורותי פארקר לאיזה ספר שהיה גם הוא אלגורי, בה טענה "שאלגוריה זה טוב ויפה, רק שהיא אינה מזהה אלגוריות אפילו אם מניחים אותן ממש מול פרצופה". אז אני לא קיצוני עד כדי כך, אבל גם אין לי כוח לפרש כל פרט ופרט ביזאריים. ויש הרבה כאלו. הרומן הוא קליידוסקופי למדי אם להשתמש בדימוי – רוצה לומר – צבעוני, גדוש וכל דבר משתקף וחוזר לאורך הספר במטמורפוזות של צורות רבות ושונות. מבנה כזה זה לעיתים יפה ומרשים ולעיתים טרחני.
הכתיבה עצמה עושה שימוש בתיאורים קפדניים ומטאפורות שמערבבות דימויים שונים ומשונים. לפעמים זה עובד ואפקטיבי מאוד ואז הכתיבה ממש טובה – בעיקר בסצנות הילדות שהן פסגת הספר. לפעמים זה לא מתפענח ואז הכל נשאר סתום וסתמי, כמו תרגום לא מוצלח משפה משונה.
ושוב הכל אקסצנטרי מאוד מוזר ורב דמיון. לפעמים זה מרתק. אבל אם אתה מתכונן מראש לספרות שחלק עיקרי ממנה הוא להיות אקסצנטרי ומזעזע אז בסוף אתה בעצם מתאכזב - במיוחד כאשר העלילה אינה העיקר (וכפי שציינתי דווקא יש כזו). למרות שהוקס יודע לכתוב טוב ואפילו טוב מאוד.
סצנות המין והאלימות יכולות להיות לעיתים דוחות במיוחד. מזכירות קצת סרטים של פיטר גרינווי, אבל בצורה ספרותית יותר.
התרגום טוב.
בקיצור הספר יכול להתאים לאחר שקראתם יותר מידי ספרות מסוג מסוים (רומנטי, קליל, בהיר) ומתחשק לכם לגוון במשהו קודר וקשה וקצת קשה לפיענוח.
3.5-4 כוכבים.
October 14, 2014
I read this at the same time I was reading Nabokov's Bend Sinister. So I was learning a different way to read with two books at the same time. Both have an unusual main character who is a widower with a child. The mother of one is dead; the mother of the other is imprisoned in the town. Both are full of strange sentences that actually mean something if you read them twice, and both have lots of very basic philosophy about life. And especially about death. About memory. "...in the storehouse of memory everything is retained. All perception, all psychic life, everything remembered, everything dreamt, everything thought, all the products and all the residue whatsoever of the psychological system are retain, down to the last drop, the lst invisible hair, within the storehouse of memory. Nothing is lost, nothing discarded. Every image, sensation, concept, has its own invisible track. . . ." p. 43 (Harper Colophon paperback edition TPA.)
"“Naturally, the script of daytime memory is far more subtle in regard to factual details, since a good deal of cutting and trimming and conventional recombination has to be done by the dream producers (of whom there are usually several, mostly illiterate and middle-class and pressed by time); but a show is always a show, and the embarrassing return to one’s former existence (with the off-stage passing of years translated in terms of forgetfulness, truancy, inefficiency) is somehow better enacted by a popular dream than by the scholarly precision of memory.
“But is it really as crude as all that? . . .” p. 57 (Bend Sinister)
I like to feel like I'm learning something when I read fiction, that I get something to think about.
"“Naturally, the script of daytime memory is far more subtle in regard to factual details, since a good deal of cutting and trimming and conventional recombination has to be done by the dream producers (of whom there are usually several, mostly illiterate and middle-class and pressed by time); but a show is always a show, and the embarrassing return to one’s former existence (with the off-stage passing of years translated in terms of forgetfulness, truancy, inefficiency) is somehow better enacted by a popular dream than by the scholarly precision of memory.
“But is it really as crude as all that? . . .” p. 57 (Bend Sinister)
I like to feel like I'm learning something when I read fiction, that I get something to think about.
January 11, 2018
an extraordinary work, first published in 78. set in an unnamed European town, this has the relentless darkness, existential angst and rustic landscape of the films of Bergman and Von Trier. the first 40 or so pages are hypnotically dull (in a good way), meticulously described before numerous shocking events unfold one after the other, some in the present, some in the past. powerful, unsettling, grim, vile and beautiful, peppered with fully realized surreal imagery and reflections on humanity and the sexes
May 28, 2023
The weaker the child, the more fanatical the man. And where is the woman who does not love a fanatical man?
In a rare interview from the '70s, Hawkes opens by raving about his love of pornography, and claims to be working on a "pornographic novel"; I suspect The Passion Artist is that novel. It's a thoroughly filthy book but of course given the man's approach it's significantly more sad and disturbing than it is sexy. Stylistically it hits an interesting balance- there's a huge disconnect between his manic, psychedelic early novels and his meditative, mournful later books, and the middle ground he strikes here is as rewarding to a student of his work as it must be frustrating to someone unversed in his world. Hawkes famously claimed to not know what a plot is, and here the structure is even more loose and dreamlike than usual, to the point one wonders what drove him to write it in the first place. It's middle-of-the-road by Hawkes standards, and showcases his world of horse-dreams, frantic sexuality, disfigurement, bad smells and obtuse violence just as one might expect. I recommend this if you're already a fan, but it would be a poor place to start compared to something like The Lime Twig or The Beetle Leg.
In a rare interview from the '70s, Hawkes opens by raving about his love of pornography, and claims to be working on a "pornographic novel"; I suspect The Passion Artist is that novel. It's a thoroughly filthy book but of course given the man's approach it's significantly more sad and disturbing than it is sexy. Stylistically it hits an interesting balance- there's a huge disconnect between his manic, psychedelic early novels and his meditative, mournful later books, and the middle ground he strikes here is as rewarding to a student of his work as it must be frustrating to someone unversed in his world. Hawkes famously claimed to not know what a plot is, and here the structure is even more loose and dreamlike than usual, to the point one wonders what drove him to write it in the first place. It's middle-of-the-road by Hawkes standards, and showcases his world of horse-dreams, frantic sexuality, disfigurement, bad smells and obtuse violence just as one might expect. I recommend this if you're already a fan, but it would be a poor place to start compared to something like The Lime Twig or The Beetle Leg.
December 2, 2008
Beautiful and lonely.
June 25, 2025
This book starts by laying what appears to be some good ground work: an eccentric odd man living in a macabre town and dealing with his wife's death, his mother's imprisonment and finally what is alluded to his daughter becoming a prostitute. Instead of dealing with these things it goes into a man's Freudian fever dream of sexual desire and what can only be defined as his own sexual awakening through abuse. In my ignorant opinion I think a lot of this was the author making a metaphor for man's imprisonment in his own sexual desires and woman's sexual power over men. Did I say sexual? Everything in this book is either directly about sex or alluding to it. It's not a great book by any stretch and some of it was a real chore to read. However some of the writing is not bad and I will give Hawkes points for originality if nothing else.
June 27, 2022
3 1/2 stars
Displaying 1 - 12 of 12 reviews