Well, I had had Philip K. Dick’s Confessions of a Crap Artist sitting on the shelf, picked up at Curious Books in East Lansing a few months ago, and while I had read all of Dick s other works back in the late ’80s and ’90s, it was only a few days ago that I finally got around to reading this one—intriguing and enjoyable, and, really, it rather whets the palate for going back and rereading all the other works sometime...
In any event, I did a quick review on Goodreads
https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/985909012?book_show_action=false, so here ’tis.
Rafeeq
Deeply intriguing, sometimes puzzling, definitely worth the read. Point of view is interesting, varying among first person with Jack, and third person limited with either Fay or Charley or Nat. Toward the end Jack comments on the various levels of irony in the title of his book--is he presumed to have written all other chapters as well, rather than there being an omniscient author who compiled everything? Maybe, maybe not, though the lurid pulp-style "dramatization" of the affair of Fay and Nat which he presents to Charley in the hospital makes me wonder.
And I wonder about a few loose ends, too. In one chapter, for example, Jack says that his parents burned his comic book collection during the war while he was fighting on Okinawa, while later Fay notes, perhaps a bit derisively, that he was in the service only a few months--what exactly is the truth here? Or what of Jack's early mention of his interest in, essentially, bondage or fetish erotica, which never seems to come back, unless it is with the faint echo of the lurid pulps he imitates? How much does Jack really know, and who is kidding whom? Such questions, perhaps, are part of the novel's appeal.
4 July 2014
In any event, I did a quick review on Goodreads
https://www.goodreads.com/review/show/985909012?book_show_action=false, so here ’tis.
Rafeeq
Deeply intriguing, sometimes puzzling, definitely worth the read. Point of view is interesting, varying among first person with Jack, and third person limited with either Fay or Charley or Nat. Toward the end Jack comments on the various levels of irony in the title of his book--is he presumed to have written all other chapters as well, rather than there being an omniscient author who compiled everything? Maybe, maybe not, though the lurid pulp-style "dramatization" of the affair of Fay and Nat which he presents to Charley in the hospital makes me wonder.
And I wonder about a few loose ends, too. In one chapter, for example, Jack says that his parents burned his comic book collection during the war while he was fighting on Okinawa, while later Fay notes, perhaps a bit derisively, that he was in the service only a few months--what exactly is the truth here? Or what of Jack's early mention of his interest in, essentially, bondage or fetish erotica, which never seems to come back, unless it is with the faint echo of the lurid pulps he imitates? How much does Jack really know, and who is kidding whom? Such questions, perhaps, are part of the novel's appeal.
4 July 2014
RSS Feed
