![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
Book Review: Offal and the New Brutalism
Jul. 7th, 2019 01:16 pmThis book is *old*. Like, it was written in the mid-80s, and it really shows. For a book so concerned with the evils of fashion and specific fashions, it's almost ... sad? Hypocritical? of it, to have dated this badly. But also, well, what can you do? It's kinda interesting, though - I wouldn't have known anything about that time or place without it (early 1980s England). It's probably not *good* insight, though, since the book is kinda incomprehensible high-art, or it wants to be. It's ... concerned about a lot of things which are still relevant today re - evil corporations, people who care more about fashion, than personal pleasure/well-being, than actually improving the world.
... wait, did I say what it's actually about.
nope.
What it's *actually* about, is people's relationship with food, I guess, as conveyed by a series of high-concept short stories. Some of them are tedious, some of them are stupid, some of them are really interesting. One of them is supposed to be stream-of-thought from a waitress and has literally not punctuation or grammar for it's entire length, just syntactically undifferentiated sentence fragments. Most of them are more normal than that.
... would I recommend it. I have no idea. It's damn weird. I ... enjoyed reading it, mostly, and it makes for interesting conversation, I guess. But there are probably better books to spend your time reading. It's kinda of a literary edge-case. I certainly wouldn't have read it if it was longer or it wasn't dumped on my lap by my mother while she was sorting books for house-moving. And the author came across as a bit of a dick.
... maybe it would make more sense to someone with more historical context.
p.s. It says something about this book that it's about food, and that made up all of one line of this review.
... wait, did I say what it's actually about.
nope.
What it's *actually* about, is people's relationship with food, I guess, as conveyed by a series of high-concept short stories. Some of them are tedious, some of them are stupid, some of them are really interesting. One of them is supposed to be stream-of-thought from a waitress and has literally not punctuation or grammar for it's entire length, just syntactically undifferentiated sentence fragments. Most of them are more normal than that.
... would I recommend it. I have no idea. It's damn weird. I ... enjoyed reading it, mostly, and it makes for interesting conversation, I guess. But there are probably better books to spend your time reading. It's kinda of a literary edge-case. I certainly wouldn't have read it if it was longer or it wasn't dumped on my lap by my mother while she was sorting books for house-moving. And the author came across as a bit of a dick.
... maybe it would make more sense to someone with more historical context.
p.s. It says something about this book that it's about food, and that made up all of one line of this review.
