this has a clippy writing style with good forward momentum and some unusual but instantly comprehensible metaphors. i don't really get the comparisons i've seen made to genet; i think a more accurate comparison is delany but more gen X. scenes and people are only sketches until the ideas and debaucheries, when the style abruptly changes. the debaucheries are extensions and elaborations on the ideas. nominally.

call me a gigaqueer but i need more emotional connection to appreciate literary debauchery. i can't read it with an erotic interest, so i need it to be, like, romantic. there's nothing more boring than fantasies of committing loveless rapemurder. again, call me a gigaqueer. i decided when i finished the book that i'm too much of a sap and not enough of an aesthete for cold libertinism. then (please un-mort the auteur for a second) i found an old interview with dennis discussing the george miles cycle. was this written as an expression of intense feelings of love? the answer, apparently, is yes.

so it's weird that i can't personally wring much of those feelings from frisk. i do understand from the text that dennis has hangups about socially unacceptable things, and he seems to feel strongly about them, yet i can only know this intellectually and at a surface level. i don't feel the love. it's like studying the internal processes of a beetle: i still don't know in my human heart what it's like to feel as a beetle feels, and the book hasn't really told me, except for a couple spots that i can't explain without it turning into a boring trauma dump.

in any case, almost everything that works for me in frisk works better and more reliably in the preceding book, closer. the greatest exception is how the first and last chapters of frisk bring the narrative towards you and away from you, like a wave on a shore, and closer just sorta stops.

but frisk loses out for being a more obvious and self-conscious autofiction. whenever the true narration style asserted itself, it made me want to bite his head off. you think it's third person until there's an omniscient "i," who is just dennis instead of a creature or being with any right to the omniscient "i." i can't even like this for a completely fictional novel, but i hate it in autofiction, or maybe i just hate it here. maybe it's a commentary on the hegelian nondistinction between subject and object and i missed it because i forgot about that until ten seconds ago.

i'll find out soon because i'm barely ten pages into try and dennis is doing this shit to me again. i'm still gonna read it because i think i need to understand beetles.

cherry

cherry

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