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Ursula Le Guin does indeed rock like a nanny on diet pills. As do Susan Cooper and Alan Garner, however...
At the moment I'm too distracted to enter the debate. You see, I'm angry. Actually I'm not angry, I'm furious. I'm fucking seething. At the moment I want to tear the world apart until there's nothing but sub-atomic particles and then I want to stamp on the little fucks. You see I've just read Talking It Over by Julian Barnes. A book about a love triangle. And, you see, I quite liked A History of the World in 10 1/2 Chapters. I quite liked Flaubert's Parrot. But, if I didn't consider the written word sacrosanct, I'd take this book and rip it up and piss on the remains. As it is I'm just worried that its pus-filled pages might infect my other books.
There are going to be spoilers here and, quite frankly, I don't give a fuck. Because I read this book to the end. I put up with the lazy characterisation that polarised the main protagonists. I put up with the oily self-conceit. I waited for his much lauded intellect to shed a ray of illumination on human relationships. And what did I get? I got the message that this man whose wife has fallen in love with his best and only friend, whose wife has moved away with his friend and started a new life and had the child he always wanted, I got the message that... that his love and hurt and humiliation could be mollified, that he could achieve 'closure' by seeing the two of them have a screaming row in the street and by seeing this woman he loves struck twice by his friend. That he could walk away happy with this. That this would make him happy?
Fuck Julian Barnes. Fuck him fuck him fuck him. This wasn't an ending, this wasn't a book: this was being pinned down and force-fed steaming offal through a funnel.
So do me a favour, please? I beg you, I beseech you, I implore you on bended knees. If you're ever feeling utterly and absolutely fucked by love. If your bed has turned into a rack that you writhe upon. If the sunrise blasts through the window like a mocking accusation and even the very paving stones you walk upon are pissing themselves laughing at you. If, at that moment, Julian Barnes (the venomous, verminous, odious little shit) approaches clutching a clove cigarette and a bottle of grappa, proffering his advice. Take that bottle of scotch you've just emptied and glass the cunt. Because the man knows as much about love as a breeze block knows about flight. |
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