Portnoy's Complaint: A Review

This book is outrageously funny, obscene, and smart. I learned about twenty new Yiddish words. Roth most closely mirrors my techniques of post postmodernism. And he gets to the heart of human psychology.

It is a classic, a masterpiece of postmodern literature in its digressive, rambling style, a modern Tristram Shandy. And it is the same kind of novel I am writing. Except that mine is not going to be as Jewish, understandably. Nor will it be as ironic.

For irony was inimical to postmodernism, due to the sense of prevailing closure at the end of last century. Today things are a touch more Romantic, in the Shakespearean sense of fairy tale and magic, rather than the 19th century sense of childhood purity and sublimity (though that applies too). The self-deprecation in the story is part of why the self-consciousness is so effective. It isn't until the story's last few pages when Portnoy gets to hear the truth of what he and the society he grew up in really are about. And to compound the narrator's pathetic nature, his flaws are told by a Sabra.

So check it out, I'm sure you'll enjoy it, if not for the postmodern narrative style, then for the masturbation scenes.

April Fools Day in Postmodernism

This is where I'm going to stay, maybe.

I'm going to Europe. I just received my Irish citizenship so that I can be a Euro Zone member and work wherever I want. Like in a month or two. I'm up and leaving. London, Paris, Barcelona, Madrid, I don't quite know yet. But I will and I'll keep you posted. Blog posted.

Meanwhile, I've been thinking about metafiction. I've been reading Portnoy's Complaint which is really great. Alexander digressively works back and forth, building suspense, dropping tidbits about his sex life and we can't wait to read more of the juicy stuff. And he very self-consciously makes note that his memories may be misconstrued:

"...Now, whether the words I hear are the words spoken is something else again. And whether what I hear I hear out of compassion for him, out of my agony over the inevitability of this horrific occurrence, his death, or out of my eager anticipation of that event, is also something else again."

Roy showed me a book by some writer whose name I can't remember but there was a metafictional part where he tells the reader that he's going to write about these characters reading a newspaper because he finds that interesting. And so the characters, both bad poets, are supposed to reflect him and things get all metamodern.

But see what I'm going to do is allow the protagonist to look out of the page and talk to the author. And that ain't no April Fools. You smell me?