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A review by brad_1
The Death of Bunny Munro by Nick Cave
3.0
Nick Cave is a better song writer than novelist. And that's OK, cuz he's a hell of a song writer. If he was that good of a novelist, I'd resent him deeply.
Irvine Welsh, in the blurb on the back cover, compares Nick Cave to Cormac McCarthy and Franz Kafka. That's a tad misleading. But, I'll offer perhaps an even more unlikely comparison: Thomas Pynchon. No, not the deep, paranoid, and paradoxical Pynchon, but Pynchon at his most slapstick and lucid.
Here's a quotation I pulled from Pynchon's "Inherent Vice":
"Puck lit up, had a long hit, and handed it over to Doc, who unthinkingly took it and inhaled. Little knowing till too late that Puck after years of faithful attendance at a ninja school in Boyle Heights had become a master in the technique known as False Inhaling, which allowed him to seem to be smoking the same joint as his intended victim, thus lulling Doc into thinking this number was okay when in fact it was full of enough PCP to know over an elephant, which had no doubt been Parke-Davis's original idea when inventing it."
Now, here's a quotation from "Bunny Munroe" (Warning, prudes: graphic content):
"Bunny checks his watch, considers it, but cruises on. He sees a weird, veiled chick in a bikini with a Victorian bustle and then waves at a cute little junkie who looks a lot like Avril Lavigne (same black eyeliner), sitting on a pile of Big Issues in the doorway of the crumbling Embassy apartments. She stands and shuffles towards him, skeletal, with giant teeth and black, panda-like rings under her eyes, and then Bunny realises she is not a junkie chick at all but a famous supermodel at the peak of her success whose name he can't remember, which makes Bunny's hard-on leap in his briefs, and then on closer inspection he realises that she is a junkie chick after all and Bunny cruises on, even though everybody who is into this kind of thing knows, more than anything in the world, that junkie give the best head (crack whores, the worst)."
Anyway, Cave's story of an immoral, horny door-to-door salesman and his brilliant son is entertaining as hell, even if it is sort of like an especially lengthy episode of "It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia!"
This does make me want to read Cave's other novel, though.
Irvine Welsh, in the blurb on the back cover, compares Nick Cave to Cormac McCarthy and Franz Kafka. That's a tad misleading. But, I'll offer perhaps an even more unlikely comparison: Thomas Pynchon. No, not the deep, paranoid, and paradoxical Pynchon, but Pynchon at his most slapstick and lucid.
Here's a quotation I pulled from Pynchon's "Inherent Vice":
"Puck lit up, had a long hit, and handed it over to Doc, who unthinkingly took it and inhaled. Little knowing till too late that Puck after years of faithful attendance at a ninja school in Boyle Heights had become a master in the technique known as False Inhaling, which allowed him to seem to be smoking the same joint as his intended victim, thus lulling Doc into thinking this number was okay when in fact it was full of enough PCP to know over an elephant, which had no doubt been Parke-Davis's original idea when inventing it."
Now, here's a quotation from "Bunny Munroe" (Warning, prudes: graphic content):
"Bunny checks his watch, considers it, but cruises on. He sees a weird, veiled chick in a bikini with a Victorian bustle and then waves at a cute little junkie who looks a lot like Avril Lavigne (same black eyeliner), sitting on a pile of Big Issues in the doorway of the crumbling Embassy apartments. She stands and shuffles towards him, skeletal, with giant teeth and black, panda-like rings under her eyes, and then Bunny realises she is not a junkie chick at all but a famous supermodel at the peak of her success whose name he can't remember, which makes Bunny's hard-on leap in his briefs, and then on closer inspection he realises that she is a junkie chick after all and Bunny cruises on, even though everybody who is into this kind of thing knows, more than anything in the world, that junkie give the best head (crack whores, the worst)."
Anyway, Cave's story of an immoral, horny door-to-door salesman and his brilliant son is entertaining as hell, even if it is sort of like an especially lengthy episode of "It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia!"
This does make me want to read Cave's other novel, though.