Oh Godfrey, as Olive Kitteridge likes to exclaim, I adored this book.
Olive is the blunt, borderline rude retired teacher at the heart of this novel (though in many ways it’s more a collection of interconnected stories), and you grow to love her the more you get to know her – especially when she throws caution to the wind and starts dating Jack, an equally blunt and pot-bellied old man who likes tooling around in his sports car while taunting police officers and drinking whiskey.
I have three confessions to make.
The first is I’ve never read Kathy Acker. This is probably my loss.
The second is you probably need to have read Kathy Acker to enjoy Crudo, which is written in Kathy’s voice.
The third is I had no idea what Crudo was about when I bought it. Instead, I simply did what I normally do in a bookshop: read the first two pages and, if I don’t shudder in disgust, buy the book.
One-sentence review: Haunting, confusing, beautiful and yet tenebrous.
One-sentence review: If you know and like Richard Ayoade’s unique sense of humour, this is for you.
One-sentence review: Wry, dry (even though it’s set in a rainy Canadian city) and moving.
One-sentence review: Pure, unadulterated hedonistic literary escapism.
One-sentence review: A quiet, thoughtful and seductive look into other people’s fears and relationships.
One-sentence review: like a PG Wodehouse comedy but with a darker edge.
One-sentence review: A jaw-droppingly brilliant comic novel.
One-sentence review: languorous, mysterious and evocative with a dark twist.
A young woman uncertain of herself is in a coastal Spanish town so she can take her cranky hypochondriac mother to a specialist who might be a crank himself.
In some ways this is a coming-of-age novel, as Sofia falls in love with the mysterious and imperious Ingrid, has blissful love-free sex with the young man who treats jellyfish stings at the beach, and she contemplates what to do with her anthropology studies while using anthropology as a frame with which to study her confusing world.