Month: Jun 2023

The Book of X, by Sarah Rose Etter

This is the first book that I have read in a long while that I can truly say is addictive. Sarah Rose Etter has written a piece of work that I literally struggled to put down.

Cassie has a knot for a stomach. Not ‘in’ her stomach but born, body-tied at the centre where her belly should be. Just like her mother and grandmother. Sounds surreal? It is. But that’s nothing.

She helps her father and brother mining in the family meat quarry. She walks down corridors of wet walls, glistening red and marbled with fat. Cassie plunges her arms, elbow-deep to pull out bloodied meat the size of boulders for her father to sell.

She has visions: fields of throats and rivers of thighs. Heads are removed to watch their own bodies. Her jealousy is taken away in a removal shop, cut out like a cancerous tumour. She buys half a man because she doesn’t have enough money for a full one.

The men she meets in her real life are not good to her when they discover her knot. She’s treated like a freak, abused and left mentally dead. She’s does eventually fall in love, but things are far from perfect.

Everything in this book is disturbing and off-kilter, as if Cassie has been dropped into a Salvador Dali painting.

It’s a wonderfully layered and brutally surreal book. It takes on the agonies and trials of a young woman growing up; it could also be seen as the struggle of chronic illness.

Split into 4 parts, and rather than chapters, it’s written in very readable chunks of narrative, dreams, visions and fact lists. This format only adds to its addictive and waking-nightmare quality.

Highly recommended if you like your fiction surreal, dark and experimental. If you’re easily disturbed then this may not be for you. But Sarah Rose Etter nails it all perfectly in her wonderful debut novel.

Her next book Ripe is available soon. I can’t wait.

West of Rome, by John Fante

After reading the glorious Ask the Dust as part of The Bandini Quartet many moons ago, I was hooked on John Fante’s writing.

West of Rome was published posthumously in 1986. It comprises of one novella and a short story: My Dog Stupid, and The Orgy.

The novella My Dog Stupid is set in the late 60s/early 70s California. Italian American, Henry Molise is an out-of-work screenwriter and novelist. He lives with his wife and 4 grown-up children, and has countless chips on his angry and weary, 55 year-old shoulders.

Henry is rude, loud, cantankerous and bitter. If he has a filter, it’s buried in dust, unused. He has racist views (his son’s new girlfriend is black), and he says terrible things to his wife who has left him more than once.

Henry comes home one night to find a  dog asleep in his garden; a huge Japanese Akita. The dog decides to take over the house (he doesn’t give them a choice) and they very grudgingly take him in. One of the children decide to name him ‘Stupid’ due to his . . .  well, because he’s stupid.

It doesn’t help the already festering family unease that he mounts every male dog that he encounters. He doesn’t just stop at dogs; human males get the same, messy treatment too!

The dog acts as a catalyst and is blamed for everything that goes wrong with the family, as the children slowly fly the nest. Henry and his wife are alone in a home suddenly too big, and full of loving memories.

Is it the dog or Henry that’s at fault?

This is one of the best short works I’ve ever read. As with most of Fante’s writing it’s autobiographical; the author and Henry Molise pretty much share the same life and views. The racist remarks grate as you read. As an Italian American, Fante experienced much prejudice against himself as he grew up in America, and it’s obviously left a scar. But it still stings to read Henry ‘s (and surpringly, his wife’s) casual racism.

I don’t think I would have liked to have met Fante in person. He was notoriously bitter, angry, and confrontational. But he was a wonderful storyteller and writer.

Stupid did finally meet the love of his life but . . right sex, wrong species. Fantastic story.

The Orgy for the record, is the most misleading title ever. It’s the story of a young boy growing up in 1920s America, working for his father in his building business. The boy meets his father’s best friend who his deeply Catholic mother despises, sprinkling him with holy water whenever he comes near the house. The boy eventually sees another side to his beloved father as his ungodly friend leads him into the ways of Sodom and Gomorrah. It’s a sad, sweet tale of betrayal and growing up too quickly. Brilliantly written and full of Fante’s trademark Catholic guilt in hard times.

If you ever only read one book by John Fante, read his novel Ask the Dust. It’s wonderful. The film adaptation with Colin Farrell and Salma Hayek is stunning.