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16 of 20 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
A masterpiece of modern fiction?, September 7, 2009
This review is from: The Death of Bunny Munro: A Novel (Hardcover)
This novel is bound to spark lots of different reactions because it is provocative and explicit and strange and dangerous and incredibly funny and genuinely challenging. But I hope that the beauty of the writing and the seriousness of the book's moral dimensions are not overlooked because of the "controversial" aspects of the novel. For this second novel by Nick Cave is a major piece of literature that makes so much of what is being written today in this country look anodyne and flaccid.
At the emotional heart of this death trip of a ride is this extremely tender and movingly captured relationship between the Bunny Munro of the title and his nine year old son Bunny Junior. It has real depth and is utterly convicing and so when you do get to the end of the rollercoaster you feel literally spent.
But along the way you will experience some of the sharpest and funniest writing you are likely to find this year. Fans of Cave's music will lap it up like cream (and the audio book which he has recorded with an accompanying soundtrack by him and fellow Bad Seed Warren Ellis) but it should also win over a lot of new fans because it is so damn good. The novel's protoganist, the travelling salesman Bunny Munro, is an unforgettable and utterly flawed and tragic anti-hero that is going to live forever.
Rock on Mr Cave and thanks for writing such a stunning book. And please don't leave it another twenty years before you give us a third novel!
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9 of 11 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars
Road story..., January 8, 2010
This review is from: The Death of Bunny Munro: A Novel (Hardcover)
Bunny Munro, the hero of this somewhat strange novel, is a traveling salesman promoting his samples of beauty products to women in small towns around Brighton in Southern England. Visiting an oddly disparate collection of women he does much more than selling his wares. In his self-assessment he is the irresistible charmer and seducer, thanks in part to his "lovelock", that, heavily pomaded, winks enticingly at any woman he encounters. Since the suicide of his "beloved" wife Libby, his stable framework is crumbling. He feels constantly observed by somebody and suffers from premonitions of death... In desperation he hits the road to escape and to do the only thing he knows well...
Seen as a farce and satire on human, in particular male, behaviour, one might get some enjoyment out of reading the travails of Bunny and his women. The lurid descriptions, however, become predictable and repetitive... No doubt, he is a sex addict of a certain kind more than anything else; if no suitable object for his almost constant availability is in his field of vision, he gets himself into the mood for the next encounter by imagining Avril Lavigne's "mother of all" private parts.
I have to admit that this is not my kind of book. Still, I have to respect Cave's writing excellence when it comes to evoking the seedy to depressing atmosphere of the apartments, houses or restaurants and their neighbourhoods that Bunny visits. With a few deft strokes he also captures the essence of the people the salesman meets. When later on in the story he recalls images of his characters, and in particular the women's more or less attractive body parts, the reader will also remember the individuals and the encounters the hero had with them.
But, life is more complicated, exemplified by Bunny junior, Bunny's nine-year old quiet, encyclopedia-reading son who misses his mum terribly. He has to "learn the ropes" and travel with Bunny from one appointment to another, of course, sitting in the car outside. The father-son relationship, or the more or less successful efforts by both to have such a relationship, adds a more serious aspect to Cave's novel. Does it work? For me the relationship between the two did not salvage the book. Without giving away developments towards the end, one can say that roles between the two will change over time. A quote on the back book flap mentions Cormac McCarthy (and Franz Kafka!). Anybody who has read The Road (Movie Tie-in Edition 2009) (Vintage International) where the father-son relationship is central and also carries the novel beautifully, will find any such comparison here out of place. [Friederike Knabe]
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5 of 6 people found the following review helpful:
1.0 out of 5 stars
Skip and read And the Ass Saw the Angel or Suskind's Perfume, April 13, 2010
OK, I've been a Nick Cave fan for many, many years now. Too many to claim. I read his first novel, And The Ass Saw the Angel, when I was in my twenties. I fell in love with Eucrid Eucrows' manic cataloging of random objects, his utterly absurd "aloneness" in a ficticious landscape that was a cross between the swampy American South of the early 20th century and the brutality of settlement life in early Australia.
And then came The Death of Bunny Munro, which I have now read in my early fourties. I found this new novel to be a relentless, one note narrative. Considering the energetic complexity of it's author, I was shocked to find the title character, Bunny Munro, to be so utterly lacking in depth. OK, we get it. Bunny's addiction to sex and self destruction is all consuming; at the peril of his wife, to the physical and psychological detriment of his son, and most certainly of his own soul. But this point is made glaringly evident within the first few chapters. From there, the story does not progress. This same dark chord is struck over and over in each successive chapter with the same effect on the reader. Bludgeoned, devastated, having lost all faith in humanity and the genetic bond between father and son, the chapters plod on and on. The reader is not expecting redemption at this point, just some other angle to the story, some irony, some progression, something. But it never comes.
The way The Death of Bunny Munro wraps up is remeniscent of Patrick Suskind's Perfume. In both novels, quite unredeemable characters get a very public, somewhat nonesensical comeuppance that could only exist in the rich fantasy life of its characters. Bunny's is consistently flat and predictable, whereas Jean Baptiste's leads the reader to some kind of absurd epiphany about the power of the most underexplored of the human senses.
Hopefully, Cave's third novel will be the charm.
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