Customer Reviews

The Dream Life of Balso Snell

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At its core, "The Dream Life of Balso Snell" is about a guy who, for no apparent reason, climbs into the anal orifice of a massive Trojan Horse. While inside the cavernous digestive track, presumably making his way up the colon, throughout the intestines, and eventually to the stomach, Balso Snell meets several randomly placed people with individualized stories to tell. At each stop, Balso listens to the various tales, learning that each person wishes to express themselves in some literary fashion. With each banally uninteresting tale, however, he ends up avoiding the various characters like one would avoid pungent, human-sized excrement. That's about it.

There are attempts at making the book a philosophical endeavor, or perhaps a poetic parable, but both are really pathetic attempts at covering up the true scatological intentions. Nathaniel West claimed that the point was to "protest against writing books", but the execution is lacking. Sure, West's attempt to irritate readers with a completely incoherent tale, pretentiously intending to confuse or disgust readers with perpetual and obscure references to fecal matter and excretory organs, was successful in that he used it as a vehicle for protest, but it fails to reach the actual desired result because of its actual incoherence, insipid subject material, and tedious slow delivery.

Absent of any truly worthwhile literary merit, I'm reminded of a famous proverb that's often heard in various fashions: If it smells like S#@*, and it looks like S#@*, well, it's probably S#@*.