Empire of the Senseless: A Novel (Acker, Kathy) [Paperback]

Kathy Acker (Author)

Book Description

Series: Acker, Kathy | Publication Date: January 13, 1994

Acker continues her post-modern explorations with a story set in a bleak world where the society we know is dying in its own ruins.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Set in the present and near future, this is an apocalyptic tale that makes Clockwork Orange look tame. It's alternately narrated by the female Abhor, "part robot, part black," and the male Thivai, a diagnosed paranoid. Thivai is a sort of wide-eyed Huck Finn adventuring through a postmodern world that is punctuated by random violence. Algerian immigrants have taken over Paris, Western cities are now "composed of dead and mutants," punky kids are playing at being terrorists, CIA plots aboundall this, Acker tells us during the age of Reagan. The most eerie quality of these new-age humanoids is their anesthetized emotions; females of any age are referred to as "cunts" and sadomasochistic relationships, be they homosexual or heterosexual, whether involving children or consenting adults, are the norm. A plotless stream-of-consciousness style and sexually explicit prose only dull Acker's powerful message.
Copyright 1988 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

From Library Journal

"I want to kill the person I love so I can be dead," confesses one of the narrators of Acker's new novel. "This seemed to be an apt response to the world." The world in this case is a near-future vision of revolution, mutilation, and putrefaction, a kind of punk Grand Guignol in which Acker's protagonists Thivai and Abhor frantically and randomly rape and pillage. Readers of William Burroughs will recognize Acker's amalgam of pulp routines and technobabble. Missing is Burroughs's savage humor; Acker is in dull, deadly earnest. There are signs that in piling negative upon negative she intends a breakthrough to some more positive realm: "You no longer don't have to not exist." But few readers are likely to hang on for 240 pages to find out.Grove Koger, Boise P.L., Id.
Copyright 1988 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

Product Details

• Paperback: 240 pages
• Publisher: Grove Press; First edition (January 13, 1994)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0802131794
• ISBN-13: 978-0802131799
• Product Dimensions: 8.4 x 5.4 x 0.6 inches
• Shipping Weight: 9.6 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.8 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (4 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #373,859 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

23 of 25 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars A schizoid ballet through the ashes of civilization, January 2, 1999

By 

[e-mail] (Boston, Massachusetts) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Empire of the Senseless: A Novel (Acker, Kathy) (Paperback)

Kathy Acker has more vision than talent. If you read "Empire of the Senseless," you're subjected to a seemingly endless series of images that range from the squalid to the nightmarish, composed with all the skill of a schizophrenic dictating her scattershot memoirs. By turns she is banal, scatological, grimly humorous, declamatory, and poetic.

However, for all its excesses, this book is frequently amazing. Acker puts her characters Abhor and Thivai in a post-apocalyptic world where abuse and defeat are par for the course, and shows their desperate search for a semblance of peace in a surprisingly humane light.

Kathy Acker does not write for the weak of heart, but "Empire of the Senseless" is brave in the face of futility and compassionate toward history's most helpless souls.

8 of 11 people found the following review helpful:

2.0 out of 5 stars overrated -- titles are better than the books, July 1, 2004

By A Customer

This review is from: Empire of the Senseless: A Novel (Acker, Kathy) (Paperback)

I tried for years to stick up for Acker, but her concepts are always infinitely more interesting than her execution. The truth is she had no natural feel for language -- there's no music to her prose, none at all, and all of the novels sound better when just the titles are read. But the idea of her as the female punk "underground" "subversive" and "transgressive" priestess is very tempting. I say this kind of in sorrow. "Kathy Goes to Haiti" is funny once in a while though. This one is a dreary bore.

12 of 17 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars One in a Million, December 31, 2000

By 

Edward Scott Haas (USA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Empire of the Senseless: A Novel (Acker, Kathy) (Paperback)

How do I describe this sci-fi/horror/sociological/scatological freak show of a novel? Well, if you're read the brilliant cyberpunk classic *Neuromancer*, you know the plot, more or less. *Empire ...* is part tribute to, part parody of Gibson's work. But let's say we were living in an alternative reality in which Gibson lost his only manuscript of *Neuromancer* before he could get it to the publisher, and who should find it but the crazy, mystical, beatnick author William Burroughs. Burroughs then says 'wow, this is quite a story, but I've got a better take on it,' drops some acid and gets right to work. Lets say, then has the worst bad trip of his of while writing. The result would look somethink life Acker's ultra-violent topsy-turvey future world in which France is a colony of Algeria, wars are fought with sound waves and burned out, amoral adventurers stride through the techno-babble wasteland of a doomed civilization in search of money, drugs, revenge and just to escape boredom.