Customer Reviews

Empire of the senseless

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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.

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.

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.

Empire of the Senseless is schizogenic because the reality it is dealing with, and our own mileu is schizogenic. Acker comes from the cut and paste school, via Burroughs and the Fluxus experiments and interprets reality through a greasy sometimes opaque, sometimes lewd, sometimes amazingly transcendental lens.

This is a "language" author and as well Acker is committed to art movements, including the art world's move towards "appropriation." To one "unititiated" in the parallel visual and dramatic (as well as musical arts) this book may seem more obscure than it is.

Yet I fully believe that if my sixteen year old sister can read and enjoy "Empire" without any formal introductions and indoctrinations then the "misunderstandings" imply those of one who has come to "expect" certain things from a book.

May your expectations be shattered!

Let's stop condoning the banal, boring, domesticated read.

Now. A must read.