Customer Reviews

Exterminator!

5 star:		(6)
4 star:		(5)
3 star:		(2)
2 star:		(2)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

EXTERMINATOR! A NOVEL is without any question my favorite William S. Burroughs book. The "A Novel" of the title must surely be ironic, because the book is not in any recognizable sense a novel. It is a collection of largely unconnected sketches and scenes. Not every section is a masterpiece, but several are among the most surreal and brilliant things that Burroughs ever wrote. And for anyone who has not previously read any Burroughs, it is a brilliant introduction. I personally find it far more accessible and enjoyable than NAKED LUNCH, which, while it has many fine passages, nonetheless can at times become tedious.

Although by and large the various parts are unconnected, several are focused on the 1968 Democratic convention in Chicago. In particular, the amazingly creative and hysterically funny "The Coming of the Purple Better One" takes that as its locale. The "Purple Better One" of the title refers to a baboon that is placed upon the convention podium, and upon whose face is superimposed the face of a white Southern, racist politician, whose recorded speech is then played. It is one of the more bizarre, brilliant, and absurd scenes in recent American literature. Another favorite is "The Discipline of DE," the DE standing for "Do Easy." The story is a strange blend of Zen Buddhist tract and self-help manifestation. Other favorites include the title story, with the narrator/exterminator repeating ominously "You want the service?" and a supposed film treatment "Twilight's Last Gleamings."

The collection features many of the themes usually associated with Burroughs: Sci-fi, fantasy, drugs, usual medical practices and phenomena, governmental nefariousness, and the corruption of capitalistic life.

This is the only other book of William S. Burroughs that, in my opinion, comes close to the absolute genius of "Naked Lunch." A fragmented novel of strange vignettes, loosely incorporating the theme of the exterminator and his grim trade as its focus, the book reads like a hallucinatory nightmare version of the Sunday comics from an unseen world better left undiscovered. Brilliant, funny, sad and disturbing--everything grteat writing should be.

This book is pretty good. I was surprised to see a few bad reviews for something which seems to hold good amount of merit, especially in comparison to most. Of course, it's not Ulysses, or even Burroughs's best. It's simply good.

Exterminator!, The Colonel Issues DE, Cold Lost Marbles, and The Perfect Servant have been my favorite passages since I first read it. The book is hilarious if you can manage to analytically wipe the opaque layer of genius-dirt from the neglected window obscuring Burroughs's warm, cozy, funny soul.

The back cover of William S. Burroughs' "Exterminator!" describes the book as an "experimental novel." Because of the book's fragmented, mosaic-like structure, I think you could also describe it as a collection of experimental prose fragments. It's a blend of science fiction, political satire, and linguistic theory, punctuated by violence and gay sex. Burroughs sometimes uses language that mirrors cinematic techniques.

If there's a plot in here, it eluded me. Along the way the reader will encounter a secret agent, a pest exterminator, Scientology, the queen of England, and John Genet. "Exterminator!" is often outrageous and absurd; it feels at times like Burroughs is just writing to amuse himself.

This book is a period piece, but man, what a period piece. Essentially a collection of short stories surrounding the "revolution" of the 1960s, Burroughs tears into the Military, the Right, the morality police, the War on Drugs, technology, and politics. Each story uses Burroughs's violent fantasy to tell a morality tale and bring each target of his ire into sharp relief before tearing it down utterly. Not as chilling as Naked Lunch or as sweeping as Cities of the Red Night. A good book for someone who is just getting started reading Burroughs.

This was the first book by WSB that I ever read. I think this was a case of trial by fire, because numerous people I've spoken to found this book impossible to read. Many of the scenes are hilarious and all are memorable. The book within the book within the book... the 1968 democratic convention... the mexican pistolero in the brilliant "Twighlight's Last Gleaming"... Fu Man Chu... This book is a nexus point, threads running through all the other burroughs novels pass through here at some point.

I can't recommend this book enough, but read Naked Lunch or The Wild Boys first, they are easier gate-ways into the wierdness of Burroughs.

Like many people, I first heard about William S. Burroughs by way of "Naked Lunch." I don't know what I was expecting to find in this book that wasn't in that one, but I can say quite comfortably that it wasn't here. Saying it that way probably makes my opinion of the book sound worse than it really is, but I stand by it. The problems with this book mainly relate to the lack of thematic consistency between sections. This might sound like a rather absurd criticism of Burroughs (after all, some would argue the whole point of his work in general goes against holistic consistency) but I intend to qualify what I mean. In "Naked Lunch," for example, most vignettes relate at least superficially to the notion of control and how it can be abused. That's the reason why the "cut-up" method of "Naked Lunch" worked so well and why the cut-up method of "Exterminator!" does not. "Exterminator!" is truly cut up with the various vignettes alternating between the trite and inane to the overtly political and back again. As I finished this book, I was left with a feeling of profound dissatisfaction: there are some truly brilliant moments in this book ("From Here To Eternity," "Wind Die. You Die. We Die.," the eponymous opening story, the satires of Scientology, and so forth) but most of the rest of the sections miss their marks entirely. There is a true lack of artistic focus here that hinders Burroughs's words more than any obscene content (which, arguably, abounds in "Exterminator!") could ever hope to do. I could conceivably recommend this book to die-hard Burroughs fans (owing to the aforementioned sections and those like them) but casual readers need not apply.

This book is a loosely-related collection of stories by the great William S. Burroughs. In typical Burroughs fashion, the stories are a bit hard to follow, but full of great description and enjoyable, although somewhat depraved, imagery in stories such as The Lemondrop Kid. It seems to reach into Burroughs youth, apparently drawn on from his experiences as an exterminator and also has a story or two with anti-war themes. Generally a good read and a must for the Burroughs fan.

As fragmentation was always Burroughs trademark, this collection of short stories or pieces of prose and some poems fits in with the whole of his oeuvre perfectly well, because it sheds light on some dark passages of his earlier work. Moreover it is essential in that it contains some of his most lyrical prose, the tale of the Priest has a transcending beauty resembling that of Joyce's The Dead. Where in the Wild Boys his straightforward attempts at more traditional writing failed occasionaly in blending with his experimental voice for which he is so renown, here they serve as counterpoints that have their own mysterious power, be it that there are also traces of the writers block that was building up inside of Burroughs round the time this was published. It was not before Places of the Dead Roads that he would fully realize and bring to bloom the possibilities created by this endeavour, although in a way this book can be seen as a try out for his epical masterpiece Cities of the Red Night that lacks the flow of the phrases that shine from the pages of this flawed gem.

I found this in the library at about age 15 or 16.

Looking at it a certain way, I was lucky - some boys

my age read "The Fountainhead" or "Atlas Shrugged",

and have their minds destroyed. I read "Exterminator!"

and had my mind - well, altered in strange ways.

To give an idea of how sheltered I was, there's a scene

where a teenage boy is described as having a 'hardon'.

I did not know what that meant, and could not figure it

out by context.

This is a strange book, not one of WSB's best, but defintely

worth a look if you like this sort of thing.