Customer Reviews

Kittens in the Boiler

5 star:		(2)
4 star:		(3)
3 star:		(0)
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1 star:		(0)

 

 

I find most fiction and poetry published by small presses to be dreary, derivative, and incompetent. Save me from the imitators of Burroughs, Beckett, and Joyce. The MFA and Creative Writing Program scribblers are even worse.

For a writer, the most difficult literary style to pull off is, of course, stream of consciousness. Add to that the handicap of scatalogical and explicitly sexual content and you have an impossible project on your hands. Give up and go to a movie.

Delphine Lecompte does pull it off, using a bit more structure than traditional stream of consciousness and a killer sense of narrative and character. Her book is so damned interesting that I had no trouble reading it in one excited sitting.

Kittens in a Boiler is a tour-de-force. Lecompte is a master and ThievesJargon Press is heroic for publishing her. Read it. Now. And demand more from this talented writer.

This isn't exactly a review so much as a short-term exorcism.

I can't tell you what it's about, you would need to read it to find out. I can't tell you if I think it's any good, this isn't really a book so much as it's a series of blank sheets of paper wrapped tighter and tighter around Ms. Lecompte's head until, on the last page, her brain explodes, and the scattershot remnants make up the previous 207 pages of scandalous, frustrating, transcendent text.

Hopefully this book will stop me from saying things like how a writer has a "stream-of-consciousness" style. Lecompte is the closest I've seen a writer come to realizing this impossible cliched dream, and it's not a stream, it's more of a flushed toilet of consciousness. I am out of metaphors, which is too bad,because I can't tell you about this book in plain language. The only way I can treat it is by dancing around it like a circus tiger, like a den of plague-ridden medical martyrs.

Luckily just shy of being unspeakably vulgar, so read it and speak of it. Dreadfully gritty without being utterly grim. Suprisingly hiliarous, especially the bit about falling off the side of the building with a friend on her back, in the process of busting said friend out of a mental hospital. Delphine's unapologetic sexuality, rampant self-violence, love of indie music, and literary ambition all wrap around a kernel of something very akin to inner peace, a glowing self-awareness and strength. Plus, the girl can write the hell out of even a little description of supermarket lighting.

This book was a similar experience to reading the Basketball Diaries but it's a girl and she's european.

I don't normally buy novels from small presses and in general I prefer more mainstream novels like the Alex Cross series and High Fidelity.

The stuff published through ThievesJargon.com is usually pretty good though.

Kittens in the Boiler is something like eighty brilliant, autobiographical short stories sewn together into a loose narrative about a girl who gets obliterated and has indiscriminate and sometimes violent sex with perverted lechers in a Belgian coastal community. I'm sure there have been other books by expatriated milk-bottle stacking harlots but this one is special.

This book very much deserves to be read. The author's bluster is endearing. Her swagger and foul mouth are inspiring. Her self-destruction is heartbreaking. The wretchedness is so perfect that the tiniest acts of mercy seems like they were brought on a velvet pillow by an archangel.

And, that's what really makes the book. Kittens in the Boiler is a storm of savagery and addled perversion told by a fierce and bloody wolf. For that it would be a great and terrifying book. But, what makes it so absolutely perfect is the faint glimmer of tenderness underneath. A vulnerability underneath the ferocity, absolute in its beauty.