Customer Reviews

Minotaur Takes a Cigarette Break

5 star:		(16)
4 star:		(10)
3 star:		(2)
2 star:		(5)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

I'm not a big English-writing-jargon-blahblahblah kind of guy, so statements like, "the over characterization of the mid-plot, doesn't even fit in with his standard style of the Victorian age." Whatever. I'm here to say that if you are looking for a fun book that is quick to read, buy this book. I liked it a lot. It made me smile. And I hate smiling.

If you read any synopsis of this book, you'd probably think, "Wow, how odd." Well, you'd be correct. However, putting the book down and not reading it because of that would be a grave mistake.

As debut novels go, this is certainly one of the better. It is not large, perhaps 350 pages, has a focused scope, great characters, and great writing.

Steven Sherrill's poetry background is evident in the book, but you certainly don't have to be a poetry lover (I'm not) to enjoy it. His writing is gorgeous, interspacing long lyrical lines with brief five word sentences. His descriptive talents are amazing. As one who worked in a restaurant in high school, I can say that the sights, sounds, and events that take place at the Minotaur's work are exactly correct.

Sherrill uses humor and humanity to great effect and by the first few pages of the novel, I did not find it strange at all that a creature with the head of a bull and body of a man was coexisting with humans in the modern South. I found myself identifing with some of what the Minotaur goes through, and found myself rooting for him.

If you've ever thought about taking a chance on a new author, this book is an excellent choice. It will make you smile and at the same time make you wonder about what it is to be fully human.

I didn't pick up this book the first time I saw it because I assumed it would have a one-joke plot; my wife read it first and persuaded me to give it a try. It turned out to be one of the finest contemporary novels I've read in years.

Sherrill never loses compassion for his protagonist despite his gleeful mastery of the Southern grotesque style--rather like Flannery O'Connor, come to think of it. The minotaur, known simply as "M" to his friends (shades of Kafka?), is more humane than some of the humans, good-natured, fallible, groping toward connection with the strange and numerous race of homo sapiens around him. His efforts, missteps, failures and yearnings echo those of every Outsider in literature and life.

Are we not all half-human, half-beast, struggling to make our thick tongues give voice to our deepest beliefs and longings?

I laughed, I cried, I passed it on to a friend.

This was a most intriguing book - I would go so far as to say it could easily become a classic of modern surreal literature. The Minotaur survives to this day, where he is a cook in a restaurant somewhere in North Carolina. Other immortals live and work among the mortals, such as Laurel, who is met during a trip to Florida taken by M and his landlord Sweeney. Interestingly, it seems that while people are occasionally taken aback by the Minotaur's appearance, no one seems terribly surprised by his presence.

I felt that, to me, this work spoke to the fact that there is within all of us a little bit of the freak that causes us to feel outcast and alone; this allows us to empathize with M. He lives very much in the "now" and has tended to forget much of his past and this is shown - among other ways - by the use of present tense in the narrative. M's search for love and acceptance is heart-breaking and heart-warming at the same time.

Definitely an interesting bit of literature for anyone who is looking to broaden their horizons a bit.

I say often that I'm not big on magic realism but if it all could be as Sherrill's fabulous novel, I'd happily snuggle up with the category until kingdom come. In any case, this novel consumed me entirely on more levels than I can count. There really aren't any cardboard characters here, even the minor players are drawn well (maybe two exceptions). Required reading for those who enjoy mythology, have a restaurant fiction fetish or a southern novel fixation and just anyone at all loves a really good book. Finest kind of reading; miss this one and be so sorry.

Tentatively, I decided to read this book simply because it wasn't like anything I had read before. The subject seemed too far fetched and I wanted to see if the author was successful. To my surprise Sherrill did a wonderful job! His vocabulary and descriptive talent made this story totally believeable! This book should have received much more attention. I look forward to another book by Sherrill.

It is a rare and special book that inspires the reader to respect it, not as an object of art but as a life story of someone we can only know through writing. The truth is, "The Minotaur Takes a Cigarette Break" is much more about the physical, tangible reality of M the Minotaur's experience than it is about the conceptual fact of his existence. A lesser book would incite a flurry of cannibalistic nit-picking; Sherrill's first provokes thought, and perhaps admiration. To dissemble it would be to diminish its accomplishment, and to ruin the experience of reading along with that.

Thus, given half a chance, I could go on and on about the branching, tangential nature of the narrative, the stream-of-consciousness writing style, the deft interweaving of near-metaphors (like the irritated scarline that divides the Minotaur's body into black and white halves). But I won't. To do so would be to miss the point. Passages like

"The Minotaur watches the crow pull the tissues out of the box until there are no more. Then the bird flies away."

do not feel like artificial devices that the author forcibly introduced into the narrative to feign perspicacity. To misquote artist Paul Klee, Sherrill does not render visible; he renders the vsible. His viewpoint character has no great insights to share. M's vision is all the more piercing precisely because it is unclouded by preconceptions. He is much too human and fallible to achieve any great wisdom, but a lifespan that measures in millennia has eroded what vices and grandeur he once may have possessed.

So, how does one address this novel in its integral, atomic entirety? It is a story of several days' events in the Minotaur's lonely, turbulent life. It is a story about cars, and cooking, and dysfunctional families, and abuse, and concealed emotions. It is melancholy, and weary, and real. It is carried by the quality and strength of its imagery (Sherrill's background as a poet is evident in every scent and sound of the Grub's Rib restaurant).

A touching, delicate, challenging novel. Highly recommended.

After 5,000 years, the Minotaur has established himself as a line cook in the south, residing in a small trailer park. Out of the labyrinth, he has become a docile and somewhat unassuming figure, only standing out due to his appearance. His is a life of solitude, though he enjoys the companionship of his co-workers and neighbors. However, he is distanced from everyone due to his physical differences, and even he cannot relate to humanity. He is a patient being, preferring routine and working with his hands.

This novel plays the Minotaur as a tragic figure, always having to compensate for his inadequacies and being generally viewed as a freak or monster. The book follows him as he plods along on seemingly normal days, running errands, at work in the kitchen, fixing cars, observing his neighborhood, and even pursuing a relationship with a waitress from the restaurant, Kelly. Of course, good intentions can be misconstrued by narrow-minded people and the overall conflicts the Minotaur face is due primarily to his unfortunate appearance. My only wish is that Sherrill had elaborated on the Minotaur's history. He does mention his time in the labyrinth, but a creature who has roamed the earth for 5,000 years surely has extraordinary tales to tell.

If you've ever felt lonely or confused about life in general, this novel, a super starter served up by Steven Sherill, should appeal to you. The odd, arresting title hints at the unusual, even bizarre, premise set up by Sherill in his original debut novel, both funny and painfully sad, locating a mythical creature - trying to jettison his gory past - in present day America's Deep South where he longs to fulfil his life and put his savage past behind him.

Then: the Minotaur lived in a labyrinth and ate virgins.

Now: five thousand years on, the Minotaur, M, bull-headed but man-bodied, lives in a trailer in the Lucky-U Park.

The novel, written in an understated style from M's alienated perspective, is essentially a slice of M's humdrum daily existence: in the rundown trailer park where he lives an orderly life observing the ordinary, everyday comings and goings, and goings-on, in the adjacent trailers, repairing cars in his spare time; and in the Grub's Rib diner where he works as a line chef. In a novel where there's no real story as such, no real incident to speak of and little character development, Sherrill's sensitive, sympathetic portrayal of M's ordinary everyday life in both his domestic and working habitats, the trailer park and the diner, makes compelling reading.

An accomplished cook, skilled in car maintenance, M finds greater difficulty interacting with people. Slow-witted and clumsy with his sharp horns, thick-tongued and inarticulate, socially awkward, emotional turmoil burning within, M deperately seeks an outlet for his human needs - a longing for love, a yearning for 'connection' in a world that seems to barely tolerate "outsiders" like himself, try as he may to leave his bloodthirsty past behind him. If there is a plot, it revolves around M's awakening feelings for Kelly, the epileptic waitress at the Grub's Rib diner but the novel is more about what it means to be lonely, what it means to be an 'outsider'. Recommended!

A sweet, melancholy book in which the Minotaur, now some 5,000 years old, is working as a line chef in a steak place in some unnamed southern state. Now known only as ÔM,Õ his days are filled by a daily routine that Sherrill somehow manages to infuse with an overwhelming sense of longing. Once a savage, terrifying force, the Minotaur now spends his days repairing automobiles, his nights carving prime rib. M stands on the outside looking in, both attracted and terrified by the prospects of friendship and love. In clean, uncluttered prose, Sherrill lets us see the loneliness and longing of his character in sharp relief. It is remarkable that such an understated book should be so affecting.

Perhaps the most impressive thing about this novel is that Sherrill is able to take such a strange premise and to turn it into something genuinely moving; to make us feel as if there is something important at stake in the MinotaurÕs search for love; that his fate will tell us something important about ourselves, about our own hopes and longings.