Customer Reviews

Minstrels

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After reading "Nice Little Stories Jam-Packed with Sex and Violence" and "My Dream Date (Rape) With Kathy Acker," the one thing I never thought Hemmingson could do was bore me. But he did that plenty with the tedious "Minstrels."

The story finds an American in Paris hooking up with a French woman he fell in love with a few years back while she was in the States.

His girlfriend Veronique's friend, Alexander, belongs to a terrorist group who want an undetermined revolution in Europe.

Albert, the American, finds himself involved with the terrorists, and then ends up in jail after killing Alexander in self-defense.

The book takes a truly odd turn as Albert, as part of a deal he cuts with a huge television company (which apparently is more powerful than the government -- or actually runs the government -- and can get him out of jail), lets them implant a fiber-optic eye-camera into his head to film his life as a reality TV show.

This novel is boring and cliche beyond description. It is filled with insipid dialogue and tepid, simplistic prose. It's so weirdly hackneyed and obvious that you wonder if it's ironic, but I don't think it is. There are also juvenile touches -- like having each chapter the name of a Camus novel and having the main character named Albert.

The attack on the media is a weak one. Since this book was written in 1997, Hemmingson certainly predicted the reality-TV nightmare that was to come, but he didn't come up with anything to do with this vision.

I was frankly shocked by how flat and dull this book was. There's no hint of the author I've read in his other works to be found here.

A disappointing, insignificant work by a very talented author.