Period [Paperback]

Dennis Cooper (Author)

Product Details

• Paperback
• Publisher: ATLANTIC MONTHLY @ PRESS (1994)
• ASIN: B000SHTN26
• Average Customer Review: 4.1 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (13 customer reviews)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

11 of 11 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Love and Dismemberment, March 29, 2001

By 

Mr Jamie Russell (London, UK) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Period (Paperback)

Few novelists pursue their chosen themes with such morbid enthusiasm as Dennis Cooper. For more than a decade his quintet of novels - Closer, Frisk, Try, Guide and now Period - have obsessed over sex, child pornography, drugs and dismemberment. Undeterred even by death threats, Cooper has played out his violent fantasies in these novels with a disturbing purity of vision. His new novel Period marks, as its title suggests, the end of the cycle. He's claimed that it's both a `disappearing act' and a `suicide note.' Considering the spectral and sparse quality of the book both comments seem particularly appropriate.

The quintet began back in 1989 with Closer. Yet it was Cooper's 1991 novel Frisk that really stirred controversy, deliberately blurring the line between fantasy and reality and securing its author a place at the cutting edge of contemporary American literature. Period draws out the same themes and concerns as the preceding novels, charting the bored angst of gay West Coast adolescents and their middle-aged paramours as they drift into experiments with drugs, Satanism, sex and ultimately murder. Like grim parodies of Enlightenment anatomists, Cooper's protagonists believe that dismembering the bodies of their lovers will reveal the truth of existence, bringing them closer to an absent God and saving them from the demystified consumer culture that surrounds them.

What has always been so impressive about Cooper's work is his dedication to narrative forms that replicate the violent content of the books. His prose has sought to cut into the flat surface of the conventional pornographic or horror text through the use of flashbacks, narratives-within-narratives, and stream of consciousness techniques. In Period this relationship between form and content reaches its peak, creating a fragmented and confusing novel that refuses easy definition. It's certainly the sparsest of Cooper's books, a skeleton thin, episodic narrative that's like the decomposed body of one of the story's victims. Indeed, the novel is so cut up that the reader has no choice but to follow the advice of the epigraph and `keep watch over absent meaning'. Shifting between different characters' viewpoints, radio phone-ins, Internet chat rooms and diaries Cooper creates a disturbing hall of mirrors through which we're left to wander without a guide. Although Period's obliqueness is slightly dissatisfying it appears ultimately inevitable, for what else but a self-reflexive `period' could end this set of books?

Period confirms Cooper's growing reputation as the most exciting and transgressive of contemporary American novelists. However, as last year's publication of Cooper's journalism and essays - in the collection All Ears - has demonstrated, his work has much more scope than this obsessively brilliant cycle of novels. He's currently working on a book based upon the recent spate of American High School shootings and has also expressed a desire to experiment with a novel of physical comedy (he cites the films of Jacques Tatti, Jerry Lewis and Jackie Chan as a potential source of inspiration). Whatever path he may choose his next offering will be awaited eagerly on both sides of the Atlantic.

6 of 6 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars The equal of 'Frisk', September 27, 2000

By A Customer

This review is from: Period (Hardcover)

The photo of 'Walker Crane' (a take on Wes Craven, of 'Scream' fame??) at the back of the book looks like an uglier, more descript version of Tim Robbins, but maybe it's just the lighting. The character Henry is my favourite in this book. He's so obssessive that all of his victims begin to look the same and their continued existence comes to depend on a trivial yet all important event in his past. The idea that physical beauty helps us deny what we are is an important theme here. The surface is just gift wrapping, but even the 'deep, incontrovertible' truth of blood and sinew is mute and meaningless. This is the best book ever written on the pointlessness of desire. Highly recommended.

7 of 8 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars lifestyle choices?, March 16, 2000

By 

A Customer - See all my reviews

This review is from: Period (Hardcover)

this one's even foggier, you just don't know what's going on, hardly any of the ultra detailed descriptions of, say, Guide, instead you're left with voices, diary entries and 'anonymous' internet chat, while the 'plot' just vanishes inside this multi mirrored projection hall. we're not really in the city anymore either, it's a small town, then a forest, then a house in a forest, and then someone gets lost in this house. Blair Witch? this is even scarier, I suppose, as we're left with traces, memories, voices and the usual all consuming dance of death and desire. Where next? we can't leave that house anymore, so we have to go back to 'Closer' and one of its characters, and we have to start a website with some strange photos of some distant looking boy, who we're slowly getting obsessed with...did i understand? are these still lifestyle choices? actually these are probably 5 stars, for at least 5 books. goodnight.