Customer Reviews

Phallos

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What a shame there's no image of the cover of this
book--it's quite handsome. Left of center is Delany's
mythical beast (which first appeared in 'The Mad Man') with a bull's head, a man's body, wings, and talons.

Visuals aside, I picked up this book
with a misgiving or two (after all, I'm a heterosexual male), but I must admit, I was delightfully surprised. Reminiscent of Borges, Delany opens with a missing text "rumored to have been in the possession of German classical antiquarian Johann Joachim Winckelman in 1768--an item that the 19-year-old murderer Arcangeli presumably made off with, along with the golden medals, after garroting the 51-year-old scholar in a pensione just outside Trieste."

From this point--the second paragraph--on, I was
hooked. A clever writer as intellectually
deft as Umberto Eco, Delany is a better wordsmith than Eco (judging from what reaches us in translation).

In addition to the multi-layered plot involving
a quest for the jewel-encrusted member of
an ancient deity (for which the book is named) this book is just a great deal of
postmodern fun involving two modern critics, the
internet, a young reader of homoerotic
fiction, and two male lovers navigating the
Mediterranean world during the reign of the Emperor
Hadrian. The back cover summary calls this book a
"Lacanian riddle to delight" and indeed it does. It
is one mirror reflected into another reflected into
another. One simple example: the search, in modern times, for an extant copy of the novel mirrors the search of Neoptolomus and his paramour, Nevik, for the fabled Phallos. But this is
not dry, academic, rarefied entertainment--far from
it. There are plenty of adventures, mishaps, escapes
and eventful twists.

Highly recommended reading for anyone who would like to see the convolute plots of Eco alloyed with the erudition and linguistic
splendor of Borges.

Don't miss it!

(I am not a native speaker, please overlook my style)

Mr Delany enjoys a widespread acclaim by critics and common readers: with good cause, his mastery of the language is outstanding and he knows perfectly how to develop a good story.

Both qualities are to be found and appreciated in phallos too but an author so esteemed must perforce keep his standards extremely high.
In this work he choses a literary topos: he feigns he has found an older work by an unknown author, a pornographical novel set in the late Roman empire and he engages the reader in a witty, cultured commentary on this novel, inserting erotic excerpts from the same.

Problem is, his "commentary" is not witty enough to stand on its own feet, and the excerpts, though teasing enough, are not outright erotic so as to give satisfaction at least in that way.

To read this work is just like reading an interesting literary essay (with some useless shows of erudition where the language is convoluted) about a work which does not exist