Customer Reviews

In Search of the Pleasure Palace: Disreputable Travels

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

 

 

I gotta tell you, I just fell in love with this book. Marc Almond, better known to Americans as half of the 80's group Soft Cell, whose one hit in the States was "Tainted Love", has really hit the nail on the head with this book.

I picked up the book as a lark; I'm not a Soft Cell groupie, I'm not gay, and I haven't read any of Almond's other books. But I'm sure glad I bought this.

It's simply tremendous. As Almond hits his mid-life crisis, he revisits places he'd been earlier (New York, Amsterdam, Paris, Barcelona, etc.), and offers his insights into life and love, now seen through none-too-nostalgic eyes. He's an admirer of the bizarre and the tacky, and sure knows how to look for it, but I think to his own dismay, the general seediness of it affects him differently than he expected.

Still, it's an unflinching look at himself, reflected in his introspective observations (almost a Nietzschean "Wie man wird, was man ist" thing).

I find myself agreeing not so much with his experiences as his reactions to them. One of the things I find most enjoyable is how I can understand how he feels; being at a kind of mid-life crisis myself, I share his sense of emptiness and disappointment. (But at least I'm happily married, not a gay fading recovered-drug-addict pop star.)

Some parts of the book I can't relate to at all, especially his comments about gay-sex clubs, but I was a bachelor a long time, and I certainly had more than my share of empty experiences; when he writes in a what-was-I-thinking-then-and-what-are-these-people-thining-now mode, boy, do I know what he's talking about. And when it comes to the tedium and mediocrity all around us, well, the less said the better. I have laughed myself silly at some of the passages, winced at others, and overall found the book hypnotic; I can't put it down.

Anyway, it's funny, sad (when talking about sex in the media, he uses the phrase that "explicit has replaced erotic," which sums it up), and insightful. Most amazingly, it's never dull. I can't remember the last time I thought that about any book (except my own, of course).

Almond can't really write a coherent narrative to save his life, but he turns a clever phrase, and compared to the other stuff I've been reading lately (second-rate thrillers and sci-fi novels, all of which seem like they're written by a computer program, and I forget the instant I put them down) this is like Tolstoy.

Well, okay, not that good. But pretty damn good.