Travesty Paperback – April 19, 2016

This book takes you on a wild ride. It manages to be both classy and trashy, more so the latter, while also being very innovative in structure.

Beautifully but repetitively written and featuring a main (only?) character who is impossible, for me, to emphasize with. But, many fascinating levels of meaning which unfold at breakneck speed, so read carefully.

A brilliant, astonishing dip into the inner voice of a man on the verge of murder. Fascinating in linguistic creativity--Hawkes' prose renders lyricism into the strangest of vehicles. His visual observations are perversely deforming, wicked, and yet profoundly beautiful. This is the slight story of a man, a man driving his friend and daughter through the countryside and to their deaths. The text is a suicide note of sorts, and it is teeming with psychological insight. Comparisons with Ballard's Crash are misleading--Hawkes' metaphysical perigrinations have little to do with the sociological tenor of Ballard's principle interests. A gem of a terrible little book.

This slim novel covers some of the same ground as J.G. Ballard's "Crash," but focuses less on the medical/scientific/technological aspects of auto accident deaths and more on the psychological depths of a man who plans to take his friend and daughter to their deaths in a car wreck. Although an American writer, Hawkes's prose often reads like an English translation of a French writer, such as Camus. (Hawkes found much greater fame in France than he ever did in the United States.) "Travesty," which is told from the point of view of a single, unstable narrator, is a brilliant exploration of sex, death, duality, and incestuous desire.

"We are travelling as if inside a clock the shape of a bullet, seated as if stationary among tight springs and brilliant gems. And we have a full tank of gas, and tires half a month old. Do not ask me to slow down. It is impossible." -JH Hawkes book is a brilliant, chilling, and hypnotic look into the urgency of life itself. In creating a situation of imminent death he deftly manuevers the reader into an assessment of our own reasons for living. A truly beautiful narrative, and probably the most easily accessible of Hawkes works.

Wonderfully written, brutal, crisp, not shrinking from cruelty, perversion, tender twists of psyche. An awful delight - read if not fragile.

A short, weird read. Interesting

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