Books Dingo likes

[Placid Dingo]

Killing Aurora - Helen Barnes

Killing Aurora is an Australian young adult fiction novel. It's one of my favorite books ever.

Its the story of two girls, and is an exploratiOn of what it means to be female in contemporary Auatralian society.

Both seem out of place with the way they fail to fit into their social expectations. Aurora internalizes, developing anorexia, while Web externalizes, picking up projects from the anarchists cookbook and exploring criminal passtimes for kicks.

Despite the YA genre, this is a serious work which touches on a multitude of themes. The dialogue is well constructed and the language is rich, expressive and frequently acidic. Rather than another teenage trainwreck dressed up as a morality tale, were presented with a serious analysis of how young women can find their place in a world that doesn't seem made for them.

Edit: Changed title rather than copypasting OP and restarting.

[Mesozoic Mister Nigel]

Hmmm, I will have to suggest it to EFO.

[Placid Dingo]

Politics - Adam Thirwell

Politics is a very simple story about two lovers who end up having a threesome that becomes a three way relationship. Rather than a blistering hot description of every lavicious moment, Thirwell adopts a quaint, 'well, as a matter of fact' kind of narrative tone that bounces along cheerfully as everyone runs around having lots of sex.

The narrative style really makes it work. Thirwell's narrator is nearly a character itself – occasionally mentioning that they might like a character, or telling us about a film they've seen.

The key feature of the narration is the tendency for the narrator to take a simple sexual scenario, have a quick candid mediation on it, and then explain the dynamics behind it in excruciating detail. Using examples from history, what we are being told is not about sex, but about human interaction, the ways it manifests, and why.  The name Politics really does describe what we're looking at; why people interact the way they do, whether they're 18th century royalty, or an unexpected polyamorous relationship in the 90s.

The work is ultimately more chipper than titillating, and serves as an unpretentious academic look at how humans interact.

[Placid Dingo]

Marabou Stork Nightmares - Irvine Welsh

I'm honestly not a huge fan of Trainspotting, or Irvine Welsh in general. I can appreciate where Trainspotting stands in literary history as a key piece of transgressive fiction, but I found it hard to enjoy when it just felt like Welsh was trying the whole time to be shocking.

Marabou Stork Nightmare is similarly trangressive in its frank portrayals of sex, violence and dysfunction but it's helped along a lot by a tight plot and a creative and original narrative style.

We meet Roy Strang hunting the elusive Marabou Stork in Africa, in a kind of pulp explorer fiction homage. Suddenly he's brought to the surface and we see him in a coma, unable to move, in hospital. The African jungle is his fantasy world that he escapes to, constantly being pulled back to the surface of his sleep by visiting family.  He keeps getting pulled back from his fantasy and plunging back into it, but to get there he must pass through his memories.

The device works extremely well as a narrative tool and as a way of lending a surreal atmospheric  tone to the story. It pulls a few surprises, Welsh style, and ends with a nearly Brechtian summation of the moral of the story, but ultimately the device itself is enough to really keep the reader engaged with what is ultimately an unapologetically dark, violent and unstable dream universe.