Putdownable

In Competition 2842 you were invited to compose the most off-putting book blurb that you could muster. There’s just space to say that I don’t think I’ll be rushing out to buy Jonathan Friday’s ‘groundbreaking exploration of the neglected beauty of bodily fluids and excreta’, which features ‘a striking array of scratch’n’sniff imagery’. G.M. Davis, nabs £30. The rest take £25.

Like Ernest Vincent Wright and Georges Perec, Guillermo Pozoverde has written a lipogrammatic novel, an extreme one. While the earlier authors gave themselves a relatively straightforward task by omitting only the letter ‘e’, he dispenses with ‘u’, ‘s’ and ‘a’ as a protest against America’s aggressive world role. Yet this is situationist aesthetics with a twist. Instead of using only words that do not use the banned letters, Pozoverde simply omits them from words that would normally contain them. Thus Brussels becomes ‘Brel’, vagina ‘vgin’. Inevitably, there are many instances of ambiguity thrown up by this method, and therefore constant exciting opportunities for readers to be active in the creative process, deconstructing the rules that have held back their understanding of art. In a bold move to unite two sources of cosmic energy, the book comes with an inspirational CD of commentary, music and reflection by Yoko Ono.
G.M. Davis
 
Embittered by unceasing conflicts in his university’s department of linguistics, post-structuralist philosopher Murdo Mackintosh returns to his native Cape Wrath, devoting himself to translating the works of Jacques Derrida into Gaelic. Tormented by the complexities and ambiguities of the text (recounted here in meticulous detail) he descends into alcoholism and depression. On a lonely beach he meets the equally despondent Morag, an artist and fervent Scottish nationalist, who suffers from severe irritable bowel syndrome. She expresses her anguish through painstaking studies of seaweed. In her most iconic painting (the immensely intricate ‘Seven Types of Bladderwrack’) Murdo finds the key to his own philosophical dilemmas.