No plot but individual bits of good writing. Gave up because bored. ( )

Maybe I'm just not the right reader for this book. I thought it was really clever and quite different (it's written from the point of view of Kathy Acker, the writer of Blood and Guts in High School which I have to remember to go look for and read) but this whole stream of consciousness mode wasn't quite for me. I enjoyed how current it was - set in 2017, full of mentions of political events and whatnot that take place around that time. Maybe I'd appreciate it more if I had read Kathy Acker's works before? There's a bitterness to this book that's hard to swallow.
I'm intrigued by the different covers. The crab guts one is the one that attracted me (I'm always attracted to books with food on the covers), but the ebook version I borrowed ended up having the dismembered fly on the cover. Which one do you prefer? ( )

A stream-of-consciousness roller coaster mimicking a vomit of words too haste for my taste, Crudo is also a panic reading of some sort. It's a tale of modern life that reflects the rush hours of the weekdays and reading it somehow feels like the ending will leave from its pages. It hurries, I hurry, and at the same time a growing sense of disillusionment and disappointment start to tear from its pages. The intriguing, questionable choice of putting novelist Kathy Acker in the midst of it all is somehow a disjointed, out-of-place roman à clef. What only takes the cake is the montage-like arrangement of words pertaining to the events of the present time; it worries and triggers. A forgettable hit-and-miss but not without a passage I can certainly call a hit:

"You think you know yourself inside out when you live alone, but you don't, you believe you are a calm untroubled or at worst melancholic person, you do not realise how irritable you are, how any thing, the wrong kind of touch or tone, a lack of speed in answering a question, a particular cast of expression will send you into apoplexy because you are unchill, because you have not learnt how to soften your borders, how to make room. You're selfish and rigid and absorbed, you're like an infant." (p66) ( )

Very interesting in both style and content. Very modern. I couldn’t connect with the lifestyle which was absent of the grind of regular life as I experience it, but the character portrayal felt very raw and open. ( )

“There is no story, she writes, I’m going crazy. It’s a cry.”
This booklet has barely 120 pages, but that was quite enough for me. I soon wondered where this was going: those short flip-flopping sentences, the accumulation of very gloomy thoughts about the (bad) state of the world, the growing chaos in the life of storyteller Kathy and beyond. The current events of the summer of 2017 are constantly returning, and Trump and Brexit in particular cast their shadow over the story. Well, story…, it's barely there: the most important thing we learn is that after a rough life, at the age of 40 Kathy is going to marry a much older poet. But apparently that event does not radiate much enthusiasm. Constant emphasis is placed on the disruption, on the emptiness and loneliness of existence: "She was at the middle of her life, going south, going nowhere, stuck between stations like a broken-down engine." That doesn't prevent Kathy from living a true luxury life: she accumulates vacation after vacation, makes impulse purchases of exquisite merchandise, and moves out as soon as she's tired of a home. All the time complaining about the misery in the world.

I learn from reviews that Olivia Laing was inspired by the life of punk artist Kathy Acker (1947-1997), but how that can be reconciled with the luxury life of our narrator is a mystery to me. I am certainly not the first to point this out, but the references to current affairs involuntarily exudes the atmosphere of Ali Smith's Autumn without approaching the magic of that work. And while we are comparing, perhaps this is a writing experiment along the lines of Rachel Cusk's Outline trilogy. But then just the other way around: with Cusk the narrator was defined by the stories that others told her, here our narrator just throws everything out herself, unfiltered (indeed 'crudo'). Unfortunately, for me this didn’t work out well. ( )