I expected the romp through blue, but this felt forced and contrived.

If you can get passed the constant misogyny, it is at times beautifully poetic and other times unexpectedly raunchy. Most of this book is a lament on the language used for sexual words and wordplay, for curses, for all things explicit. Then it seems to try to make something of blue and hue that’s not very interesting in between philosophies I enjoyed.

 

I did find the moments when r*p* were included to be quite jarring, and upsetting to see someone give it any space in their work. I thought maybe he just needs to examine this part this way, but then it kept going on & on. Women as passive subjects to be used and never considered, over & over.

Surprisingly, there are some seriously moving and poetic moments in his writing. At points I was convinced. Yes, Mr Gass, we simply have failed to capture sex and curse words and all manner of fucks in language - the nuance and the sensory, we’ve given up. But is the only sexuality conceivable that of this sort, when you’ve ached for pages about a limited imagination?

It feels like two books in a novella, trying very hard to make sense of each other, but I don’t know if they ever do.