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QUIRKY COLLECTION AN EXUBERANT CHRISTMAS INDULGENCE
Canberra Times (Australia)
November 23, 2013 Saturday
FICTION
Quirky collection an exuberant Christmas indulgence FICTION PETIT MAL.
By DBC Pierre. Faber & Faber. 208pp. $29.95.
Reviewer: PETER PIERCE T he self-willed enigma, and now resident of
Ireland, D(irty) B(ut) C(lean) Pierre (born Peter Finlay at Reynella,
South Australia, he apparently grew up in Mexico), is back in print
(or in many cases reprint) with Petit Mal. Illustrated with such
cartoons as "Horace the Magic Hedgehog", photographs and full-colour
illustrations - all by the author - this small, rectangular book is
sub-titled "Allegories of Youth, Wrongness and Right". It follows
Pierre's End Times trilogy of novels that began with his surprise
2007 Booker Prize winner, Vernon God Little.
This work is described as "a collection of short fictions,
philosophical vignettes and aphoristic interludes". The opening is an
ecstatic piece of writing called Night: "Open your feelings at night
and nobody's there to question them, stain them, stifle their air."
The book ends with a collage on which, inside a speech bubble,
appears the injunction "Sit Down".
Many of the pieces have appeared previously, in places as various as
the Frankfurter Allgemeine, the Sunday Times, New Statesman, Time Out
and the Erotic Review. There are running gags, including summaries of
the News at Ten from a harshly paternal near future and four contacts
made with the author by "the possible mother of God", the Virgin Mary.
The first begins "the man was going to show me something secret ...
the Church's banker across millennia, an unplayed trump card". Yet is
it her or the other Mary - Magdalene? Soon enough, she is hitting on
the author for 300 Euros and accommodation. Pierre plays it straight.
As in all the successful parts of this miscellany, the unbridled nature
of the content becomes more striking for being presented deadpan.
His openings are typically quirky and arresting: "If Swedenborg says
there's a paradise for Turks and the Dutch, I want one for poets
and dogs. Because we're passionate, and know all the right places to
shit." In Quantopia, an affable stranger knocks on the door and asks
to kidnap a couple's son, promising that "he can do the one where
Darren is found shaken but unharmed by Thursday". An axolotl reproves
his son for eating another axolotl (there aren't many of us left). A
news flash reports a £68million defamation claim by the Association
of Urban Solution Technicians against a 43-year-old man who called
them "builders and labourers". In Torgren, Pierre's parodic target is
the travel guide, where we learn that "Australia having been an open
prison in Austro- Hungarian times, it continues to define itself by
suspicion and law".
A number of the pieces in Petit Mal are set around the world. Cox
is the affectionate memoir of a supposed building security guard in
Port of Spain, who is dying of AIDS: "He had the largest wardrobe
in Trinidad, and it was also his bed". In Paradise, Pierre opts out
of comedy.
Visiting Armenia with Medecins sans Frontieres, he marvels at a land
where "apricots and cherries originated, along with wheat ... where
leopards still roam, where Noah's Ark came to rest, where the first
Christian state arose, where Winston Churchill declared the brandy
finer than any cognac". Now it is a ruined place. Most of the patients
of a lunatic asylum that he is shown will never leave. There is no
one to take them. Lust imagines another terminal condition. A dying
man who knows that his life support is about to be turned off watches
his son shuffle past "charged like all children with dismantling a
net of family lies".
Since this exuberant, indulgent book is timed for the Christmas season,
let us end with Pierre's suggestion of the affinities between Santa
Claus and a terrorist: "He speaks occasionally from an implausible
destination"; "A majority of the population undergoes inconveniences
and alarm preparing for his arrival"; "He laughs at us, and is never
caught".
Canberra Times (Australia)
November 23, 2013 Saturday
FICTION
Quirky collection an exuberant Christmas indulgence FICTION PETIT MAL.
By DBC Pierre. Faber & Faber. 208pp. $29.95.
Reviewer: PETER PIERCE T he self-willed enigma, and now resident of
Ireland, D(irty) B(ut) C(lean) Pierre (born Peter Finlay at Reynella,
South Australia, he apparently grew up in Mexico), is back in print
(or in many cases reprint) with Petit Mal. Illustrated with such
cartoons as "Horace the Magic Hedgehog", photographs and full-colour
illustrations - all by the author - this small, rectangular book is
sub-titled "Allegories of Youth, Wrongness and Right". It follows
Pierre's End Times trilogy of novels that began with his surprise
2007 Booker Prize winner, Vernon God Little.
This work is described as "a collection of short fictions,
philosophical vignettes and aphoristic interludes". The opening is an
ecstatic piece of writing called Night: "Open your feelings at night
and nobody's there to question them, stain them, stifle their air."
The book ends with a collage on which, inside a speech bubble,
appears the injunction "Sit Down".
Many of the pieces have appeared previously, in places as various as
the Frankfurter Allgemeine, the Sunday Times, New Statesman, Time Out
and the Erotic Review. There are running gags, including summaries of
the News at Ten from a harshly paternal near future and four contacts
made with the author by "the possible mother of God", the Virgin Mary.
The first begins "the man was going to show me something secret ...
the Church's banker across millennia, an unplayed trump card". Yet is
it her or the other Mary - Magdalene? Soon enough, she is hitting on
the author for 300 Euros and accommodation. Pierre plays it straight.
As in all the successful parts of this miscellany, the unbridled nature
of the content becomes more striking for being presented deadpan.
His openings are typically quirky and arresting: "If Swedenborg says
there's a paradise for Turks and the Dutch, I want one for poets
and dogs. Because we're passionate, and know all the right places to
shit." In Quantopia, an affable stranger knocks on the door and asks
to kidnap a couple's son, promising that "he can do the one where
Darren is found shaken but unharmed by Thursday". An axolotl reproves
his son for eating another axolotl (there aren't many of us left). A
news flash reports a £68million defamation claim by the Association
of Urban Solution Technicians against a 43-year-old man who called
them "builders and labourers". In Torgren, Pierre's parodic target is
the travel guide, where we learn that "Australia having been an open
prison in Austro- Hungarian times, it continues to define itself by
suspicion and law".
A number of the pieces in Petit Mal are set around the world. Cox
is the affectionate memoir of a supposed building security guard in
Port of Spain, who is dying of AIDS: "He had the largest wardrobe
in Trinidad, and it was also his bed". In Paradise, Pierre opts out
of comedy.
Visiting Armenia with Medecins sans Frontieres, he marvels at a land
where "apricots and cherries originated, along with wheat ... where
leopards still roam, where Noah's Ark came to rest, where the first
Christian state arose, where Winston Churchill declared the brandy
finer than any cognac". Now it is a ruined place. Most of the patients
of a lunatic asylum that he is shown will never leave. There is no
one to take them. Lust imagines another terminal condition. A dying
man who knows that his life support is about to be turned off watches
his son shuffle past "charged like all children with dismantling a
net of family lies".
Since this exuberant, indulgent book is timed for the Christmas season,
let us end with Pierre's suggestion of the affinities between Santa
Claus and a terrorist: "He speaks occasionally from an implausible
destination"; "A majority of the population undergoes inconveniences
and alarm preparing for his arrival"; "He laughs at us, and is never
caught".