« Africa | Main | Beer blogging »
August 14, 2005
Mystic Pig
Richard Katrovas's Mystic Pig blew my mind. Thanks Karl.
A wholly different sort of New Orleans book than Poppy Z. Brite's Liquor and Prime. Katrovas is a poet and so his style is ornate and complex, in contrast to Brite's straightforward conversational tone. And while the Liquor series is about the interactions between an array of colorful characters, Mystic Pig is about the internal demons of one man with a mid-life crisis and a bizarre secret life.
It's so very hard to describe this book without giving anything away, and it's a book that you're best served going into without knowing much about the story. Quick summary: Nat is a restaurant owner with three children by two wives, and a secret life that involves a third woman. But the secret life is so much more than what you're thinking.
This book utterly nails the thought processes of the 40-something husband and father who feels like something slipped away over the past couple of decades while he wasn't watching. Like American Beauty or Lost in Translation.
This snippet is Nat talking to his newly discovered birth mother via email:
I'm a father, a dull, phallic signifier (how am I doing with the lingo?) in that odd Hell of unsteady yet enduring patriarchal determinants. But you know what? I'm also a night goblin, rousting about in the shadows while others sleep. I'm a silly monster my kids are not only not frightened of, but regard more in the spirit of a large pet who comes and goes, more or less protecting the hearth, than of a gray wall of intractable laws and their enforcement. Hey, I'm just looking for myself, like everyone else, trying to figure out who I am. Maybe we never stop being sixteen. Isn't that really when it starts? Right about then? Isn't that when suddenly you realize that the child you recently were, so sure of it itself, so sure of who and what it was, is a foreigner trapped inside you? It will always be there, must always be accounted for, even as you have become someone else. And there is no single moment marking the birth of that rattled self, that self wholly aware of how ordinary it is in most respects, but also feeling a uniqueness that would allow it to occupy the entire fucking universe all by itself, allow it to be God.So you're fourteen or fifteen or sixteen and you could be God if the universe would let you, but it won't, so you have to be human and account almost daily for the child you recently had been, a child who will always be there and who will be the only immutable fact of consciousness unto death. But there's something else. An itch. A compulsion maybe? No, I prefer it to be an itch, one that can never be scratched or balmed. A sense that there is something of you, maybe the part that could be God, maybe not, that is knowable and that you should try to know. Why? No fucking reason. No fucking reason at all. There's just that itch. In my secret life, in those brief moments I indulge in that artifice, and yes I admit freely cheerfully unambiguously that it is an indulgence, the itch ceases.
But the revelations of exactly what slipped away and why--in Nat's case--is so shattering, so twisted...well, you have to read the book. I've said as much as I can say.
Posted by ray at August 14, 2005 11:20 PM | Permalink
Categories: [books ]
Comments
Post a comment