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And now, a scene from the Simpsons that encapsulates my feelings towards this book:Moe has radically remodeled his bar, and it is now filled with assorted eurotrash, yuppies and pseudo-hipsters. Homer and friends appear at the grand re-opening and are taken aback by the crowd and environment. Looking up at a TV above the bar that is showing an image of an eyeball blinking and looking wildly around, they ask him what the hell it's for. "It's po-mo" says Moe. This elicits no reply from the guys. "...
THE VERIFICATIONIST by Donald Antrim is a comic novel that spews from the mind of the psychologist narrator over the course of one night as he attends an annual pancake dinner with his colleagues. To say more about this sendup of baby men, psychology and sex would spoil the surprises within. Commit yourself!
Regarded only through the lenses of magic realism or surrealism, this book is a hilarious (albeit in an entirely disturbing and discomfiting manner) and occasionally poignant story of an adult male trying to simultaneously avoid and claim his status as a man. But Antrim seems to not be writing a narrative only about this character's dream-like journey (or lack thereof). His deft use of these techniques to heighten the disassociative state of the narrator, to lend it greater realness and credence...
This was funny but I couldn't stand the psychobabble. Also, went on for much longer than it needed to.
Antrim is the master of the casually bizarre. In crisp, fact-laden descriptions, he gives the reader a perfectly ordinary world scarred by just one or two total strokes of insanity, making his short books both archly comic and deeply unsettling. A genealogy of his influencers could include Charlie Kaufmann, Woodie Allen's neurotic monologues, and Kafka's Metamorphosis, but you don't really need to go past Donald Barthelme (Antrim discusses this in a wonderful retrospective by John Jeremiah Sulli...
Wild, funny and dreamlike in the truest sense (in that, at the end, you are left scratching your head, wondering what it means). But there are so many great moments. Antrim is clearly toking off the Saunders bong. If I had to guess at what this book is about, and it's one of those books where the author's genius is foregrounded, I would say the Verificationist is about the impossibility and subsequent infinite longing for human connection, as well as the sadness that results when someone looks a...
This is one of the most successful novels in terms of employing surreal approaches. One reason seems to be that the novel's surreality is introduced gradually, and the author manages to make it seem both real and the protagonist's fantasy in the midst of what appears to be a nervous breakdown. It is both funny and sad, and yet not too funny nor too sad. What is also wonderful about the novel's surreality is that it is very limited -- e.g., the protagonist floating up toward the ceiling of a panc...
Despite how much I look for strange fiction, this is one of the more unique novels I've managed to come across in a long time. It's premise, it's style, it's language, it's characters, it's everything are as fresh and interesting as anything I've seen in a long time. It is a real pleasure to read. I just got into it right form the first page and remained just as interested all the way through. There is wonderful humor as well. Really, it is a wonderful book.
Sometimes a book makes you appreciate how hard it must be to write a really great book.
This book happened to catch me at the exact point in my life where it would be the most uncomfortable.I get pretty down on myself around my birthday, which I know is pretty ridiculous, but here we are. This most recent one was probably the toughest yet -- without wallowing too much in self-pity, I'll just say that I'm not exactly where I thought I'd be at 31 years of age in terms of my career, finances, creative goals, or most importantly, relationships. I'm acutely aware of time passing these d...