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The Bed Stripped, the Maid Whipped, My Eyes PrickedI should really rate this very brief novella five stars. What appears on the page is both a perfect construction and an exquisite confection, and yet somehow it wasn't enough. I am not alone in this:"He goes to gaze out into the garden, vaguely dissatisfied. The room is clean, the bed stripped and made, the maid whipped, why isn't that enough?"For all of its hundred pages, I felt that I was in the presence of a master (and slave) craftsman. I di...
Rigorously arranged repetition/variation (perhaps heavier on the repetition) around a maid, a master, and the solemn act of chastisement that binds them. What would otherwise be the entry point into some kind of obviously c-grade erotica, is here entirely altered by form, the relationship less erotic than mathematical, or really most of all linguistic. This is a book about semantic relationships, about puns, about obscure but insistent game rules (ie society ie religion ie morality ie ____) exce...
One might find this novella base. One might find that base desires and longings, base natural proclivities, base sexual deviancies are not worth reading. I want to Coover all those bases.This novella is dark, gallows-humor funny, brilliant. Its actors are caught in a perpetual loop - a timeless equation whose therom has been proved in the Master's "manual". Both the Maid and the Master succumb to those maths regardless of the minor props that make an appearance and could potentially alter the co...
***(This review is been dedicated to Paul who always has the sweetest and most encouraging words to say and also has been patiently awaiting the Coover review)**The tinkling of the chimes crackled through the open door pouring ample sunlight on the lazy mauve interiors. She timidly walked in with her vital office paraphernalia – mops, cleansers, brushes, all loosely hanging in her pockets. The smell of the velvet curtains tightly clinging on to the humidity of her sweaty underwear. Clenching th...
This long-ish short story about a theocratic slave-master relationship has repetitions reminiscent of purgatory and serial dreams with surreal moments, such as the surprising disgusting horrific fragments of things that the maid finds in the master’s bed. Coover’s tale is a limbo cell that could exist within the same temporal prison as Russel Edson’s absurdist bardo of bourgeois faux pas The Song of Percival Peacock, though more sexual than social, yet not erotic, per se, just rotten. However, i...
If you like spanking and you like Coover, you'll like Spanking the Maid. If you don't like spanking, please don't read this beautiful book. If you don't like Coover..... well, sorry for you. If you like spanking but don't know if you like Coover, no matter, read Spanking the Maid. If you don't like spanking but you like Coover, you've contradicted yourself. If you like neither spanking nor Coover, you're not reading this review.
Well, now I've seen everything. Slap n tickle surrealisticated, taken away from the Great Unwashed and artsy farstsified so the pretentious middle classes can quaff it publicly with Sancerre and no shame. Stylised to within an inch of its life, but its rictus dejuiced in the bargain: a dry heave, what ho!
I should have hated this, what with its Groundhog Day-like repetition, its plotlessness, its highbrow approach to the lowbrow, its infrequent but bleak philosophical overtures. But as it turns out, this book is just short enough to avoid being overly tedious and just well written enough to keep my attention despite its lack of coherent plot. Really, Coover is a pretty incredible craftsman of sentences, good enough to make what is essentially a writing exercise an engrossing and uncategorizable p...
Only slightly less disturbing than "The Babysitter." I sometimes confuse Coover with Barthelme and then I think about how he hired those guys to mug Dan Rather and while they were beating him up they kept saying "what's the frequency Kenneth?" and then REM wrote that song that also makes me think of that other one they wrote, "Everybody Hurts" and then I just get bummed out and look out over a pond or something.
Cute. The first time I read this, I totally missed the point. Duh. This time, it was almost sad to see that the Master was just as obligated to his "rules" as the maid was to him. Never thought of this dynamic in this way. Recommended read.
For the entire book: two characters (both with no names), one setting. The characters: the master and his maid. The setting: his bedroom, with an adjoining bathroom. It happens everyday: the maid comes in early in the morning, with her cleaning paraphernalia (a mop, bucket, soap, etc.), the master either still in bed or already in the bathroom taking a pee. The maid would sometimes accidentally see his morning erection, sometimes while he's still in bed as she pulls off the blanket, sometimes in...
This is an intense, raunchy, parodic allegory of power couched in an S&M-ish story that works on a broader level than the triviality of its content suggests. It's the creation of ideas through the free indirect speech and the larger symbolism it conveys that is to be savoured. The relationship between the man and the maid draws upon the power imbalance sustained by the use of deeply entrenched accepted ideas about the attainment of some higher goal, to serve a larger purpose - and the cooperatio...
I could write a whole book in response to this book which is how I feel. That is also basically the best feeling a book can give me as far as being a creative person goes. This book speaks directly to me. Some only have faith when life gives nothing to look forward to except a beating. This book hurts. It is the dream you can't wake up from that drags you into the horrors only you can invent. This is how I feel about this book.
