Antkind

Location & Checkout Length	Call Number	Checkout Length	Item Status
Traverwood Adult Books 4-week checkout	Adult Book / Fiction / General / Kaufman, Charlie	4-week checkout	In transit
Malletts Adult Books 4-week checkout	Adult Book / Fiction / General / Kaufman, Charlie	4-week checkout	Due 04-26-2024

"B. Rosenberger Rosenberg, neurotic and underappreciated film critic (failed academic, filmmaker, paramour, shoe salesman who sleeps in a sock drawer), stumbles upon a hitherto unseen film by an enigmatic outsider--a film he's convinced will change his career trajectory and rock the world of cinema to its core. His hands on what is possibly the greatest movie ever made, a three-month-long stop-motion masterpiece that took its reclusive auteur ninety years to complete, B. knows that it is his mission to show it to the rest of humanity. The only problem: The film is destroyed, leaving him the sole witness to its inadvertently ephemeral genius. All that's left of this work of art is a single frame from which B. must somehow attempt to recall the film that just might be the last great hope of civilization. Thus begins a mind-boggling journey through the hilarious nightmarescape of a psyche as lushly Kafkaesque as it is atrophied by the relentless spew of Twitter. Desperate to impose order on an increasingly nonsensical existence, trapped in a self-imposed prison of aspirational victimhood and degeneratively inclusive language, B. scrambles to re-create the lost masterwork while attempting to keep pace with an ever-fracturing culture of "likes" and arbitrary denunciations that are simultaneously his bête noire and his raison d'être."-- Provided by publisher.

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Love It submitted by jibkidder on June 28, 2022, 8:18pm It took me some time to settle into this novel. Before I did, there was a way in which Kaufman, the film director, seemed to be taking too many shots at his film critic protagonist, that his contempt for the character was getting in the way of creating him. Having since settled into that, and enjoyed a lot of this book, I'd say that is still there, still true, and all of his motivations for doing that aren't entirely clear to me, but nevertheless he was able to pull off his headscratcher Matryoshka doll magic using this construction in ways film could never support. I can't help but compare this with Cronenberg's novel "Consumed", which is a fine book, but Kaufman in this instance seemed to understand what was only possible in this medium of writing, and take full advantage of that.