Freedom Read #117

“Madrid. Unfinished. Man Dying.“

70 scant pages, barely an hour’s reading.

7 sections – canvases – of stripped back prose – some conversation, some that almost falls into poetry. There are repeated ideas, thoughts, types. Some prose, some words run together like a melting, struggling consciousness. Some passages play on the sounds of the words, wandering away from meaning down side alleys. Some is brutal, vulgar, languid, viscous, self-lacerating, maudlin, telling whatever tale wanders across the increasingly arid plane of his thinking. There are remembered meals, arguments, addictions, sex, a visceral hated for the extremely “English colour” green and a lot of telling people to “fuck off.” All of which is believable.

“Wounds. Typical of me, all the gore, special effects, now I am the empty-headed celebrity meat master of macabre, lead in his wounds, champagne, doomed.“

The restraint and / or the brutality of the editing that must have gone into this book is quite something to consider.

It is described on the cover as a “great painter lies on his death bed“, and that these “written pictures” show the “explosive workings of the artist’s mind“.

You will love it or hate it. Today, I find myself in the former camp, tomorrow, who knows.