Anaxagoras said to a man who was grieving because he lay dying in a foregin land, "The descent to hell is the same from every place."

is up there with "Call me Ishamel" in terms of all time openers.

Simultaneously manages to be one of the most vulgar and eloquent blocks of prose that I've ever read. The intentional alliteration, asyndeton, and everything in between is nearly poetic, and there is a certain cadence to the monologue that propels the reader's journey onwards, tracing Kohler's confessional inwards and downwards. It is also one of the most daringly typeset books I own (high praise) I can understand why it fell out of print and is as expensive as it is. As a prolonged monologue, this is one of the more demanding and impressive books that I've read in recent memory. Almost every page contains something that feels portable. It is brash and darkly humorous.

The high level premise is that a history professor sets about finishing his book about Nazi Germany and immediately lapses into depression about his small penis, big wife, and german ancestry, and his annoying colleagues.

From the surly age of twelve, I looked back on eleven with distain

The monologue circles around his family and his discontentment, his fat wife who stops sleeping with him, his eccentric Uncle who probably molested him, his drunk of a mother who got away with it because gin looks like water, and his prototypically insatiable and thus disappointed father, his childhood, and everything in between.

Throughout there are many boldfaced and horrible, horrible little limericks that remind me of Pynchon.

My father taught me how to become a failure. He taught me bigotry and bitterness.

Update, he does not break ground until however, many hundred pages into the novel and I was thoroughly captivated through that point. If not for the title, this would have come as a titillating surprise and development in the plot, which is thus far consisted of one monologue.

I am overcoming certain protestant patterns from my past by whacking my wee-wee

He digresses again into his complaints and characterization of his editor Herschel and compares his life to his own. Not dissimilar to Transparent Things in which the protagonist quibbles with his editor:

I suddenly feel as though his tears are mine, wept back to me, but slightly revised

.

This guy [a pitcher] knows that the batter hits curves like a drunken driver, which is why he's not throwing curveballs despite the murmurings of Kohler's father

Hilariously apropos, if not prescient of the sexually deviant, Nazi author to muse about the beauty of a name like "Sandusky."

Woof.

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