(some spoiling awaits)Mother of God. I don’t believe I’ve ever before had a reading experience like the one I've just had with The Blood Oranges. For the first three quarters of the book, I, having never read John Hawkes before, struggled to believe that it was the author's intention to portray...
Sex Without FeelingHawkes, John (1974). Death, Sleep, & the Traveler. New York: New Directions.Main character Allert (accent on the first syllable) is an overweight, middle-aged Dutchman with a younger, beautiful wife, Ursula. Their neighbor, Peter, a psychiatrist and trim, younger man, is attrac...
Hawkes, Travesty. John Hawkes' most extreme vision of eroticism and comic terror.
"No synopsis conveys the quality of this now famous novel about an hallucinated Germany in collapse after World War II. John Hawkes, in his search for a means to transcend outworn modes of fictional realism, has discovered a highly original technique for objectifying the perennial degradation of ...
And now? And now the wind and the hammock which I so rarely use. For it is time now to recall that sad little prophetic passage from my schoolboy’s copybook with its boyish valor and its antiquity, and to admit that the task of memory has only brightened these few brave wo...
Dressed in her severe gray suit, her gardening hat, her girdle, her negligee, her sullen silk dress, her black blouse, her stockings, her red pumps, and carrying a carefully packed straw suitcase in either hand, thus she is leaving me. She is going at last not because of what occurred on the ship...
Gray toppers, gray gloves and polished walking sticks; elegant ladies and smart young girls; fellows in fedoras, and mothers, and wives—all your Cheapside crowd along with your own Sidney Slyter, naturally. Pure life is the only phrase that will do, life’s pure anticipation. … So you won’t want t...
Ten or twenty men to a tent, they penny-anted by lantern light and only came out into the falling snow to watch when a load of shovels arrived or the crated yellow tractor was slid from the rear of a truck and left in a shallow dune to await spring. For days the men tramped out in small groups to...