I missed that it was a rewriting of Barry Lyndon! Too many years since I'd read the novel, I guess. So this review is extraordinarily helpful, as well as great on its own terms.
I now see that both my appreciation of the novel and my reservations about it are just how I always feel about the picaresque! It's a powerful way of looking at the world, but also one I ultimately find unsatisfying: I need art to reflect the orderliness of the world rather than its arbitrariness, I guess. Now I'm also wondering f I should have read Flesh as more of a comic work than I did. A certain bleak irony, sure--but is it actually a comic novel, like its original and like other members of the genre? Or does the comedy dissolve in its rewriting? And what does that say if so?
"After reading Flesh, I found myself wondering whether there had ever been any successful kept men in the canon, and if so, what their secret was. I could only think of two, sitting at opposite ends of the spectrum."
it's not the point of the book but you might try 'Chez Krull' by Simenon
Not directly on the ‘kept man’ theme, but reading this delightful and thought-provoking review, I was put forcefully in mind of the Peter Sellers character in *Being There*, and of course Oblomov— two more leading (male) characters drifting glassy-eyed and passive through life, and to whom things *happen* and not the other way round.
I missed that it was a rewriting of Barry Lyndon! Too many years since I'd read the novel, I guess. So this review is extraordinarily helpful, as well as great on its own terms.
I now see that both my appreciation of the novel and my reservations about it are just how I always feel about the picaresque! It's a powerful way of looking at the world, but also one I ultimately find unsatisfying: I need art to reflect the orderliness of the world rather than its arbitrariness, I guess. Now I'm also wondering f I should have read Flesh as more of a comic work than I did. A certain bleak irony, sure--but is it actually a comic novel, like its original and like other members of the genre? Or does the comedy dissolve in its rewriting? And what does that say if so?
"After reading Flesh, I found myself wondering whether there had ever been any successful kept men in the canon, and if so, what their secret was. I could only think of two, sitting at opposite ends of the spectrum."
it's not the point of the book but you might try 'Chez Krull' by Simenon
Not directly on the ‘kept man’ theme, but reading this delightful and thought-provoking review, I was put forcefully in mind of the Peter Sellers character in *Being There*, and of course Oblomov— two more leading (male) characters drifting glassy-eyed and passive through life, and to whom things *happen* and not the other way round.
that's what happens when you marry a base women, i.e almost every single one