In Memoriam to Identity - Hardcover

Acker, Kathy

3.83

442 ratings by Goodreads

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 080211170X ISBN 13: 9780802111708

Publisher: Grove Pr, 1990

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"In Memoriam to Identity is a weird, violent, searing, angry work, full of pain, dislocation, desire, hate and the raging drive of resistant creation. . . . Kathy Acker has invented a form of secret historiography, a language of shock and sensation that provides a vivid, disruptive, unsettling readout on the psychosocial trauma of our time."--Tim Clark, Los Angeles Times Book Review.

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From the Back Cover:

In this characteristically sexy, daring, and hyperliterate novel, Kathy Acker interweaves the stories of three characters who share the same tragic flaw: a predilection for doomed, obsessive love. Rimbaud, the delinquent symbolist prodigy, is deserted by his lover Verlaine time and time again. Airplane takes a job dancing at Fun City, the seventh tier of the sex industry, in order to support her good-for-nothing boyfriend. And Capitol feels alive only when she's having sex with her brother, Quentin. In Memoriam to Identity is at once a revelatory addition to, and an irreverent critique of, the literature of decadence and self-destruction.

"Dramatic, superbly ironic . . . A narrative that seduces with style. Her best writing." -The New Statesman

"Punk, postmodernist fiction . . . Reminiscent of the cut-and-paste experiments of William Burroughs and Brion Gysin."-The New York Times Book Review

"Acker's is not polite fiction, nor is it naturalistic. It is, however, challenging, certainly in its style and form but even more in its smart, articulated anger."-Library Journal

"Kathy Acker was a fiction writer, a show artist, a punk performer . . . A postmodern iconoclast who believed in the discipline of the classics. . . . A sharp, sexy reporter among the trash cans and strip joints, tapping out dispatches from the underground."-Jeanette Winterson

Novelist and performance artist Kathy Acker (1948-1997) was among the most important postmodernist authors. Her ten novels include Pussy, King of the Pirates; Empire of the Senseless; Blood and Guts in High School; My Mother: Demonology; and Great Expectations.

From Publishers Weekly:

Acker, known for her scatological excursions into the demimonde of post-modernism, is above all a literalist, and a literary one at that. If her concern is the alienation wrought by industrialization, she literally appropriates Dickens's Pip, as she did in her first novel (sassily titled Great Expectations ), and thrusts him into the complexities of her time. In this new book, Acker mourns the childhood innocence (mostly sexual) lost to socialization. She invokes the writings of Rimbaud and Faulkner, blending them with modern angst and not a little political posturing--about AIDS, Thatcherism, etc. The book's four interlocking stories detail Rimbaud's doomed relationships with his mother and the poet Verlaine, Quentin Compson's deluded engagement with his unfolding fate and the tragic exploitation (again, mostly sexual) of several other characters. The tie that binds these narratives is the frenetic struggle to escape from the limitations of the social self. Acker writes with the coldest beauty and the most perfervid excess; she will find the audience that wants nothing in between.
Copyright 1990 Reed Business Information, Inc.

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