Portrait of an Eye: Three Novels by Kathy Acker
My rating: 3 of 5 stars
This is an author finding her voice. There are brief moments of insight, tantalizing bits of sublime work, but mostly repetitious, meandering cut ups and pastes of various sorts. As Acker says in an interview (and so Zizek and Lacan would agree) the erotica is not erotica! If the text speaks of something else, it’s obviously sexual, but if it’s sexual then it’s obviously something else. So you can read this as a tear-down of power relations, of the attempt to break out of family-oedipal narratives, of the whole rigmarole. Does she succeed? Is she able to find a new space? It doesn’t seem so with these texts.
Definitely for the die hard Acker fan.
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