M HKA Ensembles

Book, 19.7 x 12.9 cm, 182 p, language: English, publisher: The Do-Not Press Ltd, ISBN: 1899344454.

Collection: Collection M HKA, Antwerp (Inv. no. B 2024/854).

Literary synopsis 

The narrator of Cunt is David Kelso. He's a writer who claims to be so lacking in imagination that his fiction isn't fiction. Kelso is completing a trilogy in which he describes tracking down and shagging the first thousand women he bedded. Despite boasting that he is completely uncreative, Kelso dreams up some seriously Machiavellian scenarios in order to get into the knickers of various women he hasn't seen for years. Kelso is also disarmingly candid about the fact that he sometimes fakes his results. Such dissimulation raises serious doubts about Kelso's reliability as a narrator. Cunt is simultaneously David Kelso's journal and a post-modern variant on one of the oldest genres of prose fiction, the picturesque novel. Kelso's wanderings take him from London to East Anglia and from there to Finland, Sweden, Estonia and the highlands and islands of Scotland. However, the relentless sexual action is occasionally frozen so that the narrator can reflect drunkenly on the philosophy of Deleuze and Guattari or literary obsessions that encompass writers as diverse as Thomas Nashe and George Gissing. Cunt can be read as pornography, satire, travelogue or a combination of all the above and much else besides.

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