Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #408669 in Books
• Published on: 1983-05-01
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 160 pages

Review
Originally published in Paris in 1955, in London in 1961, and in the US only in mass-market paperback (as part of a collection called The Outsiders, 1961): a drab, modestly effective novella in the Camus manner. The narrator, a moody, educated man named Joe, begins with some existential musing: "I don't ask whether I am the 'I' who looked or the image which was seen, the man who acted or the man who thought about the act." But for the most part this small tale is drearily straightforward. While working on a Scottish canal barge, Joe - together with boss Leslie - discovers the drowned body of a girl. And from that moment Joe becomes obsessively, sexually drawn to middle-aged Leslie's 35-ish wife Ella, first with some footsie under the table, later (while Leslie's off at the pub and cinema) with full-scale erotics. At that point, narrator Joe tells his (guessable) secret: the drowned girl was his own girlfriend Kathie - who died accidentally after a tussle with Joe. So, as the affair with Ella peaks and then sours (Leslie catches them, disappears; Joe is unfaithful to Ella with her newly widowed stepsister), Joe is increasingly preoccupied with the trial of the innocent man accused of Kathie's murder: Will the innocent man be found guilty? Does Joe have the duty to tell his story to the police? Would it do any good? With familiar themes - guilt, responsibility, the sex/death interface - and a by-now-cliched, alienated anti-hero: an undistinguished exercise, with only the convincingly dour Glasgow/canal atmosphere lending a bit of distinction. (Trocchi, however, has achieved a certain position in Britain as a leader of the postwar avant-garde literary scene.) (Kirkus Reviews)

Customer Reviews

Sexistential
A very slim 'read-it-in-one-sitting' novel but structured around the most important of themes.

Joe, too often (and self-defeatingly) identified as Camus' main protagonist in 'The Outsider'is a superbly realised character whose sexual confidence has literally deadly consequences.

Trochhi was once a paid pornographer and there is a vivid and beautifuly depicted scene where ... well let's just say it involves custard and some other household fluids.

The turgid opening paragraphs on the difficulty of language disqualifies this novella from five stars but there also fine insights into both personality traits and the physical landscape of canal life - that outer point of urban living.

The recent film is very faithful to this text, though, as is often the case, inferior to it as well.