Product Description

Anna is a student with a taste for perverse sex involving an older man and a ventriloquist's dummy. She lives in Aberdeen and her sex life revolves around the stone circles in that region. The grandeur of the stones provides a backdrop against which she can act out her provocative psychodramas.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #656227 in Books
• Published on: 2002-03-14
• Original language: English
• Binding: Hardcover
• 182 pages

Customer Reviews

Most peculiar
This is a most odd book. Man meets woman, has sex with her, she has sex with his dummy, he has sex with all her friends and deconstructs all her books, and then they go off on a tour of the standing stones of NE Scotland while trying to have coffee in as many supermarket cafes as possible. And that's just the beginning. It's probably highly pretentious, but for reasons I can't quite fathom I enjoyed it immensely. It's highly readable and great fun. Haven't a clue what it all means - if indeed it means anything at all. Don't read it if you're put off by rude words and graphic sex.

Beating the boundaries
"A man called Berg, who changed his name to Greb, came to a seaside town intending to kill his father...."

So began Ann Quin's 1964 experiment in Beckettian psychodrama, _Berg_. Stewart Home's 69 Things shares Quin's obsession with ventriloquists dummies, and a strikingly similar opening:

"A man who no longer called himself Callum came to Aberdeen intent on ending his life...." From here on, we're pushed into a dense sea of literary repetition and parody: whole passages ripped from dry Scottish guidebooks, sex done in the repititious cliches of porn (we hear of people 'adjusting their clothes' very very frequently), po-mo lit-crit done in the repititious cliches of porn (much of which relates to Ann Quin, Alexander Trocchi, and the relation of British experimentalism to the hack literary mainstream).

The plot, such as it is, relates to Callum's attempt to recreate the final journey of Princess Diana's corpse, which we're told was lugged around the geodetic force-lines of Scotland by KL Callan - a journey that Callum read about in the imaginary cult book, _69 Things to Do with a Dead Princess_. You might relate this to Home's earlier avant-garde texts, relating the force of the British establishment to the occult force of the Ley.

KL Callan, the Magus, and author of the occult political text, _Marx, Christ and Satan United in Struggle_, will already be known to readers of Stewart Home's work. What will be less well known is that Callan is the REAL Stewart Home: "Stewart Home" is actually a group name used by a number of avant-garde artists, including Callan, Karen Eliot, Monty Cantsin, and the late Ern Malley.

Teenage romp with tedious post-modern twist
Anna Noon is a Aberdeen student entangled with Alan/Callum a gluttonous consumer of high-brow literature. Together they reenact 69 (or 169) pilgrimages to the monoliths and standing stones of Aberdeenshire. Their trips are punctuated by continuous shagging in the worst style of teenage fantasy.

This work was almost certainly written as the culmination of a bet. Formulaic encounters are interspersed with pointless bookish onanism. Were you to skip these two elements of the work, the three pages left to you would leave you non-plussed - what was the point? The final self-referential nuance is mere confirmation that the author was unable to convincingly round-off what was, in summary, an utter waste of a tree (well, sapling).