Waterstones Aliens & Anorexia
37 ratings
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Price: £8.99
Brand: Waterstones
Description: It's 1996, and Chris Kraus is in Berlin, seeking a distributor for her film Gravity & Grace, described alternately as 'an experimental 16mm film about hope, despair, religious feeling and conviction' and 'an amateur intellectual's home video expanded to bulimic lengths'. It's 1942 in Marseille, and Simone Weil is waiting for the US entry visa that will save her from the Holocaust, while writing work described alternately as a 'radical philosophy of sadness' and 'immoral, trite, irrelevant and paradoxical'. It's the late 90s, the millennium is approaching, and Chris Kraus is in Los Angeles, not eating, waiting for her s/m partner to reply to her emails. It's 1943, and Simone Weil is in London, completing her project of transcendence by dying of starvation. Filled with Chris Kraus' trademark wit and frankness, unfolding to reveal the lives of ecstatic visionaries and failed artists, Aliens & Anorexia is an audacious novel about failure, empathy and sadness.
Category: Books
Merchant: Waterstones
Product ID: 9781788160070
Delivery cost: 2.99
ISBN: 9781788160070
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Author: meeah
Rating: 5
Review: I loved this book. I loved "I Love Dick," too, while we're at it. I'll probably end up buying all the rest of Chris Kraus's books. I keep doling them out to myself sparingly, like chocolates, because Im heavily into masochistic self-denial. Reading "Aliens & Anorexia" is like watching a midget wrestling match. The midget wrestlers are the subjects of this novel: Simone Weil, Ulrike Meinhof, SM online sex, anorexia, alien abduction, the making/unmaking of Kraus's movie "Gravity & Grace," her touchingly dysfunctional (by conventional standards) marriage…oh and a few more random midgets who jump into and out of the ring at various times. It's not nearly as chaotic as it sounds. Themes emerge, dissolve, and reform again in new and surprising forms. This is a true novel…by which I mean it's "novel." You're not going to read anything else like it. Chris Kraus is a daring intellectual explorer. She goes where…well, I was going to say where few would dare to go…but I don't think anyone has gone where she's gone. She de and then re-territorializes sex, revolution, anorexia, terrorism, aliens, alienation…and so much more. This is a book that challenges you to think along with it.
Author: Mary Reilly
Rating: 3
Review: I loved Chris Kraus's previous books - I Love Dick and Torpor - and if you loved those books you should of course read this one. I did find it the least interesting of the loose trilogy, and found its attempt to rehabilitate anorexia a little problematic. But overall an interesting read for Kraus completists.
