Monday, May 5, 2014

Thomas Keneally and sex

In the 26 April issue of the Spectator, Caroline Moore reviews Thomas Keneally’s new novel Shame and the Captives which is about Japanese PoWs breaking out from a camp in rural New South Wales. Sounds a bit like Vincent O’Sullivan’s play Shuriken about the massacre of Japanese PoWs at a camp in rural Wairarapa. Ms Moore is generally positive about the novel, but then she quotes:  
Within the limits of his everlasting deceit, he answered the unnegotiable kindness of her breasts…

Sometimes I think authors shouldn’t write about sex at all. It would save a lot of embarrassment all round. Manil Suri won the Literary Review’s  Bad Sex in Fiction award for 2013 for this, from his novel The City of Devi:
Surely supernovas explode that instant, somewhere, in some galaxy. The hut vanishes, and with it the sea and the sands – only Karun’s body, locked with mine, remains. We streak like superheroes past suns and solar systems, we dive through shoals of quarks and atomic nuclei. In celebration of our breakthrough fourth star, statisticians the world over rejoice.

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