Books: Politics, by Adam Thirwell - Revisited

 

(Drivebycuriosity) - Everything is so complicated. Iran conflict, recession scars, Greece negotiatons, U.S. presidential race, you name it. But complications can be funny, at least  Adam Thirlwell is making fun of it.

His novel "Politics" (first published in 2003 amazon.com ) doesn´t deal with Geopolitics, business cycles and debt problems. Thirlwell describes just a microcosmos, a relationship between a man and girl, and sometimes with a second girl. But nothing really functions in this microcosmos because human interactions are complex,  which might also explain why the whole complex world looks so messy. A reason why I reread the book recently.

The author narrates about a relationship between Moshe, a theater actor in London, and Nana, a student of architecture, and sometimes a third girl named Anjali. Thirlwell`s style reminds me to a surgeon doing an autopsy. He doesn`t just sketch the psychological issues, like jealousy, or the simple misunderstandings (who can read the mind of his/ her partner?), he also narrates explicitly the technical problems of their sex life.

I enjoy Thirlwell`s style and his attitude. The author claims that his attitude to fashion "is a technical interest and respect combined with an amazed sarcasm". I guess "amazed sarcasm" describes how he deals with the characters of his book. And reading sarcastic meditatations about all the difficulties in this microcosmos is helping me a bit to deal with all the incomprehensions we read all day in the news.