Wednesday, September 13, 2006
In Search of the Pleasure Palace
I gotta tell you, I’ve been reading a great book. It’s called “In Search of the Pleasure Palace”, by Marc Almond, better known to Americans as half of the 80’s group Soft Cell, whose one hit in the States was “Tainted Love”.
I picked up the book as a lark; found it for a buck on a closeout table in a bookstore.
It’s simply tremendous. As Almond hits his mid-life crisis, he revisits places he’d been earlier, and offers his insights into life and love, now seen through none-too-nostalgic eyes. One of the things I find most enjoyable is how I can understand how he feels—being at a kind of mid-life crisis myself, I share his sense of emptiness and disappointment. (But at least I’m happily married, not a gay fading recovered drug-addict pop star.)
Some parts of the book I can’t relate to at all, especially his comments about gay-sex clubs, but I was a bachelor a long time, and I certainly had more than my share of empty experiences; when he writes in a what-was-I-thinking-then-and-what-are-these-people-thining-now mode, boy, do I know what he’s talking about. And when it comes to the tedium and mediocrity all around us, well, the less said the better. I have laughed myself silly at some of the passages, winced at others, and overall found the book hypnotic; I can’t put it down.
Anyway, it’s funny, sad (when talking about sex in the media, he uses the phrase that “explicit has replaced erotic,” which sums it up), and insightful. Most amazingly, it’s never dull. I can’t remember the last time I thought that about any book (except my own, of course).
Compared to the other stuff I’ve been reading—second-rate thrillers and sci-fi, all of which seem like they’re written by a computer program, and I forget the instant I put them down—this is like Tolstoy.
Well, okay, not that good. But pretty damn good.
I picked up the book as a lark; found it for a buck on a closeout table in a bookstore.
It’s simply tremendous. As Almond hits his mid-life crisis, he revisits places he’d been earlier, and offers his insights into life and love, now seen through none-too-nostalgic eyes. One of the things I find most enjoyable is how I can understand how he feels—being at a kind of mid-life crisis myself, I share his sense of emptiness and disappointment. (But at least I’m happily married, not a gay fading recovered drug-addict pop star.)
Some parts of the book I can’t relate to at all, especially his comments about gay-sex clubs, but I was a bachelor a long time, and I certainly had more than my share of empty experiences; when he writes in a what-was-I-thinking-then-and-what-are-these-people-thining-now mode, boy, do I know what he’s talking about. And when it comes to the tedium and mediocrity all around us, well, the less said the better. I have laughed myself silly at some of the passages, winced at others, and overall found the book hypnotic; I can’t put it down.
Anyway, it’s funny, sad (when talking about sex in the media, he uses the phrase that “explicit has replaced erotic,” which sums it up), and insightful. Most amazingly, it’s never dull. I can’t remember the last time I thought that about any book (except my own, of course).
Compared to the other stuff I’ve been reading—second-rate thrillers and sci-fi, all of which seem like they’re written by a computer program, and I forget the instant I put them down—this is like Tolstoy.
Well, okay, not that good. But pretty damn good.
