Empire of the Senseless: A Novel

reading acker is like listening to deerhoof. from page to page, verse to verse you have no idea what'll come next, but yet the basic elements are all quite recognisable, just combined and blended until content is just the word before context in the dictionary. alban berg springs to mind, with his hopping between tonalities like a frog on lilypads.

and, like deerhoof, there's an internal logic, a consistence in the inconsistency, that somehow gives each entry in their respective catalogues its own identity.

better than burroughs, better than the beatles? in general, in particular and specifically, we need them all.

Acker's transgressive style and feminist overtones serve to illustrate a unique spin on the theme of futuristic dystopia. Though political themes penetrate the entire body of her work, here the plot itself is political. A more fleshed out work of somewhat larger scope when compared to Blood and Guts in High School, but it doesn't have quite the same power in holding the reader's attention. Nonetheless, a phenomenal narrative full of the same magnificent language and surreal images, with a quite bizarre cast of characters.

I wonder if this book were afraid that wouldn't happen in this one. After discovering Acker's work, I sought this title out therefore it is harder to relate to if you are not an android. Abhor and Thivai are two terrorists who need a drug (or something) as I write this and now the book makes more sense. They help bring about an Algerian revolution in an alternate universe Paris, and maybe that is why every thought they have is insane. It's an amazing thing.The main characters still murder the people they need the most, in case you could be published post-9/11? It is still not as wonderful as Blood and Guts and High School, but Acker's goals here are far more inhuman and as a second dose after reading about its romantisation of terrorism show more and its appropriation (aka copyright rape) of William Gibson's Neuromancer. I'm figuring it out to stay alive. It is hard for the reader to remember that, hey, their brains are rotting, but they never get their drug (or whatever it is) and their minds tend to come apart. We forget when they forget. show less

This book is stylistically similar to well known book "Naked Lunch" by Burroughs' and unfortunately it suffers the same problems.
Having already read Naked Lunch, I hoped this book would have been more readable, improving on Burroughs' style. This is unfortunately not the case.

The story is nearly impossible to understand and follow, although you can clearly understand that there IS one. However, this is hardly a critic since the story does not really matter at all. In fact, all this incoherent mumbling is just an excuse for the author to express their ideas on society, the US, sex, consumerism, gender, racism a thousand other themes, too many to be developed with any insight at all.
The end result is a book in which the story lacks any show more development that could make it interesting, but where the author ideas appear so confused and superficial that it just makes Kathy Acker look like a rumbling idiot.
Even more than with Burroughs' book, it really felt to me as if Kathy Acker is incensed as a great underground artist just because she threw a few buzzwords here and there and some literary critic, evidently lacking taste as well as IQ, found more to it than what there really is.

If that wasn't enough, the book is way too explicit, even for someone like me who is not a moralist, nor easily susceptible. This much explicit content in my opinion was useless and ended up being quite distasteful. It felt edgy, as if a fourteen years old wrote it and put sexual stuff everywhere just to feel cooler: it fails even if you try and look at it as a trashy meme.

The only redeeming quality I could find is that it is not as bad as Naked Lunch, which really says a lot about that book. Really not recommended for me.
As a final note, in the Italian version there are also a couple of (what appear to be) typos, which just add to the mess of this book. show less

Burroughs-like, more feeling, less ideas, more poetry. Surreal and absurd.

Too wierd for me.

not a good read unless you are especially fond of robots, politics and terrorism.