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24th out of 24 books
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20 voters
The Marbled Swarm: A Novel
The Marbled Swarm is Dennis Cooper's most haunting work to date. In secret passageways, hidden rooms, and the troubled mind of our narrator, a mystery perpetually takes shape--and the most compelling clue to its final nature is "the marbled swarm" itself, a complex amalgam of language passed down from father to son.
Cooper ensnares the reader in a world of appearances, wher...more
Cooper ensnares the reader in a world of appearances, wher...more
Paperback, 208 pages
Published
November 1st 2011
by Harper Perennial
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Nov 22, 2011
Nate D
rated it
4 of 5 stars
Recommends it for:
Isabelle Adjani
Recommended to Nate D by:
Pierre Clementi
The Marbled Swarm is a performance of gruesome virtuosity, a blood-gilded house of cards that geometrically collapses down to a single card containing the superimposed forms of all that preceded it, at last finding itself reduced, pure and tragic, a simplicity it so desperately attempted to obscure with endless card tricks -- mysteries within mysteries, horrific acts minutely detailed, the ultimate veneer of language itself -- attempted to obscure out of nothing so much as failed self-preservati...more
part genius; part indecipherable.
a guy with a giant dong assrapes some kid for so long the kid's intestines fly out of his anus resembling 'a bloody octopus'. i wish dennis cooper was my boyfriend.
a guy with a giant dong assrapes some kid for so long the kid's intestines fly out of his anus resembling 'a bloody octopus'. i wish dennis cooper was my boyfriend.
7 likes · like · see review
Since this won’t be released for a while, I don’t want to say too much. Some quick thoughts: I'm a huge admirer of Dennis Cooper's work and The Marbled Swarm strikes me as a genuine masterpiece. Set in Parisian warehouse apartments and country chateaus, the novel is riddled with secret passages, doubles, cannibalism, and peepholes that reveal both more and less than they appear. Its labyrinthine structure is worthy of Robbe-Grillet and the puppetmaster narrator is an equal of Pale Fire’s Kinbote...more
3 likes · like · see review
This review has been hidden because it contains spoilers. To view it,
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Whenever people talk about transgressive fiction, they always bring up three (and only three) names: Kathy Acker, William S. Burroughs, and Dennis Cooper.
Until she tragically died of breast cancer in 1997, Acker was batshit crazy and was, therefore, completely sui generis. Burroughs' world is rather what you'd expect from a drug-addled queer who shot his own wife in the face.
And then there's Dennis Cooper. If you're familiar with his previous work, The Marbled Swarm will not be particularly surp...more
Until she tragically died of breast cancer in 1997, Acker was batshit crazy and was, therefore, completely sui generis. Burroughs' world is rather what you'd expect from a drug-addled queer who shot his own wife in the face.
And then there's Dennis Cooper. If you're familiar with his previous work, The Marbled Swarm will not be particularly surp...more
A very beautifully layered novel that one can almost taste the narrative. Considering it deals with cannibalism among other things this may not be your type of flavor - but it is an essential read by one of the great English language writers alive. What strikes me about the novel for me personally is the jaded aristocratic voice that runs through it. All of Dennis Cooper's novels have a strong visual sense - and usually with the minimal language. "The Marbled Swarm" is different because the text...more
6 likes · like · see review
I lucked out, this is the first time I've gotten a galley of a book from an author that I literally fucking love the work of more than anything (got a galley of a Guyotat book once, which was awesome, but Guyotat takes me like ages to read, whereas Dennis books I can't help but tear through). So I of course read this within a 24 hour period, and it's totally fucking fantastic. Even though I hate reviews that draw comparison as a way of highlighting the narrative of a text (mostly because the com...more
4 likes · like · see review
I liked it. It reminded me a bit of Myra Breckinridge, while less specifically about cinema it is about the pornographic nature of contemporary culture (in 2011, not 1968). In Myra Vidal says that the French won't write novels and the Americans can't and throughout the book Myra looks back fondly on the films of the 1940s. Similarly in a key scene towards the end of Cooper's book his main character finds himself in front of the television "showing an older film, not so old it lied the world was...more
I just bought Dennis Cooper's Closer on my Kindle and I am already terrified that someone is going to look at my Kindle and start reading it and see that it is not only pornographic, but pornographic in the most disturbing sense possible. I am fully convinced that e-Readers were invented for the sole purpose of being able to hide all your erotica from your friends.
Dennis Cooper scares me, yet The Marbled Swarm was still one of the most interesting novels I've read this year. The Marbled Swarm re...more
Dennis Cooper scares me, yet The Marbled Swarm was still one of the most interesting novels I've read this year. The Marbled Swarm re...more
Warning: A rather low brow review. I finished this book and immediately I thought, welp, I need to read that one again. This is the first book I've read by Dennis Cooper. I had a friend who loved him, but for some reason I never sought out any of his books until I read his Art of Fiction interview in The Fall Paris Review. I specifically found Cooper's comparison of his writing to The Jesus and Mary Chain's "Psychocandy," which has been spinning on my record player as of late. Call it coincidenc...more
Apr 24, 2012
Michelle
added it
Before anyone contemplates reading The Marbled Swarm by Dennis Cooper, please note that the language is extremely rough, but more importantly the subject matter is seriously disturbing. One could take this as a sign of Mr. Cooper's genius in that he challenges the reader's sensibilities, or one could believe that Mr. Cooper may need to seek psychiatric help for his depraved subject matter. No matter what one feels about the main character of his novel however, one must laud Mr. Cooper for his ab...more
I think its a novel about the French language, especially literary language, how seductive it once was and how it declined. And oddly enough is written is wonderfully capacious english. Dennis Cooper is a ####ing genius.
Literary French seduced a continent for several centuries, but its descendants have misheard it, in this account. And in any case the world now speaks English. So this is more an elegy for the 'marbled swarm' of FR writing, from Laclos and Sade to Rimbaud. The beginning of the en...more
Literary French seduced a continent for several centuries, but its descendants have misheard it, in this account. And in any case the world now speaks English. So this is more an elegy for the 'marbled swarm' of FR writing, from Laclos and Sade to Rimbaud. The beginning of the en...more
1 like · like · see review
Jun 26, 2012
Jacob
added it
Do you ever read a book and go, ew! Like out loud? Like you're reading it and you stop and say, ew. This book made me do that a lot and I kept following and saying, what the fuck is this? Then I got to the end and I put the book down and I looked around the room and I said, what did I just read? How did he do that? I felt as if the entire book had fucked with my brain and caused me to distrust the world around me, the books on my shelves, the walls of my house especially. Ornately styled and irr...more
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Chasing the intriguing mystery-story plot as it reflects down and back a hallway of mirrors may set you up for a slight feeling of disappointment on the last page, but this book isn't actually quite done with you yet, and there's much fun to be had arranging and processing this books many vivid symbols with the benefit of hindsight. Even if the repulsive brutality sours you on prolonging your exposure to the marbled swarm, I'd still say this narrator's voice alone is kind of unmissable. It's lik...more
I generally love Cooper's work...but this one left me a bit cold because the writing / dialogue was so often verging on opacity. The problem is, I suspect Cooper desired this response, given the wilfully stilted and oddly archaic nature of 'The Marbled Swarm's diction and the multiple story-lines buffeting my poor mind about. Oh well. Give me George Miles any day over this...
All that said, though, Cooper is an inveterate stylist and experimentalist, and I appreciate pretty much everything he doe...more
All that said, though, Cooper is an inveterate stylist and experimentalist, and I appreciate pretty much everything he doe...more
Cooper is working his usual dark magic, here, but in a new form. Normally something of a minimalist, here he attempts to reverse that trend. In fact, you might think of the titular "Marbled Swarm" as a 180 degree rotation from what Nabokov did with "Lolita"--an attempt to cover a central truth with convoluted sentence work and dense plot layers (some leading nowhere) like a honeycomb covered in bees. It's genius that only he could create. A word of warning, though: as I've said before, this is d...more
I love Dennis Cooper more than his characters love underage rough trade psycopath nymphet boytoys with daddy issues. But one thing Dennis Cooper is not is subtle. Sophisticated, yes; layered with meaning, absolutely -- but understated, no way. In fact, I would argue that his greatest talent is his ability to be the opposite of subtle: it's his unrelenting repulsiveness that so powerfully drives his work to ever crueler, ever more captivating heights.
Which is to say that I hated this book. I mea...more
Which is to say that I hated this book. I mea...more
As much as I wanted to love this book, the narrator is just too much of a monster. In the end, I found him convincing, but too terrifying to relate to. There are no soft edges to grab, and so every encounter with the book made me both disgusted and nauseated. I love the work of Dennis Cooper but I found nothing redemptive, and in the end, the book is both empty of meaning and heart. I'd give the book 3.5 stars if I could, but only because of the incredibly high quality of Cooper's prose. I could...more
Mar 15, 2013
Caleb Wilson
added it
Here's a book where tone of voice is so important that it even has a name, like a Zoolander pose. It's a Byzantine and hypnotic method of speech, transcribed by the hero into short, even paragraphs--he makes much of the fact that his speech is a weakened form of his father's, as the book's text is presumably a weakened form of his own speaking voice. And yet even "weakened" this is still one of the best first person narrations I've read in a long time.
It also might be the best blend of imagery,...more
It also might be the best blend of imagery,...more
I have no idea what the ^#$@ I just read.
Cooper clearly had a plot here, because this is a book and even the most nonlinear, experimental book encompasses a plot, because otherwise it isn't a "book," it's just words on paper; but the way in which he told the story, the sentence structure and formulation and syntax used, obscured whatever he was trying to tell as if the words were a wall blocking comprehension of the meaning they were supposed to convey.
The above sentence is reflective of the way...more
Cooper clearly had a plot here, because this is a book and even the most nonlinear, experimental book encompasses a plot, because otherwise it isn't a "book," it's just words on paper; but the way in which he told the story, the sentence structure and formulation and syntax used, obscured whatever he was trying to tell as if the words were a wall blocking comprehension of the meaning they were supposed to convey.
The above sentence is reflective of the way...more
MIRROR TRICKS, ALL OF IT!!! i need to read this again to fully grasp 'what happened' both on the referential level and on the level of form -- but was deliriously riveted by the language and syntax play which is frequently hilarious, and very similar to Urs Allemann's BABYFUCKER w/r/t the comically disorienting syntax providing an uncomfortably comfortable distance from the horrors it's describing, though enacted in a much different way, a mode of rather hilariously insufferable linguistic exces...more
First book I have ever read by Cooper, and once I gave myself permission to enjoy it, I read through it in less that 24 hours. I don't have a lot of literary comparisons or academic criticisms, but I know I enjoyed the layered corkscrew language and found myself laughing out loud more than once. I am not generally a huge fan of gut fucking shock and and sleight of hand narratives, but This one? This one kept me reading despite myself and somehow punched me in the heart at the end. There you go.
I’m not a prude, and I’m not against weird or absurd or horror literature (the Lord Horror series by David Britton is a hundred times more offensive than this), but I just didn’t enjoy it (honestly, I probably just didn’t “get it”). I found some of the things the author was trying to do with the language interesting, but overall it just read like a poor man’s de Sade…and when the word “rape” is used so often that it starts to actually lose meaning, it probably isn’t a good sign (although maybe t...more
To distill this review into one sentence, I suppose I could write Lolita and David Lynch have a baby in the dungeon of a chateau, who grows up being filmed by his father, who hides with his camera behind fake walls that contain secret rooms and tunnels that eventually lead the boy to deviant cannibalism and and a gift for unwielding long stories within stories attached to houses within houses, which he narrates to a mirror with us on the other side.
First I was like, "Awesome! He's written a comedy!" but then I was like, "Oh shit, he's written his own version of a Story of the Eye." and I hate the Story of the Eye! BUT. maybe. maybe this is the punchline. Maybe it is some sort of comment/joke on True Art Is Incomprehensible yes?
God, I hope so. I don't want to have spent all that time being like, "nononono, he's not like that!" and then this. which is exactly like that.
God, I hope so. I don't want to have spent all that time being like, "nononono, he's not like that!" and then this. which is exactly like that.
This is my first foray into Dennis Cooper. I picked up a book because I had read elsewhere that he was the master (or some such) of writing the body/the fiction of the body. Perhaps he writes for a very particular body (ie, not mine). It was graphic, verbose, clouded, disgusting; it vacillated between being entertaining and being too much. Maybe I'm not meant for body writing.
I really think I'm just not into Dennis Cooper's recurring themes. As in the Sluts, there is an exploration of the intersection of lust and violence. I will say that I liked the format of this book much better than that one. I don't have a problem with "shock" as I will watch films that fall into that category, but reading about it just feels too bland-tedious at times. Oh and P.S., cannibalism.
I wish I could say that I didn't get it, but I did. Cooper dressed up his erotic themes in Brideshead's clothing. The result was not very interesting. I didn't see anything original, new or even true in the telling of this story. A real disappointment compared to almost any other Cooper novel I have read
I got this book free from the Toronto Public Library online discussion book.
On our Christmas drive up to Peterborough, I read through it as Jeff drove. In fairness, and prompted by the promises of the narrator that it would get better, I gave it more than the usual fifty-page-rule.
I questioned myself; was it because I'm homophobic ... nawwww ... I've read same sex stories before and liked them, even though I'm not gay.
What made me toss this thing was the sheer vulgarity of the action in the st...more
On our Christmas drive up to Peterborough, I read through it as Jeff drove. In fairness, and prompted by the promises of the narrator that it would get better, I gave it more than the usual fifty-page-rule.
I questioned myself; was it because I'm homophobic ... nawwww ... I've read same sex stories before and liked them, even though I'm not gay.
What made me toss this thing was the sheer vulgarity of the action in the st...more
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The word that kept popping into my head as I read this was "bewitching", and the first book I thought of was Lolita, although it doesn't seem as sound-driven (at least if my memory of Nabokov is in any way accurate). All I can say is that I like it when a writer leaves me wondering what the hell just happened.
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Dennis Cooper was born on January 10, 1953 and grew up in the Southern California cities of Covina and Arcadia. In 1976, he founded Little Caesar Magazine and Press, which he ran until 1982. In 1985, he moved to Amsterdam for two and a half years, where he began his ten year long project, The George Miles Cycle, an interconnected sequence of five novels that includes Closer, Frisk, Try, Guide, and...more
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Nov 23, 2011 01:03pm
Nov 23, 2011 01:12pm