Adult Life of Toulouse Lautrec by Henri Toulouse Lautrec

Portrait of an Eye #3

by Kathy Acker, William Wegman (Illustrator)

A vida adulta de Toulouse-Lautrec entrelaça acontecimentos e personagens históricos com passagens ensaísticas e elementos ficcionais. Vincent (van Gogh) critica a arte de Toulouse e ela se irrita. Como de costume, Acker usa os gêneros das personagens de maneira deliberadamente fluida. Aqui, Paul Gauguin é a faxineira do bordel onde uma bobalhona foi assassinada. Em meio às cenas com personagens famosas que são apresentadas ao longo do livro, também dão as caras Janis Joplin e James Dean, jovens amantes que ainda não sucumbiram às pressões e ao cinismo de Hollywood. Henry Kissinger e outros figurões da política também surgem ao longo do texto. A autora, ainda que deixe clara sua posição nesse emaranhado de personagens, dá liberdade a quem lê para tirar suas próprias conclusões. Entre comentários sobre a política estadunidense do século XX e suas reverberações em países como a República Dominicana, Acker faz cortes abruptos e se lança em uma busca por prazeres desenfreados. Em outra passagem, retoma o final do século XIX e, em meio a conversas entre Toulouse e Vincent sobre Paris e São Francisco, pipocam greves em todos os cantos. Anarquistas se reúnem na Haymarket, um grande espaço aberto em Chicago, a fim de protestar contra um tiroteio policial que reprimiu uma manifestação de grevistas. De repente, uma bomba explode na multidão. Anarquistas são presos em nome da lei, batem na polícia em nome da liberdade e se defendem frente ao juiz. Fariam de novo.

Genres: Fiction

201 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1978

About the author

Born of German-Jewish stock, Kathy Acker was brought up by her mother and stepfather (her natural father left her mother before Kathy was born) in a prosperous district of NY. At 18, she left home and worked as a stripper. Her involvement in the sex industry helped to make her a hit on the NY art scene, and she was photographed by the newly fashionable Robert Mapplethorpe. Preferring to be known simply as 'Acker' (the name she took from her first husband Robert, and which she continued to use even after a short-lived second marriage to composer Peter Gordon), she moved to London in the mid-eighties and stayed in Britain for five years.

Acker's writing is as difficult to classify into any particular genre as she herself was. She writes fluidly, operating in the borderlands and junkyards of human experience. Her work is experimental, playful, and provocative, engagingly alienating, narratively non sequitur.

Reviews

[Nate D · Rating 3 out of 5]

In Paris, Toulouse Lautrec, apparently female, hopes for love, hangs around a brothel, recounts the life of her friend Van Gogh, and attempts to solve a murder. Meanwhile, the love affair of Janis Joplin and James Dean is derailed by his career, which requires that he not be a real person, and Henry Kissinger's war politics drive U.S. economics on their course into ever-higher inflation and dangerous financial instability. In short, it's Kathy Acker slipping fluidly through many sources and constructing a kind of derailed and chameleonic noir narrative. Actually more plot flow than usual for these early works, but just as darkly playful and charged with dissection of storytelling, identity, and contemporary America.

[Andrew · Rating 3 out of 5]

Some aspects of this were straight 5 stars, like the Janis Joplin meets James Dean contrasted with Henry Kissinger's war crimes chapter, or the random vingette with interjections of the mechanics of hyper-capitalism. Phenomenal and very odd writing that I just loved. But so many of the other chapters felt eh, out of place, or just uninteresting. But overall, this is the best of her early works that I've read yet!

[Alexander · Rating 1 out of 5]

this read like a 200 page version of a bathroom stall poem written by an edgy 16 year old girl as she listens to my chemical romance

probably the worst thing i've had to read for a class !

[Márcia Figueira · Rating 4 out of 5]

"é preciso saber exactamente quais são as forças com que você está lidando, para saber quando é o momento de se curvar, de se esconder e de matar"

"preciso do mundo de sentimentos descontrolados e do compromisso social que existem nela"

[Lee Foust · Rating 4 out of 5]

Vintage Acker. Quite good. This one begins rather cohesively for a couple of chapters as a clever transposition of the author's own 1970s U.S. art scene pasted over the post-impressionist Paris of Lautrec, Gaugin, and Van Gogh, and then transforms into other individual games in the following chapters blending many of the author's preoccupations, which were also the avant-garde preoccupations of the era--a Marxist, historical reading of late capitalism and the war economy, the romance of James Dean and Janis Joplin as a kind of American cinematic fairy tale of the 1950s and '60s, and a spirited romantic representation of gangster films like Paul Muni's Scarface and Key Largo, and the war of the sexes with women and men figured as a cat and a big ape as in a children's book. Aces all round.

[Carrie · Rating 5 out of 5]

dirty.

[JJ]

Seeing Acker's process unfold in these early works is really nice.

[Vítor Freire Zannin · Rating 4 out of 5]

Super cru, super intenso. Estrutura mais do que inventiva, mais do que subversiva: é esquizo, ou é selvagem.