CAMBODIA: A Book for People Who Find Television Too Slow

by Brian Fawcett ‧ RELEASE DATE: Sept. 1, 1988

A roll of the die must have determined the publisher's decision to label this bizarre production as fact rather than fiction: 13 short-stories (but are they stories or essays with dabs of fiction?) fill the top two-thirds of each page, straddling a long disquisition on the Khmer Rouge and the decay of Western civilization. No doubt that analytical essay sits on the bottom because it lays an ideological foundation for the tales. Fawcett brandishes his guerrilla papers off the bat: he is writing ""about what it means to be intellectually and artistically adrift in North America in the 1980s, a hostile in the Global Village. . ."" Weaving a complex, angry argument that ties up the Congo, Cambodia, Vietnam, and Joseph Conrad, he asserts that life today is ruled by technology, by central committee, by--as the Khmer Rouge knew--""cybernetic and administrative efficiencies."" The same obsession with techno-strangulation gluts Fawcett's fictions, which include a chat between Marshall McLuhan and St. Paul in the desert, a train wreck marked by empty body-bags (a symbol for media hypocrisy?), a confrontation between Reggie Jackson and a group of punks, and the delightful tale of two German POWs who turn out to be Tibetan peasants convinced they are travelling through the Bardo realm. Fawcett makes no effort at ""suspension of disbelief"" here--in fact, he destroys the storytelling spell at every opportunity, desiring ""to make the subtext of this book visible and literal to the best of my ability."" Despite its gonzo design, not a disorganized hodgepodge, but rather a set of cunning skirmishes in an all-out attack on the automatisms of modern life. By turns boring and exhilarating, silly and insightful, grumpy and affectionate. Kind of like modern life.

Pub Date: Sept. 1, 1988

ISBN: N/A

Page Count: -

Publisher: Grove

Review Posted Online: N/A

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 15, 1988

Categories: NONFICTION