Christie Malry's Own Double-Entry

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It is our duty to ensure that people who care learn of its existence, read it, laugh, love and think. Christie Malry’s Own Double-Entry, the last novel to be published in B S Johnson's lifetime, is undoubtedly his funniest. As mentioned in other reviews, this is an experimental novel that combines wicked doses of dark humor with many different, and hilarious, nods to the fact that this is a novel. In spite of the relative success of the film I can't see me making a film with anyone in the British Film industry at the moment. But it is a dark, sly humour predicated on the distaste Johnson had for an oppressive post-war British society (an oppression he delineates brilliantly in The Unfortunates).

To the extent that this is a caution against tolerating injustice in the hope of heavenly justice and redemption, it is the equivalent of the existentialist messages (for they are different) of Camus and Sartre, only it’s delivered in an almost offhand, wry, humorous way. The effect this has is to make the novel not a novel but a diagram of a novel (the plot is a sketch, the characters are thin to the point of emaciation), into which the author wanders and offers comments. I)n der Tradition des experimentellen Erzählens und genauer noch in der Tradition jenes abgründigen angelsächsischen Humors, den Autoren wie Sterne, Joyce oder Flann O'Brien begründet haben.

We are merely labour, consumption and a melange of traumas and exaltations with reciprocal sets of margins.

Similarly the illustrative quotes chosen here are merely those the complete review subjectively believes represent the tenor and judgment of the review as a whole. By using the Web site, you confirm that you have read, understood, and agreed to be bound by the Terms and Conditions. he goes for an accounting job in a bank without having any qualifications for it, because, as a "simple man", he just wants to be where the money is. As others have observed, this was his Johnson's last novel before killing himself, the same year as his compatriot Ann Quin disappeared into the ocean, incidentally, which really gives the bitter buffoonery a stark context.But if it failed, let me reiterate: There seems little left of our lives or the world around us that is not already captured by the power of the pound and profit. The death of Christie’s mother, his love of the Shrike represented areas ‘in which the writ of Double-Entry did not run.