Got to get this one down for J.P. Donleavy because I can feel the busy-ness breathing down my neck for next week... Thanks to Jolee for the suggestion of The Beastly Beatitudes of Balthasar B, but I had to go with Ginger Man for distribution/availability/length issues (sorry!). Should be a good read and accidentally fits the Irish theme happening right now for St. Patrick's Day... Discussion is April 8th at 7 PM.
First published in Paris in 1955, and originally banned in the United States, J. P. Donleavy's first novel is now recognized the world over as a masterpiece and a modern classic of the highest order. Set in Ireland just after World War II, The Ginger Man is J. P. Donleavys wildly funny, picaresque classic novel of the misadventures of Sebastian Danger-field, a young American ne'er-do-well studying at Trinity College in Dublin. He barely has time for his studies and avoids bill collectors, makes love to almost anything in a skirt, and tries to survive without having to descend into the bottomless pit of steady work. Dangerfield's appetite for women, liquor, and general roguishness is insatiable--and he satisfies it with endless charm.
--from http://www.booksinc.net/book/9780802144669
In 1928, Georges Bataille published this first novel under a pseudonym, a legendary shocker that uncovers the dark side of the erotic by means of forbidden obsessive fantasies of excess and sexual extremes. A classic of pornographic literature, Story of the Eye finds the parallels in Sade and Nietzsche and in the investigations of contemporary psychology; it also forecasts Bataille's own theories of ecstasy, death and transgression which he developed in later work.
