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The Inflatable Volunteer (Hardcover)

by Steve Aylett (Author) "A street thronging with grave-fillers ..." (more)
4.4 out of 5 stars See all reviews (7 customer reviews)
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Product details

  • Hardcover: 166 pages
  • Publisher: Weidenfeld & Nicolson (28 Oct 1999)
  • Language English
  • ISBN-10: 1861591233
  • ISBN-13: 978-1861591234
  • Product Dimensions: 22.5 x 14.3 x 2 cm
  • Average Customer Review: 4.4 out of 5 stars See all reviews (7 customer reviews)
  • Amazon.co.uk Sales Rank: 948,371 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

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Product Description

Amazon.co.uk Review
This is like nothing you have ever read before--except, perhaps, the last Steve Aylett novel. Slaughtermatic did cyberpunk in a weird, parodic version; this short, poetic novel brings to mind the work of the early novels of William Burroughs in its innovative linguistic style and its violent form and content. With the occasional refrain of "O my brothers" Aylett also acknowledges a debt to the future-speak of Anthony Burgess' A Clockwork Orange. Aylett's imagination offers a bleak, nightmare world in a narrative which operates in a dream-logic of random shifts, puzzling conjunctions, sudden islands of clarity, and absurdist word-play. The narrator pours out his story in a sequence of interlinking confessions. He seemingly has an ability to conjure demons through mirrors and this gets him a job in the campaign for Mayor.

The manifesto for the job includes such helpful pledges as: "Wooden skulls don't work for long", "A severed head will become bleak when dropped underwater," and "Bones from polar bears make grand mallets". Such conjuring talents produce the minor problem of invoking the devil himself, John Satan. Lying somewhere between science fiction and avant-garde prose poetry, this is an intriguing read, sometimes funny, sometimes utterly opaque, but always provoking if you relax and enjoy some the surprising juxtapositions and shifts of register Aylett has become increasingly adept at using. --Roger Luckhurst --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

Product Description
Welcome to Eddie's world, where grave fillers throng the pavements, where ants are plotting to slash and burn us before we do it to them, and where it doesn't pay to have too many dealings with John Satan.

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7 Reviews
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Average Customer Review
4.4 out of 5 stars (7 customer reviews)
 
 
 
 
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2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars Literary Dimethyl Tryptamine, 13 Jul 2001
This has turned out to be my favourite book among the many I've read this year. I bought it to read on the way to work and back, but was soon thrilled by the abundance of ideas and jokes. The sort of novel where you scrabble around for a pen to scrawl exclamation marks in the margin; you flick to the front page to start again as soon as you have finished; you miss stations just to read a few more paragraphs; you find elements of Aylett's style invading your own writing, even if you're only signing a cheque. Brilliant.

Early in the book you might think 'this is nonsense, just free association', but this is a book animated by hundreds of micro-plots and episodic detail. I'd never read anything remotely similar, but I concede it might not be for everyone. If you're healthily unhinged you'll find both enjoyment and encouragement here, as there's little reak darkness. Even the most atrocious detail is informed by a delicious pronoia and humour. Kafkaesque schizotypic delusions are presented here as mere annoyances, the diabolical is recast as something you'll encounter over a pint.

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2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars Excellent, 30 Jan 2000
By A Customer
This review is from: The Inflatable Volunteer (Paperback)
Like an intense fingertip massage of the mind, this book is an eye opener, it reveals what can be wrought from ideas and words when they are freed from the strictures of plot and character. Like the charged and garbled, yet internally intelligible conversations that bubble forth after a night spent more than awake, this prose has a rare rhythm and power of its own. It is a very easy but rewarding read, the flow unbroken throughout. I shall read more of Steve Aylett's books. I think he has bottled the essence of a mind's fecundity but I also suspect it will not be to everyone's taste.
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1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars enthusiasm and coherence don't always go together, 16 Nov 2004
By Damon K. J. Mitchell (Slovakia) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   
This review is from: The Inflatable Volunteer (Paperback)
I've read most of Aylett's stuff and although anything by him deserves 5 stars for it's sheer otherness I have to say this one is the hardest going; had I read this first I probably wouldn't have become as big a fan as I am of his work.
Both praiseworthy and problematic are the lack of fixed plot or character here which leaves you in at sea in Aylett's stream of conscious; a distressing place to be if you haven't learned to swim with some of the other works first. (The monkeys which know everything - but got it from a file! or the ghost who wanted to boast about his suicide but had to do it in mime because the slit throat carried over - these were stand out moments for me in this book just to give you an idea of what to expect.)
It kind of appends onto the world of Accomplice (a self contained series of 4 books he wrote) and uses images and ideas from that series without ever explaining them here - so reading Accomplice first may help you to follow the flow a bit better.
As a first book I'd reccommend the stand alone book 'Bigot Hall' to anyone, that'll give you some of the biggest belly laughs Aylett style and ease you into his flavour in bite sized chapters.
However here, as ever, Aylett's use of language and his ability to eschew all convention is a joy to read and is reccommened to anyone who finds most books to be merely bad echos of something else and are searching for something new.
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Most Recent Customer Reviews

3.0 out of 5 stars What I told the reader
This book will have a different meaning (or lack thereof) for each and every reader. With an absence of either a conventional plot or narrative structure, it might prove too... Read more
Published 14 months ago by sft

3.0 out of 5 stars Weird, weird and thrice weird
I've heard and read great things about Steve Aylett - but with this I appear to have picked the most difficult place to start ... Read more
Published 15 months ago by Annabel Gaskell

5.0 out of 5 stars the best of his books
having read all of Aylettes currently published books, this is the best by far (well, bit THAT far, Bigot hall is hilarious, and almost as good). Read more
Published on 30 April 2001

5.0 out of 5 stars Literary dimethyl tryptamine
This has turned out to be my favourite book among the many I've read this year. I bought it to read on the way to work and back, but was soon thrilled by the abundance of ideas... Read more
Published on 5 Dec 2000 by Tim Snaith

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