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2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Mad, mad ,mad!, 16 Nov 2005
The content of ‘My Cousin, My Gastroenterologist’ is – thankfully – just as weird as the title. While billed as a novel, this is more truthfully a collection of short stories, a wild blend of insane science fiction, medical madness and laugh out loud humour. The pieces sit at a strange crossroads between being prose and poetry – Leyner writes in an incredibly dense manner with a constant stream of wild ideas, occasionally a narrative will start to take shape, but more often than not Leyner will get distracted along the way in an almost stream of consciousness manner. All this could of course be very pretentious, were it not for the fact that Leyner’s style and ideas are so outlandish that they’ll have you laughing your head off more often than not. If you enjoy such madness as William Burroughs and Steve Aylett you’ll love this: you know you’re on to a winner when a books opening paragraph contains such delights as “I’d been habitually abusing an illegal growth hormone extracted from the pituitary glands of human corpses and I felt as if I were drowning in excremental filthiness but the prospect of having something good to eat cheered me up” – what more do you need to know?
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2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Leyner doesn't simply wound with words, he slaughters, 11 Jul 1997
By A Customer
Imagine this: Richard Brautigan's "Trout Fishing in America" is reborn in a Jackie Chan movie as a crossbreed between William S. Burrough's "Naked Lunch" and the more scientific portions of Richard Power's "The Goldbug Variations." Confused? Well... It helps if you approach the book not so much as a novel, per se, than as a gastronomical imagination explosion. An Explanation?
Like Burroughs, Leyner doesn't write stories, although the book is seperated into "Sections". Rather, he chooses to take insane topics, (like the Military Academy of Beauty, a man named Big Squirrel shooting his first, beautiful ape woman, kidney stone removal with Jimi Hendrix guitar solos, etc.) and create an arsenal with it. Admittedly, this means you will either love it, or hate it. If you don't like it, leave it alone. The rest of us will blow cold cereal out our nostrils while howling with laughter. A completely original, insane, inspired masterpiece.
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2 of 3 people found the following review helpful:
2.0 out of 5 stars
Funny, but that not that funny, 9 May 1999
By A Customer
Is Mark Leyner funny? Yup, and clever too, and "My Cousin, My Gasteroenterologist" is full of good jokes. The problem, then, is that they're buried under so much junk and pseudo-transgressive "genre-busting" that you'd never know they were there unless you look really closely, and having to put that much effort into finding humor kind of negates its value as humor. Which is a shame, because Leyner's obviously smart and has something to say about something (His short piece - not in this collection - about the Death of Postmodernism is fall-out-of-your-chair funny). Kinda just wish he'd settle down and stop congratulating himself and write a real book, one of these days. This one's an amusing diversion, and he's obviously talented, but it's not much else. It'd be sad if Leyner wasn't satisfied with just a smirk.
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