Reviews for Unbabbling

The average rating for Unbabbling based on 2 reviews is 4.5 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2020-06-28 00:00:00 Hester Bogues Check out the Interview George and I conducted with the author here: This Dalkey Archive discovery is deceptive in its approach but memorable in the extreme. The prose is packed with slapstick, imagery and song, an equal ratio of panic and satire, passion and heartache, while it bubbles over with bombast, belligerence and, after acclimatization, brilliance. Truth be told, it took about a hundred pages to convince me, but after that I became a REYoung reader for the foreseeable future. Now out to purchase the other books, before they disappear… What is an Unbabbling? After finishing the novel, I can only guess: an unrivaled unraveling, a midsummer night's Babel. Like one of the narrators, I drank long and deep, but from the book's intoxicating style. The plot is marked by simplicity, but it is also rich with experience. The value lies in the language, the luscious, exuberant, frolicsome wordplay, and the lucid undercurrent of anger, terror and hedonism. The first part's forward-slashing prose deluges verge on delusional, while REYoung introduces the reader to a hoarse, slavering, wage-slave schmooze, a deadbeat, a deadened, heartless Bukowskian complainer, whose days and nights blur like a grainy tape on fast forward, until the sick joy of haggard reminiscence instills a palpable dread. The pages drip with ecstatic sweaty spasms of laboring paragraphs, wherein images swarm like the cross-section of a beehive. The impact of real life can often be moving, and the horrid prospect of merely living is disturbing when described in the gritty, greasy manner here employed. Our main character reaches for the bottle, murders a part of himself every night when he comes home, gets back up in the morning, and that weight gets heavier and heavier all the time. A Sisyphean accumulation. I, for one, sympathized with the amassing burden experience imparts. The unhinged descriptions continue in part 2, as the context shifts. The unremitting anger is reminiscent of Ellison's underground man - a scenario which occurs in Part 3 to full Dostoyevskian effect. Here, cynicism, is a form of wisdom. Interior monologues merge with dialogues - yet which pieces are pretend, which manifestations are real versus imagined? The monster of self-loathing morphs into a universal loathing, but it is somehow crystalline, even amid the frazzled, frenetic, hectic burping prose avalanches, which gurgle forth in volcanic bursts. It is perhaps because of the marvels of compression the author pulls off, that his hypnotic storytelling takes on such depths. In Unbabbling, REYoung tunnels straight through the heart of America, down into its rotting belly, excavating the fear and disgust which has piled up for centuries like the bedrock holding up the guv'na's house.

Review # 2 was written on 2012-05-30 00:00:00 Jacob Flores A Dalkey, understated even by Dalkey standards. Who is Reyoung? How can there be nothing out there on this man? Complete blackout, true 'man of mystery'. 'Unbabbling' also debuted without fanfare in 1997: unassuming, unpromoted, and frankly unread. A real shame. The novel is arranged in three 'silos' : standalone stories loosely seamed together through the narrative consciousness of Harry, who morphs into new personas whilst preserving the Harry moniker as a signifier of a macabre continuity. I read the first part 'Unbabbling', and skimmed through the rest before setting it aside: nothing to do with quirkiness of this gem and everything to do with my own idiosyncrasies: I don't do trilogies in one book at the same time. (Tourettes, you know). Set in some indeterminate future, and unspecified town (so vaguely alluded to I didn't realise it until the story was almost over: I thought it was happening in NYC), protag Harry seems to have been plucked from the heart of Bukowski's oeuvre, fleshed out to 'Roman' proportions and loosed in 3D: a Pinnochio 'unbabbled'. Harry is a vet, suffering from shell shock, immersed in a haze of booze and drugs, plagued by war terrors, sweating it out in a stone quarry by day and meshing with 'his people' at night: the underbelly of society, the salt n' pepper miscreants whose unheard lament echoes across the battlefields of American wars (well its true, isn't it? I don't think the American soldier on the ground is a senator's son, now, is he?). And, he hates himself, and life of course is meaningless. The problem of course in situations like these is that if you hate yourself, you have trouble believing anyone else could possibly love you. Therefore, they must all have nefarious purposes: they must be out to get you. And with this philosophy in mind, Harry undergoes a Mephistophelean metamorphosis whilst fucking over his wife and kid.(E.g. rises up the corporate ladder, makes a load of money, starts sleeping with his boss: the usual deal). Needless to say, happiness remains an unattained illusion whilst the death of soul, if not body, count around him rises. Mephistopheles with a Medusa touch: everyone he turns his hand to withers and shrivels to husk. Its not a unique story by any means. What wins me over is the raw, unpurified anger, the electrifying intensity of emotion, prose, purpose and praxis of anguish. A pancea of pain and helpless rage ooze like treacle off the page, and Reyoung hovers somewhere in the wings, holding an electric cattle prod, which he periodically brandishes with unbridled relish straight into my neural network, so that I'm unbabbled right alongside Harry, in tandem.