Take a walk on the weird side
Terry Southern interviews a faggot male nurse. How could a book of stories containing such a bluntly outrageous title not be good? The former journalist's 'interview' with the homosexual male nurse (camper than the unholy offspring of Graham Norton and Julian Clary) is almost too funny to be fictional. This book's most winning feature is Southern's ability to parade the personae and emotions of all his characters as though he experienced them himself.
Southern, creator of 'Doctor Strangelove', has two gifts at his disposal: a highly-versatile imagination and an ear for the redundant. The first generates situations of every conceivable kind: a scene from an appallingly-scripted war movie; a surreal episode involving a white negro minister who administers blood-tests before marriage, and then breaks into music-hall scat; one with Kafka being told off by his mother during a phone conversation with Freud.
The second focuses a journalistic attention to detail on the minutiae of every life, preying on the inadequacies of people's minds, their vocabularies, and their mannerisms. With this caustic weapon - akin to the pedanticism of the likes of Pratchett and Bill Bryson - Southern can slaughter his victims in the quietest way. With a plethora of different humours, ironies, and shades of wit, there is no-one that Terry Southern cannot undermine.
Less surreal than Burroughs, less serious than Kubrick, less flagrant than Hunter S. Thompson, this is a work of Underground cunning and fearlessness. In every page it flouts convention and acceptability, and loudly proclaims that the author doesn't give a damn about your reaction. That said, it's probably not worth your while unless (very) black comedy is your thing. If you enjoyed Fear and Loathing...then this is for you.
From the Atlantic to the Pacific, in 1951 Ernesto Guevara de la Serna set off with Alberto Granado on an eight month motorbike odyssey up the Andean spine of South America. Eventually, most of Che Guevara's great road-trip was conducted sans bike after La Pederosa II (the Powerful One) collapsed in the Chilean mountains. But this proved no hindrance to the duo in their quest for "faraway countries, heroic deeds, beautiful women", a quest which was to lead to the formation of Guevara's earliest views on the politics of South America.
Along the way, the young medical student recounts his adventures with a quiet humour; a church bell whose name was changed because it rhymed with a local word for 'arse'; shooting his host's dog because he thought it was a puma; Bacchanalian drinking episodes. He recalls the Inca kingdoms with their evocative scenery and passes many a politically incorrect comment. And he reveals the very human young man, head full of poetic notions, which posterity has rather forgotten, losing himself in thoughts about fear, 'mestizo' generosity, and his mother. Not really a biographical account so much as a conscious note on some of his experiences, and all the better for being in his own words.
During an evening spent looking at the Atlantic Ocean, he reflects upon the driftwood, thrown up on "the beach it sought", and whether it can claim that success for itself. At the close this consideration of destiny returns with astonishing force: as, opera-style, a dark man steps from the shadows to tell Guevara that the people are ready to rise up, the future El Che realises that he can only "be with the people", and with this the eerie fore-knowledge that he will be a sacrifice to the cause.
The Motorcycle Diaries is part travel journal, part sketch of personal development, part social study. In his own words, "a cocktail of our impressions". It is highly entertaining, and ought to be on the list for anyone who has a poster of Che Guevara on their wall, and isn't sure why.
24th Jan 2002