“And so the city became even more savage with the passing of each day, with the taking of each step, the breathing of each breath. From time to time a body would fall from a window and before the blood had a chance to seep through the clothing hands were going through his pockets to see what might be found to help them through another moment of being suspended in Hell”
Category: hubert selby jr
twenty-eight.
The place is Brooklyn, New York, some time after World War II. The gang hangs around Greeks, a local bar, looking for sailors and military men to rob and pick fights with, girls and fairies to lay and cars to steal.
With this book, Hubert Selby Jr. replaced Charles Bukowski as my favourite dirty old man. I love his introduction to the book where he explained how and why he learnt to write. It is a hard book to read. It took me a while for me to get used to the language, the way he glue the words together, but the book wouldn’t be the same if it was written in standard English.
It was banned in England for being controversial. And it is brutal. Cross dressing, drugs, foul language, violence and very descriptive sex scenes. I will not recommend it to the faint-hearted. But it is definitely a book worth reading.