| Product: |
Minotaur Takes a Cigarette Break - Steven Sherrill |
| Date: |
10/05/04 (46 review reads) |
| Rating: |
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Advantages: witty great reading
Disadvantages: none
Some debut novels become unavoidable reading, splattered across the review pages of the newspapers and filling up the bestseller lists for months on end (not necessarily deservedly). Others linger quietly in the background. Steven Sherrill: never heard of him. But I decided anyway to take a gamble on ?The Minotaur Takes A Cigarette Break?, promised to be ?wise and ingenious?a tender and wryly witty first novel? by the New York Times. Wry? Witty? Clever? That?s some mark to live up to. And Sherrill manages it, taking the discarded half-man, half-bull creature of myth, and opening our eyes to a period in the life of this immortal being.
The Minotaur, or ?M?, is now residing in America, cooking in a diner, living in a trailer park, and generally keeping himself to himself. Timeless wandering the earth has dulled his reputation as a devourer of virgins, dulled any such remembrances even within himself for the most part, and most people seem unfazed by his thick black bull?s head protruding from his wide necked shirts. But really they ignore him, belittle him, and try to pretend he doesn?t exist. M gets by, cooking, fixing cars, and sticking to his long established routine.
The story he participates in is one of the mundane, of people, of humanity, as it struggles to keep afloat in the modern world. The individuals surrounding M in the kitchen and the Lucky-U trailer park are a rainbow array of those we encounter on any given day: from the good, kind and beautiful to the most rotten dregs who cower behind an ugly façade of violence. Really very little happens, it?s one of those novels that offers us a voyeuristic stance over the lives of others, and by so doing forces us to look inside at our own.
M at times is cold, so cut off he cannot perform on the most base of human levels, yet at others he suffers terribly with the human emotions trapped within his inexpressive bovine face. Coupled with his inability, or unwillingness to speak, M becom
es a strange central figure, drawing and repelling us in equal parts, as his hybrid nature demands.
For large tracts his physical presence becomes forgotten, when we will him to be happy, though he doesn?t seem unhappy as such, our own desire for love wishes him to feel it too, and Sherrill lets us settle into an unarmed position, until something cringe-worthy happens to make us shut our eyes as his huge black horns tear the quiet fabric of the story. At other times the story becomes grotesque, why does no one care that the creature carving their sunday beef roast for them has the head of a cow? How can M bear to do it, how does he see himself, what does he wish to be? His relationship with Kelly sparks some hope, but how can such a thing be resolved? How can an immortal so hideously downtrodden and robbed of his history move forward?
Who knows. Sherrill never tells us. And I haven?t managed to decide for myself yet. The book ends with no promise of any change for The Minotaur. And I kind of liked that. The story could just have well have started where it ended, at the point where we drift back out of sight of M and Lucky-U.
This is a debut worth reading. Sherrill has no real credentials to live up to, and as such his writing is not pretentious or self conscious, but easy to read and still containing surprisingly beautiful passages of penmanship. As far as the bones and themes of the story itself go, he has taken an interesting formula and imbibed it with subtle questions. Really the Minotaur could be any one of a number of beings deemed ?different?. If you so chose I think you could read this as a comment on racism, sexism, or any other kind of ?ism you care to think of, and the attitudes of people towards them, but done in such a subtle and refreshing way that it doesn?t jar against you.
Recommended? Certainly. It won?t blow you away, but it?s an engaging book that will stay with you after you finish the last pages.
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?The Minotaur Takes a Cigarette Break? by Steven Sherrill
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