Worth Every Penny? It’s Morrissey’s novel…

List of the Lost by Morrissey

Republished into my blog’s original timeline – one of the lost posts.

Regular visitors will know that I am willing to try reading anything, and I always try to look for the best in a novel.

I read Morrissey’s ‘Autobiography‘ and reviewed it here, finding some parts, especially the childhood sections a fair read – it soon descended into being bitter and twisted and oh so boring though.

But I still couldn’t resist spending £5.59 on a copy of his novel, out yesterday – my copy arrived this morning, and I have skimmed bits of it at coffee break and lunchtime.

The first sentences read thus:

Ezra, Nails, Harri, Justy. You’d dig hard and deep to excavate four names quite so unusual. Yet there they were and there they stood, sounding exactly like what they were.

Nothing special, except I already thought I’d rather re-read about another foursome – Jude, Willem, Malcolm and JB from Hanya Yanagihara’s doorstop gay novel A Little Life!  

The fourth sentence continues:

You would be offered a hearty shake of the javelin hand as expressions of possession of command from the four boys, each one fully developed into the blissful torment of their turnabout twentieth year – a pleasantly resolved marital union almost closed off in its camaraderie to the onlookers of the mookish great world.

Seriously, it had lost me already.

*** SPOILERS ***   *** SPOILERS ***  *** SPOILERS ***

Skimming on, the foursome get into an assortment of scrapes including an encounter with a hobo who dies, finding a body long-buried in their college grounds. Oo-er! All sounds a bit Donna Tartt Secret History suddenly…

Then, on page 99 begins an excruciating sex scene between Ezra and his girlfriend Eliza.  The Times review informed me it is 72 lines long!

… Eliza’s breasts barrel-rolled across Ezra’s howling mouth and the pained frenzy of his bulbous salutation extenuating his excitement as it whacked and smacked its way into every muscle of Eliza’s body except for the otherwise central zone. …

You can award him the Bad Sex Award now!

*** END OF SPOILERS ***

It’s ranty, overblown, very abstract at times, and very annoyingly, the dialogue is in italics.

Mercifully, it is only 118 pages long, but I don’t think I can be bothered to read it in full.  Still for the price of a pint and a half, it has ‘entertained’ me.

* * * * *

Source: Own copy – DNF

List of the Lost by Morrissey – published 24th Sept 2015 by Penguin. Paperback original. 118 pages. BUY at Amazon UK via affiliate link below:

3 thoughts on “Worth Every Penny? It’s Morrissey’s novel…

  1. Nina says:

    It doesn’t sound like anything I’d be interested in reading. The sentences sound like word salad, fancy wording without feeling captured.

  2. cath says:

    Thank you for entertaining me, and giving me enough of a taste to decide on saving that price of a pint for something else – perhaps a pint…

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