Under the Skin by Michel Faber, one of the 1,000 Novels Everyone Must Read https://www.theguardian.com/books/2009/jan/19/1000-novels-comedy-part-one - 7 out of 10

 

Under the Skin by Michel Faber, one of the 1,000 Novels Everyone Must Read https://www.theguardian.com/books/2009/jan/19/1000-novels-comedy-part-one

7 out of 10

 

 

‘Somerset Maugham shacking up with Ian McEwan’ is what you are to expect here, unless you feel like me and reject that notion, the former is one of the top five writers in my book http://realini.blogspot.com/2014/06/a-casual-affair-by-somerset-maugham.html and the former would be with the best twenty, while Michel Faber comes nowhere near that, gifted and acclaimed as he is

 

The problem (or some of part of it anyhow) lies with the desperate search for more positive material – Harvard Professor Tal Ben-Shahar has had the most popular course in the history of that perennial institution http://realini.blogspot.com/2017/07/positive-psychology-on-youtube-by.html and among the leit motifs he used was “Words Create Worlds’, thus if the landscape in the book is apocalyptic then the mood cannot be sunny

Sometimes it does not work on those specific lines, we can feel liberated and so lucky to have our life, with its plagues and tribulations, but better than in Under the Skin, and furthermore, we cannot reject Leo Tolstoy http://realini.blogspot.com/2017/04/anna-karenina-by-leo-tolstoy.html just because the heroine dies at the end, and this is a naturalistic image, we are shown the body on the tracks…

 

However, I see Ian McEwan as superior in any of the maybe 6 novels I have read http://realini.blogspot.com/2018/08/the-comfort-of-strangers-by-ian-mcewan.html to Michel Faber, regardless of the arbitrary judgment on that, based mostly on the repulsion felt for the subject…never been an ardent fan of Science Fiction, never mind horror genre, where aliens mutilate and fatten humans to turn them into meat

There are expectations to the rules, and if the novelist has achieved divine status, as is the case for His Holiness Kingsley Amis, in spite of the fact that both of us (what a thrill to talk about ‘us’, placing the Godly figure in the same space with his church member) reject God – Kingsley Amis has said it is not that he does not believe, he hates Him http://realini.blogspot.com/2022/12/the-friends-of-plonk-by-kingsley-amis.html

 

In The Friends of Plonk, we are following Simpson (if that was his name) into a dystopian future where land the size of Europe will have been destroyed in an atomic war, which has also annihilated vines, barley and other crops used for alcohol and a society of people is trying to overcome this catastrophe, the loss of tradition – they will have passed through another period of prohibition- to make…plonk

 

In some ways, it is astonishing how accurate Magister Ludi Kingsley Amis has been in his predictions, that is that the American election will be won by a Rosicrucian, which I take it to be the clear sign that this is a weird dude, when we have seen this happening, and if Trump is as godless as can be, such a badass (this being not cool, interesting or anything but a monster) became the most powerful man in the world

 

To begin with, Under The Skin was interesting enough – mind you, given the high opinion others have of the opus, we should conclude that this is a very good read…let me just mention a comedian that used the quintessential If by Magister Rudyard Kipling (I have read that he was the equivalent of a rock star, someone as famous as Mick Jagger, you know of him surely, in his time) http://realini.blogspot.com/2022/06/if-by-rudyard-kipling-one-of-most.html in a creative, sarcastic, efficient way, saying ‘If you can keep your head when all about you Are losing theirs and blaming it on you…’then there is something wrong with you and you should have your head examined, which makes sense

If more accomplished bozos say this is one of the Must Read Novels, who am I to deny it, ‘if all are blaming it on me’, besides, I see that this is interesting, nay, let us raise the stakes, the debut is more than enticing, with the reader challenged to guess, decipher the mystery of the ‘girl’ Isserley, who is taking hitchhikers.

 

There is a sense that something is wrong – first using The Thin slicing explained in the fundamental Blink The Power of Thinking Without Thinking http://realini.blogspot.com/2013/05/blink-power-of-thinking-without.html by Malcolm Gladwell, then thinking of Chekhov’ Gun Law, which states that one should not introduce anything that will not be important to the plot, ‘'If you say in the first chapter that there is a rifle hanging on the wall, in the second or third chapter it absolutely must go off’

When we see her with the German traveler, then she is burning his things, backpack and all, then we must assume that the gun has gone off, even if this is a subtle way of telling us it did…we have not seen or heard it, we just use logic, if the things are destroyed, there must have been foul play, but wait, what if it is more complicated?

 

Indeed, this is very promising, for there is the chance that the man is still out there – and he is, spoiler alert, needed somewhere above, where it is stated that we are dealing with an alien that kidnaps humans to have them mutilated and then turned into meat for…consumption, ugh – and then we sympathize with the creature (still thought to be human until I decided to drop out) that has suffered an operation and men want her for sex, but as in the case of one, he is disgusted by her looks and thinks of felatio, so that he cannot see her face  - perhaps wrongfully, I decided to read a little about the book and then found out what the story is proposing and lost appetite to follow what I took for a human being and now knew to be a creation that does harm to us, poor males (I think it was just males, but who knows) and as a result I stopped and went back to doing my regular thing, which is what you see here http://realini.blogspot.com/2022/02/unique-in-world.html?q=unique+in+the+world