After finishing one experimental novel , I didn’t expect to read another one so soon. At first glance Blood and Guts seems like a Young Adult novel but it’s totally different than that.
Janey is a ten year old who is abused by her father , and is sent to New York from her Mexican home. The thing is that Janey is an unreliable narrator so certain events may not take place and could just be the scribblings of a bored teenager. As the novel continues we find out that Janey has a dull job and is later kidnapped and sold into slavery.
In between this us readers are subjected to pornographic illustration , free form poetry and sentences translated from Arabic into English. Plus a lot of sub conscious rambling.
Now I may make this sound negative but it is a good read , again like the previous novel, one cannot fully appreciate Blood and Guts … after the first read. It definitely deserves more so that the complex narrative comes out better. What I can say though is that this is a very post modern novel as it deconstructs the idea of a book and then takes it to other dimensions through adding other literary styles randomly. As experiments go , I do see this as a success.
oh and mega kudos for mentioning this band :
The Bobsphere 