The Death of Bunny Munro: A Novel (alkuperäinen julkaisuvuosi 2009; vuoden 2009 painos)

Death of Bunny Munro by Nick Cave I like Nick Cave's music so I naturally came to this with some pre-conceptions.
 
I liked it but not as much as I wanted to.The thing I liked was how seedy it all was, like everything is seedy, the main character is seedy, the locations are seedy, the action is seedy. I guess it's that English thing about squalor. I lived in Amsterdam for a few years and people occupied empty houses (squats or kraakhuis). The Dutch occupied beautiful empty apartments overlooking the canals while the English occupied boarded up slums with no water or toilets or power.Bunny Munro would have been one of those kids when he was younger. Devoid of conscience and taste yet feral and active. There is not one single redeeming feature about Bunny Munro, no shred of humanity at all and the inevitability of it is like watching something die a horrible death.At the end of it I felt a bit like I'd swallowed something bad like processed English food. I know he is from Oz but has that thing down just so.Not for the faint hearted among us. ( )

ugh. yucky and weird. ( )

Quite repetitious and sometimes too comic, but amusing.
I like the fact that NC writes, and that his writing will not eclipse his music. ( )

The excessive perversion of the main character Bunny Munro is at times tiring and mostly unsettling. If not for the story of Bunny's son, Bunny Munro Jr., to counterbalance the storyline of the father, this book would have been lost in its pessimism. No doubt Nick Cave did not set out to create a likable protagonist; the reader has to take Bunny for who he is. I loved the side story of the devil man terrorizing England; it was the perfect pairing to this tale of self destruction and possible redemption. ( )

Bunny Munro is a bastard, a tragic figure, a modern age Lothario with sexual addiction tendencies accentuated by his predisposition for dreaming and daydreaming about the private parts of Avril Lavigne and Kylie Minogue, a man with a gift of the gab which incidentally makes him a successful beauty product salesman, and of course gets him in trouble along the way especially with the staff of the many fast food restaurants he visits.

I enjoyed the fact that a bunch of what goes on in the novel we read through the eyes of his nine year old son Bunny Junior who loves his encyclopedia as much as he loves his dad. When a writer goes on and on describing every little minutia of the scene, I tend to skip it, as I like to use my imagination to fill in the gaps, plus I find that shit boring as balls, not saying that Mr. Cave did that here a lot but in the instances in which he did the writing was so good that I didn't mind it that much. The novel is a breezy read a fact which I found a bit surprising since the adventure takes place in England and I thought he was going to use a lot of regional dialect.

Kafka meets Benny Hill, go read it.


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