🥒 reviewed The First Bad Man: A Novel by Miranda July
*from the bottom of my heart* Y E A H !!!!!!
5 stars
This book is weird as Hell and certainly not to everyone's taste but when I read it at my sister's tiny apartment summer of 2015 I was hooked!!! It is to the day one of my all-time favourite novels and really highlights July's skills as a writer, a very specific brand of comedian, and her ability lay bare in incredibly bizarre prose idiosyncratic habits of the mind that are eerily relatable like entering a room "ear-first" to show off one's best asset or creating a character, a shared soul, for every single baby one comes across. The somewhat unlikable protagonist lives such an ordinary life on the exterior contrasted by the vivacious eccentricity of her inner voice and sometimes exceedingly specific longings. It is gross, funny, and very, very human.
Though July has had a lot of practice at prose writing with her short stories previous to this novel, evident …
This book is weird as Hell and certainly not to everyone's taste but when I read it at my sister's tiny apartment summer of 2015 I was hooked!!! It is to the day one of my all-time favourite novels and really highlights July's skills as a writer, a very specific brand of comedian, and her ability lay bare in incredibly bizarre prose idiosyncratic habits of the mind that are eerily relatable like entering a room "ear-first" to show off one's best asset or creating a character, a shared soul, for every single baby one comes across. The somewhat unlikable protagonist lives such an ordinary life on the exterior contrasted by the vivacious eccentricity of her inner voice and sometimes exceedingly specific longings. It is gross, funny, and very, very human.
Though July has had a lot of practice at prose writing with her short stories previous to this novel, evident in her quick-witted but simple style is someone who was forged in the visual medium of film not literature. Far from being a flaw, I think this adds to the book: here is someone who made a piece of literature in a way that perfectly compliments the medium, in a way that as I'm sure she is fully aware, would be impossible to convert into film, yet her inexperience with the world of novels simultaneously imbues this story with visual tropes familiar to cinema and completely new to prose.
So, um, ahem yes I liked this book lmao
