Bibliofreakblog

The Dream Life of Balso Snell by Nathanael West

This novella starts out with an American poet, Balso Snell, in Troy on vacation.  He encounter the Trojan Horse and decides to climb inside.  Snell can’t reach the opening in the horse’s mouth, and the opening in it’s navel is apparently stuck or something, so he climbs in through the horse’s asshole.

It ends with our eponymous here having an orgasm.

The entirety of the rest of the novella is spent in the Trojan Horse’s intestines, which is entirely populated by artists who desperate want someone to read their work.

Each of these artists is a sort of caricature of art itself.  They are self-serving, overly dramatic idiots–as is Balso Snell himself.

I’m a little bit reminded of the writers Howard Roark distains so much in The Fountainhead.

The back of my book says that it’s inspired  by Dada, but I consider Dada–especially in a case like this–to be a lazy excuse for creating surrealism without the wherewithal to back it up.  Which, to be honest, is what a lot of 20th century art is (this was written in 1931).  

Probably this is chalk full of legitimate symbolism.  But even that becomes a kind of caricature.  Which may or may not have been Nathanael West’s intent.

When describing it to some (male) friends, I was asked if I liked it.  Certainly I didn’t hate it.  But it was something that I expected to read in one sitting, and instead it took me five days.  It was tedious, I told them.

“Well,” said my friend, “sometimes climbing inside an asshole is a lot of fun.  Sometimes it’s just tedious.”

“I don’t know,” said the other, “I’ve never been inside an asshole.”
Buy The Dream Life of Balso Snell on Amazon

If you like this book/author, you might like:

(my reviews in blue)

The Body Artist by Don Delillo
Selected Poems of William Carlos Williams by William Carlos Williams
Naked Lunch by William S. Burroughs
A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man by James Joyce
Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking-Glass by Lewis Carol
Haunted by Chuck Palahniuk
The Fountainhead by Ayn Rand
Inferno by Dante Alighieri
The Odyssey by Homer
The Body Artist by Don Delillo

Other works by Nathanael West:

miss lonely hearts & the day of the locust
Nathanael West : Novels and Other Writings 
A Cool Million and The Dream Life of Balso Snell: Two Novels

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