12/30/2023 0 Comments Arturo the aqua boy![]() ![]() The Binewski family is a cast of fabulous and sympathetic characters with fiercely loyal familial ties Oly is the heart of the family and makes for a fascinating narrator. The dark humour makes it palatable and ultimately it is a love story as well as an absorbing family drama with sibling rivalry like no other. Horrific but heartbreaking, tender yet terrifying, Geek Love, is a touching look at those who live on the fringes of every society. I did tell you that it is like nothing like you will have ever read before, but don’t turn away in disgust from the synopsis. Arturo the Aqua Boy is a limbless megalomaniac with flippers for hands and feet Siamese twins Electra and Iphigenia have musical talent and a penchant for prostitution and the baby, Fortunato or ‘Chick, possesses Telekinetic powers all are star attractions in the Binewski Carnival Fabulon. Said narrator, Olympia (Oly’), and her siblings have been bred by their parents as a means of saving their failing travelling freak show, having intentionally modified the genes of their unborn children by using a cocktail of various drugs, pesticides and radiation. She is the geek of our story and the mother of our bald, albino, hunchbacked dwarf narrator. ![]() When your mama was the geek, my dreamlets, Papa would say, she made the nipping off of noggins such a crystal mystery that the hens themselves yearned toward her, waltzing around her, hypnotized with longing… ‘Crystal’ Lil Binewski, is introduced in the opening line: The modern definition of geek and geekdom, that which is more embraced and accepted everyday as extreme enthusiasm, is not the geek of this novel the geek here is an older-meaning of the word, possibly originating from the Germanic ‘geck’ for ‘fool’, the opening act of a circus sideshow, a carny freakshow, a geek that bites off the heads of live chickens after chasing them around the circus ring. It’s a psychedelic trip that subverts the carnivalesque and is darkly hilarious. You can loathe circuses and yet love circus fiction however, Geek Love is more freak show than circus. It has endured twenty-five years of cult popularity but deserves a wider audience, a peanut-crunching crowd who roll up, roll up, to see the show. I have reread it more than I reread most novels and welcomed the recent reissue by Abacus for its twenty-fifth anniversary and the subsequent invitation from Simon to review it for Shiny New Books (he knows me and my taste in fiction well). I first heard about it at university, from a lecturer who you sat up and listened to when he recommended something, as, more often than not, it was something you had never heard of before but would never forget upon reading. Hyperbole or not, it is one of those cult classics that those who are in the know, are smug to be so, and see it in the work of Pulitzer-prize-nominee Karen Russell, of any fiction set in or around a circus, or in the latest season of American Horror Story: Freak Show. Geek Love by Katherine Dunn is like nothing you have ever read before.
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