vv (3): body as battlefield or: portrait of the artist as a shy guy

[Lorentzen / Nicklaus]

 on nose job, plactic surgery & the enfetishment of the inanimate:


 reading again the passages about esther's nose job it came to my mind that this 
 is perhaps not only a diagnostic statement along the lines of cultural   
 criticism, but also a kind of personal liberation. from "lineland" i remember  
 siegel's ex-wife reporting that trp was during the 60s still very ashamed of 
 his hamster teeth. & skimming back through the pages i find on page 11 the 
 story of the engineman ploy who is "in earnest about keeping his teeth". though 
 the terror of normative body politics is most intense in the teenage years, 
 it's, according to my own experience and observations, still a major theme in  
 the first half of the third decade. a-and to write the novel we are currently  
 reading - a book he published when he was still a young man - trp had to miss a 
 lot of parties at an age where this is especially painful. since the themes of 
 plastic surgery & teeth amputation do not play an important role in later 
 novels, i assume that the man did write something off his flesh here.   

kai frederik lorentzen