NP - Have any of you read David Cronenberg's 2015 novel, CONSUMED?

[Will Reid]

Mark,

I will definitely have to try that out - I'm a huge fan of Cronenberg's
films but never got around to reading his novel.

He actually mentioned in an interview in 2005 that when he was in college
he aspired to be a novelist, and was writing a lot of sci-fi and
Pynchonesque stuff.

Here's the article:
https://nymag.com/nymetro/movies/features/14547/

- Will


On Fri, Apr 23, 2021 at 12:36 AM Mark Thibodeau <jerkyleboeuf at gmail.com>
wrote:

> I recently read it, and found it to be very much in keeping with many of my
> favorite aspects of his cinematic aesthetic.
>
> Upon completing my first read-through, I got a definite sense that
> Cronenberg is a reader of Pynchon... although that is something one might
> have gleaned from his mid-career films, as well. Say, from The Brood,
> onward to Existenz. There are a lot of surface similarities, including
> funky nomenclature, corporation-as-conspiracy, the sexual fetishization of
> technology, etc.
>
> CONSUMED is also simultaneously very funny and somewhat frightening. There
> is a certain cool ferocity to the descriptions of the novel's central
> crime, wherein the male half of a modern version of the French ideal of a
> Sartre/de Beauvoir "public intellectuals" power couple appears to have
> murdered and partially cannibalized his partner before beating a hasty
> retreat to Japan.
>
> The novel's central characters, however, are two relatively successful
> indie photojournalists covering two very different stories about two very
> different, smallish groups of people; he, a couple of doctors (one
> European, the other, Canadkan) with strange hobbies and stranger habits,
> she, the aforementioned French philosophical power-couple.
>
> Anyway, I very much recommend it, and would love to hear what Pynchon
> admirers have to say about
>
> A pretty good review by Johnathan Lethem here:
>
> https://www.nytimes.com/2014/09/28/books/review/consumed-by-david-cronenberg.html
> --
> Pynchon-L: https://waste.org/mailman/listinfo/pynchon-l
>