Tunc ★☆☆☆☆

I picked this up on a whim in a bookshop in Copenhagen. The start was interesting, though a dense read, but quickly started to feel very meandering and directionless, full of its own cleverness and unfunny comedy. But I am nothing if not stubborn and decided to stick it through to the end, if only to experience what a reviewer in The Irish Times would call “a dazzling, poetic triumph” in 1968. The answer is, of course, constantly misogynistic, frequently racist and occasionally homophobic. It does manage to pick up in the back half and get some sense of momentum and direction going and eventually a meaning actually starts to coalesce around a man trapped in a capitalist nightmare that traps even those would would notionally be its masters, a self-perpetuating system from which the author seems to imagine there can be no true escape or break from. Or perhaps that escape is saved for Nunquam, the novel that is apparently the second half of the story started in this one, though I don’t think that I will be reading it.