Period

Rating:
Summary: Difficulty Defining and Destroying Desire
Review: "Period" is likely to anger many Cooper fans due to its spare qualities in narrative, character, form. Cooper has always written about desire, particularly it's darkest manifestations and results. Cooper's books are short, extreme, and demand that they roll around the subconscious of the reader. "Period" is no different, but here everything Cooper has worked toward in the 4 previous novels in this cycle is reported flatly, obscurely, and sometimes causes great aggravation in the reader.

However, interviews with Cooper have revealed that "George Miles" was a real person who left deep emotional marks in Cooper. His mutilation in "Closer," the first in the cycle, seems like an attempt to exorcise the author's feeling for his object of obsession. George's absence (or mere mention) in the next 3 books makes it seem like the author was successful. Those 3 books ("Frisk," "Try," "Guide)all deal in some way with the attempt to vanquish desire. Exploration of the extremes in human thought and behavior distance the obsession over something the author, who is always a character in some fashion in the cycle, cannot have.

Interviews say that Cooper found that the real George Miles committed suicide, years after their relationship. "Period" takes that as a cue to move everything toward death - desire, the author himself, any characters that happen to appear in the midst. This book mirrors Cooper's others, but leaves us in the end only with ourselves and interpretations. The book has a formal structure where the prose is allowed to mirror itself foremost, the other books in the cycle secondly, and ourselves - probably most disturbingly.

Under all the sex, gore, minimalism, and luridness of Cooper's novels is a profound meditation on who we are, what relationships mean, how expression cannot contain reality, and the various meanings of love.

This is strong stuff. "Period" is not the place to start for a novice. But it's one hell of a book-long poem about desire, and therefore a fitting end to the five book cycle. What Cooper does next is already an intriguing subject. He might just be the last American writer with any guts. A master; a masterwork.

Rating:
Summary: Difficulty Defining and Destroying Desire
Review: "Period" is likely to anger many Cooper fans due to its spare qualities in narrative, character, form. Cooper has always written about desire, particularly it's darkest manifestations and results. Cooper's books are short, extreme, and demand that they roll around the subconscious of the reader. "Period" is no different, but here everything Cooper has worked toward in the 4 previous novels in this cycle is reported flatly, obscurely, and sometimes causes great aggravation in the reader.

However, interviews with Cooper have revealed that "George Miles" was a real person who left deep emotional marks in Cooper. His mutilation in "Closer," the first in the cycle, seems like an attempt to exorcise the author's feeling for his object of obsession. George's absence (or mere mention) in the next 3 books makes it seem like the author was successful. Those 3 books ("Frisk," "Try," "Guide)all deal in some way with the attempt to vanquish desire. Exploration of the extremes in human thought and behavior distance the obsession over something the author, who is always a character in some fashion in the cycle, cannot have.

Interviews say that Cooper found that the real George Miles committed suicide, years after their relationship. "Period" takes that as a cue to move everything toward death - desire, the author himself, any characters that happen to appear in the midst. This book mirrors Cooper's others, but leaves us in the end only with ourselves and interpretations. The book has a formal structure where the prose is allowed to mirror itself foremost, the other books in the cycle secondly, and ourselves - probably most disturbingly.

Under all the sex, gore, minimalism, and luridness of Cooper's novels is a profound meditation on who we are, what relationships mean, how expression cannot contain reality, and the various meanings of love.

This is strong stuff. "Period" is not the place to start for a novice. But it's one hell of a book-long poem about desire, and therefore a fitting end to the five book cycle. What Cooper does next is already an intriguing subject. He might just be the last American writer with any guts. A master; a masterwork.

Rating:
Summary: horrified? heartbroken? confused?
Review: 'Period' by Dennis Cooper is at times horrifying, heartbreaking, or just confusing. Horrifying becauses of it's violent implications and stronghold to truth. Heartbreaking because of the overwhelming feeling of desire and missed chances. His dialogue and syntax keep reading interesting, if not hard to comprehend. He jumps around a lot, but that just adds to the whole darkness of the book. Without having read the other novels in this "cycle" , it takes awhile to figure out what's going on. 'Period' is a book that the reader will either read cover to cover three times, or set on fire after reading the first few paragraphs.

Rating:
Summary: Fizzle, fizzle
Review: Dennis Cooper has named his latest book after a punctuation mark -- the most common, perfunctory punctuation mark (except for the lowly comma). In case you're wondering why Cooper does this, I should probably inform you that _Period_ is meant to give closure to his previous novels, much as a period provides closure to a sentence. Actually, in this case it's more like a stake through the heart.

The big news here is that George Miles reappears from Cooper's first novel _Closer_, and is marginally more interesting this time around. In case you didn't know, George died in _Closer_ -- but, like poor, hapless Kenny in "South Park," George comes back for more.

For such a tiny book, _Period_ is crammed to the gills with impenetrable incident. There are pseudo-satanic murders, body doubles, radio call-in shows and cyberchats, isolated teenagers shouting to the dark, rumors and rumors of rumors about a minor novelist, and a generous dollop of smoke-and-mirrors postmodernism just in case you think you might have understood what just happened.

Not that there's any reason to care.

Rating:
Summary: American Pop
Review: Dennis Cooper is the only Living American Writer that is worth reading in a serious manner. Period.

Rating:
Summary: Love and Dismemberment
Review: Few novelists pursue their chosen themes with such morbid enthusiasm as Dennis Cooper. For more than a decade his quintet of novels - Closer, Frisk, Try, Guide and now Period - have obsessed over sex, child pornography, drugs and dismemberment. Undeterred even by death threats, Cooper has played out his violent fantasies in these novels with a disturbing purity of vision. His new novel Period marks, as its title suggests, the end of the cycle. He's claimed that it's both a 'disappearing act' and a 'suicide note.' Considering the spectral and sparse quality of the book both comments seem particularly appropriate.

The quintet began back in 1989 with Closer. Yet it was Cooper's 1991 novel Frisk that really stirred controversy, deliberately blurring the line between fantasy and reality and securing its author a place at the cutting edge of contemporary American literature. Period draws out the same themes and concerns as the preceding novels, charting the bored angst of gay West Coast adolescents and their middle-aged paramours as they drift into experiments with drugs, Satanism, sex and ultimately murder. Like grim parodies of Enlightenment anatomists, Cooper's protagonists believe that dismembering the bodies of their lovers will reveal the truth of existence, bringing them closer to an absent God and saving them from the demystified consumer culture that surrounds them.

What has always been so impressive about Cooper's work is his dedication to narrative forms that replicate the violent content of the books. His prose has sought to cut into the flat surface of the conventional pornographic or horror text through the use of flashbacks, narratives-within-narratives, and stream of consciousness techniques. In Period this relationship between form and content reaches its peak, creating a fragmented and confusing novel that refuses easy definition. It's certainly the sparsest of Cooper's books, a skeleton thin, episodic narrative that's like the decomposed body of one of the story's victims. Indeed, the novel is so cut up that the reader has no choice but to follow the advice of the epigraph and 'keep watch over absent meaning'. Shifting between different characters' viewpoints, radio phone-ins, Internet chat rooms and diaries Cooper creates a disturbing hall of mirrors through which we're left to wander without a guide. Although Period's obliqueness is slightly dissatisfying it appears ultimately inevitable, for what else but a self-reflexive 'period' could end this set of books?

Period confirms Cooper's growing reputation as the most exciting and transgressive of contemporary American novelists. However, as last year's publication of Cooper's journalism and essays - in the collection All Ears - has demonstrated, his work has much more scope than this obsessively brilliant cycle of novels. He's currently working on a book based upon the recent spate of American High School shootings and has also expressed a desire to experiment with a novel of physical comedy (he cites the films of Jacques Tatti, Jerry Lewis and Jackie Chan as a potential source of inspiration). Whatever path he may choose his next offering will be awaited eagerly on both sides of the Atlantic.

Rating:
Summary: A trippy, conufsing tale
Review: I must say i was surprised to say the least when i read this book and got out of it nothing i would have expected. Although many people dimiss cooper as an overindulger in morbid homosexuality, I honestly didnt think this book was as frightingly grotesque as cridicts tend to label it as. The sex, although undeniably intigrated into the stories main point (if there even is one) is fleeting, nondescript, and sometimes if you skip past a single sentence you wont even know anything even happened. Which brings me to the next point of this book. Its so very confusing. I finally understand the phrase smoke-and-mirrors, thanks to cooper's brain-rattling insane prose that for some odd reason thinks it should call itself a book. But its apparent that he possess an ultimate ablity to trick the reader beyond belief, and to leave you sitting there wondering whats real and whats not. And all done so as if he isnt even taking credit for any of these events he just happens to be writing.
This is one of the most unique stories i have read in years, addictive, deceptive, sometimes unrelentless, buy always good.

Rating:
Summary: The equal of 'Frisk'
Review: This is about the kids...no money to party, no date for the prom...crystal meth brewing in the bathroom, death metal on the stereo, raising demons in the woods...What they gotta live for?...Does this book offer the answer? Gary Indiana? How many serial killers do you know; six, seven?...these kids are into double digits. The author draws a line under his previous work - gone are the naturalistic settings; this book is supernaturally charged and stripped to the bone. The symmetry of life and afterlife that cleaves 'Period' (Leon/Noel) leaves you wondering if George Miles is better off alive or dead. This is genuinely terrifying, a freeform world of drift and skid that leaves you clutching at shadows. A sly evocation of the earliest work of the Buljang Brothers, Dennis Cooper takes us through a dark mirror into the hellmouth.

Rating:
Summary: lifestyle choices?
Review: this one's even foggier, you just don't know what's going on, hardly any of the ultra detailed descriptions of, say, Guide, instead you're left with voices, diary entries and 'anonymous' internet chat, while the 'plot' just vanishes inside this multi mirrored projection hall. we're not really in the city anymore either, it's a small town, then a forest, then a house in a forest, and then someone gets lost in this house. Blair Witch? this is even scarier, I suppose, as we're left with traces, memories, voices and the usual all consuming dance of death and desire. Where next? we can't leave that house anymore, so we have to go back to 'Closer' and one of its characters, and we have to start a website with some strange photos of some distant looking boy, who we're slowly getting obsessed with...did i understand? are these still lifestyle choices? actually these are probably 5 stars, for at least 5 books. goodnight.