Boy Parts

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I read Lolita and while it did repulse me (as intended) I didn’t hate it because it was from the pov of a p*dophile. When she first read the novel, Kelly remembers being struck by how well it captured the experience of being fresh out of university. The book follows the build up towards a big exhibition of Irina's work, and we watch as she trawls through her past work, reliving her interactions with her models, and her attempts at creating new work for the exhibition, which involves 'Eddie from Tesco'.

irina herself is a fascinating character, mostly because she’s incredibly unlikeable and quite frankly, just a terrible person. The novel is narrated by a violent anti-heroine who stars as Clark’s “ unlikeable female protagonist“. she manipulates everyone around her and is just downright cruel most of the time, but she’s also very witty and you’re further drawn into the story just to find out what she’s going to say next.If you want to do that, then more power to you – I just don’t think we should extend that sensibility to all [books]. The main character is distinctly unappealing, which can sometimes work, but not here, as there is no sense of why she became so morally vacuous in the first place.

I’m relatively new to good reads and thought this was a safe space to share my reviews (not many of my friends read and was hoping to find community here), I didn’t expect to be publicly mocked for it. Geordie girls are up there with Irish girls and Scottish girls; the black women of white women, you know?if i put my hands around your neck and crushed your windpipe and chopped you up, would anyone find you? She poses them in photographs in ways that subvert the male gaze-heavy fetish photographs that show women in peril or pain. But then we are meant to believe that she was in fact traumatized by this so much so that now she herself is subjecting others to the type of trauma she was victim to.

And I can forgive a lack of intersectionality and dimension if say this, like Plath's Bell Jar, had been published in the 1960s. Now it’s been turned into a stage play, adapted by Gillian Greer and starring Aimée Kelly as the wildly unreliable narrator.i've also only heard good things about it so it better not let me down or i may never recover again. Key to this book are the gazes into power structures that shatters any rose colored glasses they might try to hide behind. Boy Parts is the incendiary debut novel from Eliza Clark, a pitch-black comedy both shocking and hilarious, fearlessly exploring the taboo regions of sexuality and gender roles in the twenty-first century. Not every reader will make it through the opening scene, which describes Joan’s horrific death after the other girls douse her in petrol and set her on fire.

Sure, the narrative shows us just how ‘pathetic’ and ‘sad’ he is about his messed up relationship with Irina but his experiences bear no real weight on Irina’s narrative.This is all to say that Irina being a stronza who engages in ‘bad’ behaviour, is not why I didn’t like this book. Eliza Clark’s 2020 debut novel Boy Parts, a brutal artworld satire-cum-thriller, is a publishing phenomenon. Although she wants to transgress accepted norms of behaviour she knows these norms are there to begin with so in certain spaces she comports herself in a certain way, her art is the only indicator that she is into some smutty kinky stuff. If this book had actually been disturbing maybe then I could have overlooked its pulpy and overt storyline…but it isn’t. it is like AMERICAN PSYCHO, but better, because it delves into a lot of amazing social commentary about sexism, society's inability to see women as the perpetrators of violence because of that sexism, "woke" culture, art and how we consume it, and so much more.