“What does he care for Jews, blacks, homosexuals, women? Not a thing. One fine morning Simon wakes – cocksure and foolish – and the countdown commences… Nude, Simon drowses, screening outtakes of dreams just filmed. It hits the ancient chimney, bounces, bursts to mouthfuls, which bounce, burst and are gone. There are five known senses: taste, smell, touch, hearing and sight… The protagonist loses them all in sequence – one by one…Īn afterthought brown apple gets pitched from the low-rent altitude, fine arm action and follow-through, hooking leftward, sharp slider. Through the course of this 600-page novel, Simon loses, one by one, all of his senses (taste is lost when trying to siphon off gasoline for his roving, broken-down production van), ending in a state of complete debilitation in which he is being made ready for eternity and salvation.Īs energy packed as a William Gaddis novel and as rich in language as a Shakespearean play, Take Five is a modern masterpiece that is at once a celebration of life and a morality play on excess, as though anticipating the self-indulgent "me generation" of the decade. Con-man, filmmaker (currently working on producing "Jesus 2001", what he calls the religious equivalent of The Godfather, best known for his movie "The Clap That Took Over the World"), descendent of a wealthy and prestigious New York family whose wealth and prestige are on a sharp decline, racist and anti-Semite (though Simon dislikes all ethnic groups equally), possessor of never-satisfied appetites (food, women, drink, but most of all, money and more money), and the fastest talker since Falstaff, Simon is on a quest that goes backwards. Welcome to the world of Simon Lynxx and to one of the great overlooked novels of the 1980s.
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