Boy Parts (eBook)

Eliza Clark (Autor)

eBook Download: EPUB

2023 | 1. Auflage
320 Seiten
Faber & Faber (Verlag)
978-0-571-38474-7 (ISBN)

Infos

A GRANTA BEST OF YOUNG BRITISH NOVELIST 2023 'Hallucinogenic, electric and sharp.' JESSICA ANDREWS 'Will make most readers howl with laughter and/or shut their eyes in horror.' GUARDIAN 'A carnival funhouse ride: terrifying, feverish, hilarious.' JULIA ARMFIELD Irina is in a rut. She obsessively takes explicit photographs of average-looking men she scouts from the streets of Newcastle while her dead-end bar job slips away; she's more interested in drugs, alcohol, and extreme cinema. When she's offered an exhibition at a fashionable London gallery which promises to revive her career in the art world, it should feel like an escape. But the news triggers a self-destructive tailspin, drawing in her obsessive best friend and a shy young man from her local supermarket who has attracted her attention . . . BOY PARTS is the incendiary debut novel from Eliza Clark, a pitch-black comedy both shocking and hilarious, fearlessly exploring the taboos of sexuality and gender roles in the twenty-first century. 'Smart, stylish, and very funny.' LARA WILLIAMS 'Boundaries are for breaking and if anyone can crash through and reinterpret the fear of our time, Eliza Clark can.' MSLEXIA WHAT READERS ARE SAYING: 'A dark, funny, nasty book. Brilliantly written, annoyingly good.' 5* reader review 'I am obsessed.' 5* reader review 'Both shocking and darkly funny, this razor-sharp debut is unlike anything I've read before.' 5* reader review 'I loved this, properly loved it!!' 5* reader review 'Left me both in awe and totally disturbed. Wow.' 5* reader review

Eliza Clark is the author of Boy Parts (2020) and Penance (2023) and She's Always Hungry (2024). In 2020, Boy Parts was Blackwell's Fiction book of the year, and in 2022 Eliza was chosen as a finalist for the Women's Prize Futures Award for writers under thirty-five. In 2023, she was named one of Granta's Best of Young British Novelists. She also writes for film and television. A stage adaptation of Boy Parts premiered at Soho Theatre in October 2023.

Rezensionen

The main protagonist will prove to be one of the most alluring, infuriating, and complex characters in modern British literature.

Hilariously sardonic . . . Will make most readers howl with laughter and/or shut their eyes in horror.

As hilarious as it is grotesque.

An assured and complex debut that tempts and teases you always a little deeper, your eyes unable to be drawn away.

Explores the darkest corners of artistic practice, sexuality and violence with bold wit and fearlessness. A dazzling, horrifying debut.

It's delightfully and deviously rooted in the now with its delectable internet and culture references and evocative and real-feeling portrait of women.

The most deliciously grim book I've read for a while.

Smart, stylish and very funny, Boy Parts is a gripping and unflinching exploration of female desire, narcissism, sexuality and rage. You won't want to put it down.

Even at its most transgressive, it all feels effortless. Dark, funny, bold, it's an exceptional debut.

Boundaries are for breaking and if anyone can crash through and reinterpret the fear of our time, Eliza Clark can.

Hallucinogenic, electric and sharp, Boy Parts is a whirlwind exploration of gender, class and power.

It is a work of consummate professionalism, excellent plotting and pacing, with utterly believable dialogue. Her characters can be monstrous, but their lives could quite easily be our lives. The book is a corrective.

An impressive, fiercely current debut... delightful and addictive.

A funny and intensely readable spiral staircase down into the mind of a woman who wears a waist trainer under her clothes and who may or may not be a keen purveyor of ultra-violence.

Boy Parts is a carnival funhouse ride: terrifying, feverish, hilarious. Clark has created a wholly original monster and a sickeningly compulsive novel. I absolutely inhaled this book.

Textauszug

DEAN/DANIEL

I’m sick in my mouth on the bus into work. I swallow it down; the sandwich I ate at the bus stop is still identifiable by texture and flavour.

When the bus pulls over, I wobble on my heels. I imagine going over on my ankle, the bone snapping and breaking the skin. I imagine taking a photo in A&E and sending it to Ryan; yikes, guess I can’t come in! But I can’t make myself fall over. It’s like trying to keep your head under shallow water; you just can’t.

‘You alright there, petal?’ asks the bus driver.

‘Just about,’ I say.

I get to the bar half an hour late. We were supposed to open at twelve. Ryan won’t be here till one, at least. I press my forehead against the cool glass of the door, repeatedly miss the lock with the key, and leave behind a smear of pale foundation.

I do the bare minimum to open, and carefully sip water till Ryan gets in. He whines at me for getting makeup on the door (again) and for failing to take the chairs down from the tables on the mezzanine. He calls it the mez. My head throbs. He asks me what time I got in (four a.m. – I say two) and if I’m hungover (‘no’), then leaves me alone at the bar while he fannies on in the office.

I chop fruit in peace for an hour; I kill six lemons and flay a pineapple. I leave the limes, the taste of my last shot of tequila is still sour on the back of my tongue.

I hear them before I see them. Men in suits, marching down the street, twelve of them. They burst in, shouting, red-faced, thoroughly impressed with themselves, and I’m stuck mixing Old Fashioneds for half an hour.

They complain I’m taking too long. I offer them a Manhattan as a quicker alternative, and the leader of the pack scoffs. His designer tie is loose, and he flicks open the top button of a monogrammed shirt; an enormous watch cuffs his thick wrist. Great pains have been taken to appear visibly wealthy. Probably ‘Aal fur coat and nee knickers’, as my mam would say.

‘A bit girly for us, darling.’

‘It’s basically the same as an Old Fashioned, it’s just a bit quicker to make,’ I say, each hand twirling a bar spoon through two glasses. His eyes are fixed on my tits, so he doesn’t catch me sneering.

‘They’re pink, aren’t they? Aren’t those pink?’

‘No, it’s bourbon-based.’ I think he’s getting it mixed up with a Cosmopolitan; he doesn’t want it, regardless.

They ascend to the mezzanine and complain loudly about how long they waited. They don’t tip. Of course they fucking don’t.

I’m praying it’s just going to be the one round, but they buy two bottles of Auchentoshan and I am in hell. It is an effort not to stand with my head in my hands, or sit down on the floor, or vomit into the bucket of ice they make me bring them. I try putting a Merzbow album on over the sound system to chase them out. It’s funny for about three tracks, but they just think the speakers are broken, and the noise makes my headache worse.

The leader separates from the pack. He comes downstairs and leans against the bar. I wait for him to buy another bottle, but he just starts talking to me. Talking, and talking, and talking. His slicked-back hair is thinning, and a strand of it keeps flopping in front of his eyes – he slaps it back into place as if he’s killing a fly.

‘I’m a partner, you see,’ says the suit. Received pronunciation – he can’t be local. A Home Counties transplant. A coloniser. He probably lives with all the footballers up in Northumberland and brags to his city-boy friends about how his Darras Hall mansion only cost him a million, how he lives next to Martin Dúbravka, and how, really, quality of life is just so much better up here, as long as you keep away from the rough bits.

‘My time is very expensive,’ he says.

‘So is mine,’ I say. He misinterprets this, and slaps a twenty-pound note on the bar, his meaty hands spanking the granite surface like it’s his secretary’s arse.

A woman has appeared behind him. She’s skinny, middle-aged and alone. Her fake tan is a nut brown, her dye-job is much too dark, and her teeth are stained. She’s shaking. I take her for an alkie.

‘Excuse me,’ she says. The suit ignores her – maybe he doesn’t hear her.

‘There you go, then, a nice little tip for you.’ Demeaning, but I pocket the money. ‘So, you’re mine for the day now, are you?’

‘Maybe the next five minutes.’ Another twenty on the bar, in my pocket. ‘I’m just going to serve this lady,’ I say.

‘How much to get you to sack this off and come home with me?’

‘It’s too early for this,’ I say. His expression has darkened in the time it took for my eyes to roll.

‘Excuse me.’ The alkie is barking now, but the suit blocks her out with his bulk.

He leans over and grabs my wrist, his belly pressing against the bar top. He snorts, his tiny, piggy eyes narrowed and bloodshot from an afternoon’s drinking.

‘You’re shaking,’ he says. Charming that he thinks the shaking is down to him and not the result of what I had presumed to be a visible hangover. He tightens his grip; I watch my skin turn white beneath his fingertips. The room is spinning. He’ll regret this when I vomit on him. It’s a shame I can’t make myself sick without sticking my fingers down my throat – it’d be a perfect way to get out of this without moving. I could scream, of course, but my voice is raw with the residue of last night’s cigarette smoking. ‘Are you frightened?’ he slurs. He is drunker than I initially suspected.

‘Let go of me.’ He doesn’t. I can’t reach the fruit knives. There is a line of pint glasses in front of me, and I grab one with my free hand. ‘I’m going to count to three,’ I tell him.

The alkie pounds the bar.

‘How old do you think my son is?’ she asks. The suit lets go, dropping my wrist like my skin has burnt him.

‘Gary, what the fuck?’ Another suit descends the stairs, wobbly and embarrassed, in a cream summertime suit. He’s the same age, but better kept, though still red with too many tumblers of scotch and too many holidays without an SPF. ‘Sweetheart,’ he begins. The woman interrupts him. She isn’t an alkie, I suppose, just a rough mam.

‘How old do you think my son is?’ She thrusts her phone into my face. My website is up on the screen. She is showing me a black-and-white photo: a boy kneeling, his tongue between my index and middle finger, my ring finger digging into his cheek.

Ah.

‘He’s twenty. He signed a consent form and brought ID. I can show you.’

‘Bollocks,’ she says. ‘What a load of bollocks. Hew.’ She taps Gary on the shoulder. Cream suit asks what this is all about – Rough Mam ignores. ‘How old does this lad look to you? Does he look twenty? Does he fucking look twenty to you?’

Gary looks at the mam, looks at me, looks at the photo.

‘I think we should leave,’ says Cream Suit. ‘Chaps,’ he calls. ‘Chaps, it’s time to go.’

But Gary is still thinking. Gary is still looking at the photo.

‘He had ID,’ I say. I pull out my phone and retrieve a scanned copy of his passport. I show it to Gary first. ‘See. Twenty. Now go,’ I say.

Rough Mam wants the men to stay. Rough Mam wants a witness. But they’re gone in a puff of expensive aftershave, the smell so potent it makes my head spin. Rough Mam wants to see the ID.

‘That’s my older boy. That’s Dean, you stupid bitch, that’s my older boy’s passport. Daniel is sixteen. I’ll call the fucking police if you don’t take that down.’

I’d scouted him on the bus and suspected he may have been in sixth form. He’d been wearing a suit. He must go to one of those colleges with an officewear dress code, but you couldn’t expect me to know that just from looking at him. I’ve seen blokes in their thirties who look twelve. That’s why I ask for ID. That’s why I keep records.

Plus, no court could possibly convict me. The similarity between the brothers is so remarkable that only a mother could really split hairs over that passport photo. I can’t imagine a jury taking against me either: people always conflate beauty with goodness. I’m more Mae West than Rose. I can just cry a bit, talk like I’m daft, tease my hair up like a televangelist: the higher the hair, the closer to God, you know?

‘Well Daniel lied to me and brought false ID. And I took these on a school day, so maybe keep a closer eye on him?’ I...

Produkt-Details

• Erscheint lt. Verlag: 6.4.2023
• Verlagsort: London
• Sprache: englisch
• Themenwelt: Literatur ► Romane / Erzählungen
• Schlagworte: Feminist fiction • Irvine Welsh • Julia Armfield • Megan Nolan • Nightbitch • Ottessa Moshfegh • Rachel Yoder
• ISBN-10: 0-571-38474-9 / 0571384749
• ISBN-13: 978-0-571-38474-7 / 9780571384747