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A review by cameronbcook
Antkind by Charlie Kaufman
4.0
There are few artists more responsible for inspiring me to become a writer than Charlie Kaufman. While my tastes have obviously evolved and grown and expanded in the last twenty years, the incredible bolt of lightning his work was for me in my early teens felt truly remarkable and unique. Now that I’ve read Beckett and Pynchon and Vonnegut and Carrington and Buñuel, it may be slightly less unique, but what sets Kaufman apart is his insistence that his work, ostensibly comedic first and foremost, always have honest pathos attached to the high concepts he attaches himself to. Not only are these ideas interesting, but they’re happening to real people.
Kaufman is perhaps most inspired by the work of Beckett and Joyce. And for me, Kaufman’s Murphy and Kaufman’s Ulysses is Synecdoche, New York—a triumphantly singular horror/comedy about the anxiety of having a body and existing in time.
So when I started Antkind, Kaufman’s debut novel, I wasn’t sure what to expect. Would he have fun with the medium like Safran Foer? Would he write a book about writing a book? It turns out Antkind is a novel written in the spirit of Huck Finn or Don Quixote—it’s a novel in which things happen for hundreds of pages, and those things have little to do with each other. It’s Kaufman operating closer to Finnegan’s Wake. It’s a work that could only really work for people who are familiar with everything else Kaufman has created.
First and foremost, this is the funniest book I have ever read. Nearly every page made me laugh. There are some passages (chapter 47) which stand alone and work as some of the best comedy writing I’ve ever read, and some of it (the apocalypse passages) that work as some of the most harrowing. It’s an intensely strange book about so many things and so many ideas that it does not at all work as a novel, but it’s also so great in its individual chapters that it’s hard to fault it.
I only remove a star because I wish it all came together as something more after its 750 pages, but I can guarantee a good time with most of it.
Kaufman is perhaps most inspired by the work of Beckett and Joyce. And for me, Kaufman’s Murphy and Kaufman’s Ulysses is Synecdoche, New York—a triumphantly singular horror/comedy about the anxiety of having a body and existing in time.
So when I started Antkind, Kaufman’s debut novel, I wasn’t sure what to expect. Would he have fun with the medium like Safran Foer? Would he write a book about writing a book? It turns out Antkind is a novel written in the spirit of Huck Finn or Don Quixote—it’s a novel in which things happen for hundreds of pages, and those things have little to do with each other. It’s Kaufman operating closer to Finnegan’s Wake. It’s a work that could only really work for people who are familiar with everything else Kaufman has created.
First and foremost, this is the funniest book I have ever read. Nearly every page made me laugh. There are some passages (chapter 47) which stand alone and work as some of the best comedy writing I’ve ever read, and some of it (the apocalypse passages) that work as some of the most harrowing. It’s an intensely strange book about so many things and so many ideas that it does not at all work as a novel, but it’s also so great in its individual chapters that it’s hard to fault it.
I only remove a star because I wish it all came together as something more after its 750 pages, but I can guarantee a good time with most of it.