MAIS QUE FOUTENT LES EDITEURS (Part 9)

Que Keith Mano soit resté largement sous le radar est un mystère complet qui ne cessera longtemps de tarauder tous ceux qui un jour ont ouvert Take Five. Avec ce pur chef d’œuvre dont la lecture fait d’emblée oublier, à 3 ou 4 titres près, l’intégralité de la production éditoriale de ces cinq dernières années, nous sommes face à un de ces monstres américains du siècle passé, sorte de bâtard mal léché de JR et de la Confrérie des imbéciles, à la sauce Falstaff. L’échec du livre (c’est peu de le dire, puisque même les veilleurs français, de Pétillon à Chenetier sont passés à côté), laissa l’auteur sur le carreau, qui ne produisit presque plus rien par la suite. Le conseil du soir de Pugnax, donc, les 5 jours de Simon Lynxx – laissez le cyclone vous emporter.

Welcome to the world of Simon Lynxx and to one of the great overlooked novels of the 1980s. 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.
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.
As 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