Review: Babyfucker by Urs Allemann

"How did they ever make a movie of "Lolita"?"

How does one begin a review of "Babyfucker"? That's the question I've been struggling with.

"(...) One of the biggest literary scandals in the post-1945 German-speaking world" is what greeted me upon opening my Amazon package. Cradling this tiny book that looked as if it had been thrown off an overpass, scuffed with black and edges are torn. I began to question just what it was I was about to submit myself to for the evening.

See, you can't read Urs Allemann's "Babyfucker" online. It's only available as a bilingual paperback on Amazon. Oh, and it's bright yellow, I have to add. You can't miss it. "Of course", I thought, the curiosity getting the better of me again, flipping it open, "this is karma for getting recommendations off disturbing book iceberg lists."

I enjoy discovering transgressive literature, I think I've made that well known. I enjoy witnessing the boundaries of the human experience and testing my limits on the content I can stomach and consume. This book was designed to provoke that intrigue. Down to the very name, "Babyfucker". It sends a shock of discomfort down one's spine and makes one feel sick and ashamed just to speak it.

Allman employs Dadaist language and shock value to present the divide between art and real life. He utilizes both disorientingly pointless subject matter contrasted against obscene, unpredictable imagery to create an experience for the reader, not merely a story.

"I used to sometimes treat myself to a walk. These days I sometimes treat myself to a memory. That's what I call it. It's a beautiful word. Sometimes I want to suck on a beautiful word. To lick it clean. Until I realize that I feel sick to my stomach. Nauseous. I'm either sick or nauseous. What's the difference. Maybe the difference will be invented by me. Some day. Nauseous. Have I ever gotten nauseous from the nauseating word memory." (Allmann) 

The use of repetition throughout adds to the sense of paranoia, almost reading like the manifestation of intrusive thoughts. The phrase "I fuck babies" is frequently repeated, interspersed with a recounting of his daily routine and of the babies that sit in baskets around him. Babies that keep growing and shrinking and aging and threatening to bury him under their oppressive weight. "I'll fuck the flesh that will bury me." (Allmann) He is afraid of the babies and in love with them; afraid of harming but unable to resist. It's perverse and alarming; a train crash you cannot look away from.

Urs Allemann plays with language in a way I've never encountered before, and given that this is originally a Swiss work, I find it phenomenal how well it was translated over by translator Peter Smith. It's absurd. It disturbers the reader. Long bumbling tangents and delusions are broken up with the periodic reminder that the babies have always been there and always will be. A constant bleating awareness.

"We think, often despite ourselves, that literature is about things or people or events. It is about these things, but never only about these things. Babyfucker is about babyfucking, but it is also about literature's ability to affect readers." (Peter Smith, foreword)

There are glimpses of lucidity through the chaos. There may or may not be a woman who may or may not have been pregnant. There is a man who may be having sex with that woman. A man who is following her up a ladder. The man in the room has always been there but the room may not even exist. I have fine strands of understanding that aren't quite tied to a conclusion. I think I might know what's truly occurring in the story but, honestly, that's not my priority. It matters not what secrets the intentionally thin plot holds, what matters is how it was written. 

I do not recommend Urs Allemann's "Babyfucker" lightly, but I do recommend it. It's shocking and upsetting and confusing. It is a book full of contradictions and unreliable narrators. It both exists and it doesn't. The babies are alive and dead. 

"I fuck babies."