![]() The key to any good relationship, the writer/reader one included, is a managing of expectations, and nowhere in even his most outwardly inviting writing does Marcus hint at anything that suggests closure and a case of the warm-and-fuzzies.Īnother consistency: Marcus’s characters are consistently on the wrong side of power balances, often for reasons unclear. The collection begins safely, with Marcus’s most accessible work, although there isn’t much in the way of traditional resolution even here. Leaving the Sea is divided into six sections on loose formal and philosophical grounds, and in loose order of obscurity and opacity. Consider this invective: “In English, no matter what you said, you sounded like a coddled human mascot with a giant head asking to have his wiener petted…”Īnd, “English, in which every word was a spoiled complaint, a bit of pouting…”Īnd, “At least overseas he didn’t speak much English.”Īll of these are taken from Leaving the Sea, the new collection of short stories from Marcus, who is bound and determined as ever to make us sick with language. I can’t really help it.”īen Marcus is obsessed with language on a sort of sadomasochistic bent. Language as a physical substance with deviant powers: a powder, a drug, a wind, a medicine. He continued, “I seem to write about language a lot. “I’d been thinking for years about language as a toxic substance,” said Ben Marcus in a 2011 interview with HTML Giant. ![]()
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