Paradise by Donald Barthelme Strange and interesting book. Rather short, otherwise I might have not finished it, for it is entertaining enough for a short format, not sufficient for an epic novel.

 Paradise by Donald Barthelme

Strange and interesting book. Rather short, otherwise I might have not finished it, for it is entertaining enough for a short format, not sufficient for an epic novel.

-          Is this about Paradise?

-          You bet it is, for:

-          A fifty three years old man lands three stunning young models in his apartment to…live with him

-          What else can beat that?

-          And yet, this is a strange heaven, described in a modernistic, if fortunately not altogether absurd manner

The characters are- Simon, the architect hero who happens to Stumble Upon Happiness, you might say, when he meets three exhilarating women in need of a place to stay, which…Bismillah –in the words of the Koran and the Bohemian Rhapsody- he has available and they all come together to talk, have hot sex and then argue over nothing in particular.

The three women are – Veronica, Anne and Dore, but I never knew who is who and did not care frankly.

They have reminded me of my own heaven, in terms of gorgeous creatures that I was blessed to hook with.

Apart from a Miss Romania, who could be considered a nec plus ultra, there have been two other fabulous creatures, who were even better than the Miss and by a weird stroke of luck, I happened to know them and enter a relationship with at about the same time.

To add to the weirdness of the situation, they had the same name, albeit one was called by friends Nicky, while the other was Nicole.

It sort of worked, because one was a virgin having sex, but wanting to preserve the “technical innocence” at all costs, including me seeing other women, while the other had a boyfriend with West German citizenship, who was going to marry her and so the affair was meant to be just that- a short term sexual camaraderie, albeit we kind of fell for each other.

In this other Paradise, the one from the book does not fit together either, because it is too postmodern and outré for my taste

Very often I had a feeling of alienation, perhaps increased by the questions and answers that appear to be evocative of an analyst who talks to our architect.

The architects Pei, Gehry and others make sense, but thrown in are sentences that lack meaning, or more likely I just miss it.

There is hot sex and that obviously I could not miss, with felatios, sex in the kitchen- which is supposed to be a female fantasy…

There is the bizarre, with references to the clitoris, which apparently was unknown to the hero up to the age of twenty.

Then there is the furniture which is supposed to be in heaven and it would be by Kroll- not that I know who that might be

The architecture as thought by Corbusier, Gropius no longer exists, with its meaning of improving human beings or something like that.

In descriptions that I do not know if I should believe: Wright had his cape and Mies his pinstripes.

Another good thing that happened during the reading of this book- I have read that one of the super-hot women keeps in shape with a trampoline and I remembered that we have one and so I have started using it again today, after – I do not know, eight years?

There is a question though:

-          How, or better said -why did I start reading this book?

-          Looking up on the net- where else? – I found a day later why- it was a finalist for a Pulitzer Prize, even if the same internet says in another place that this is the least appreciated of the author’s books