Connell, Brendan - Heqet

Diary, journal, jottings of our narrator: visionary, artiste, street bum.
The repeating arc follows our narrator’s encounters with a timeless enchantress. While these break him from his lethargy, afterward he seems in ruins. Maybe.
He uses, abuses copious amounts of drugs and stimulants, opening his eyes to hitherto invisible dangers, yet blinding him to readily apparent perils.
Throughout, there are a flash of fevered words, concentrated prose poems, leavened with the odd prattle of the deranged street person.
I found our narrator to be unsympathetic and unreliable.
For every stray insight, there are pages where I think his mind is a nest of moldy cobwebs.
Following the novella are stories, fragments, exercises.
“The Sweet Princess Prized” would have made a ripe conte cruel, a hundred years earlier. Spoiled aristocrat sisters, jealousy, envy.
“The Organist” could have come from Huysmans. Holy cathedrals are the battlefields where performers of darkness and light duel in thunderous crescendos.

One of the reasons I bought Heqet was because this collection was hailed as modern decadence.
Curious, I thought. I reside in a time where electorates routinely install liars as representatives and judges.
Where children are massacred weekly in classrooms and citizens no nothing.
What fictions will be transgressive and taboo in an ethically bankrupt society?
Invention pales next to our ugly daily realities. Vitam vivere.