You Too Can Have a Body Like Mine audiobook

You Too Can Have a Body Like Mine begins as a chronicle of the smallness and aimlessness of everyday life, something that might seem very recognisable to many of us. Remaining unnamed for the entire story, our narrator worries about her creepy roommate, B, and the empty relationship she has with her boyfriend, C. She watches TV advertisements. She goes to work, part-time, at a local office, where she sits in a cubicle designated for freelancers and proofreads copy for obscure magazines with titles like New Age Plastics and Fantastic Pets. She observes the neighbours across the street - an ordinary lot, until the day the whole family abandons their house and troops off clad in white sheets, leaving the words 'HE WHO SITS NEXT TO ME, MAY WE EAT AS ONE' daubed on the garage. Along with B's bizarre behaviour, this is an early indicator that the story may be something a bit more twisted and inventive than it initially appears. Images of consumer culture are significant in You Too..., particularly a series of adverts for Kandy Kakes, an entirely synthetic sweet snack. The TV commercials all feature the brand's mascot, Kandy Kat, who chases the animated Kakes ever-more-desperately through a series of different scenes and situations. Kandy Kat's endlessly fruitless pursuit is an idea familiar from old cartoons - Tom and Jerry, or Wile E. Coyote and Road Runner - but his physical appearance takes on disturbing aspects more suited to a 'lost episode' creepypasta ('the bones and tendons of the arm show starkly... the stomach distended and throbbing through the thin cover of skin... he was biting so hard that his teeth cracked'), while the accompanying slogans are ripped straight from a nightmare ('KANDY KAKES: WE KNOW WHO YOU REALLY ARE').The narrator is initially afraid that B is emulating her, trying to take her place, but it slowly starts to seem as though the opposite might be the case; the narrator destroys B's makeup and vandalises her room, then begins to stalk C in the same way she'd earlier described B harassing an ex-boyfriend. The narrator's quest to track down Kandy Kakes mirrors the antics of Kandy Kat; her physical deterioration, too.Other important elements of the plot include: Wally's, a supermarket chain where every member of staff wears a giant foam head, the aisles are frequently shifted in nonsensical ways to keep customers confused, and a chandelier made of food spins in the lobby; a phenomenon nicknamed Disappearing Dad Disorder, which involves men vanishing from their families' lives only to resurface months later in a different, but similar, place, often living with a replacement wife and children; Michael, a man who develops an obsession with stealing veal from food stores, and becomes a celebrity - and has his image used to advertise the meat - after he is caught; and a reality show named That's My Partner!, in which couples compete in bizarre tasks to determine how easily they can recognise their partner in disorientating situations (example: groping a roomful of naked strangers), and the losers are forced to split up. Finally, and ultimately most significantly, there's a sinister organisation known as the Church of the Conjoined Eater, which brings all the other elements together towards the end in a really rather ingenious manner.I thought at first that You Too... would be an American counterpart to Alice Furse's Everybody Knows This Is Nowhere, something about the sort of directionless life many of us find ourselves in during our twenties and thirties, still trying to figure out some sort of identity, doing a bearable job but not yet having a career, etc. And there are times when the narrator's cynical comments fit perfectly with that expectation - that's part of what balances the story so effectively. But the quiet horror and creeping surrealism of its details, eventually, reminded me more of the stories of Robert Aickman, or what I was hoping for when I had a go at reading the Welcome to Night Vale book.This is a strange and surreal novel. I don't think I can overemphasise that - I'd read reviews of it before I started, and an excerpt, and I was still surprised at exactly how weird (and I mean that in the sense of the phrase 'weird fiction') it was. I've been scanning back through some of those reviews, and I think maybe I was surprised because so many of them focus on aspects like the relationships between the narrator and B and C, or whatever the whole Kandy Kakes/Church of the Conjoined Eater arc has to say about body image, and when I was in the thick of the story, I didn't (or couldn't) read those elements that literally, or even see them as analogous to real life. I liked You Too... better the further it divorced itself from reality. It's entirely possible that I was reading it wrong, but either way - this is a brilliant story, and more subtle than it has any right to be given the often outlandish images it throws up. 2016 is only just beginning, but I've already found a favourite.

Having read two books in a row that were surrealist by female authors, I’ve decided to write a combined review comparing my reactions to them. You Too Can Have a Body Like Mine by Alexandra Kleeman and The Beautiful Bureaucrat by Helen Phillips. I will refer to them henceforth as YTCHABLM and TBB. When I began YTCHABLM, I thought it was going to be a contemporary version of Generation X by Douglas Coupland, and it initially threw me off as it evolved unexpectedly from real to surreal, but once I got past that shift, I thoroughly enjoyed it. On the other hand, TBB was a short, tight book with a consistent style, but in total, I disliked it. It struck me as gimmicky and artificial in plot. A game for the author with little true purpose and no meaningful themes. If I was to try to capture these books in a nutshell, I would describe YTCHABLM as The Stranger for Millennials, while TBB was the movie Angel Heart starring Mickey Rourke rehashed from a female perspective.YTCHABLM has something else going for it: humor. It was strung throughout with amusing commentary and dialogue about relationships, television and commercialism, food, religion, and our physical bodies. The title of the book threw me off quite a bit. I expected some kind of satire of the modeling industry, but rather, Kleeman’s take on the body is more about how we are alienated from our physical bodies by culture. Especially women but men too. Through the agricultural/advertising/grocery chains of the world, through the cosmetics industry, through porn and mediated by the contemporary struggle to achieve intimacy in relationships. I did not expect the surreal turn of YTCHABLM…the first quarter of the book is a relatively realistic view of two female slacker roommates and the main character’s relationship with her arrogant slacker boyfriend. Clues begin to pop up in the story that this is going to take a turn away from realism, such as a repeated series of highly elaborate TV commercials that are much too long and intricate to be actual commercials. And too many of them in a series as well. They are almost more morality tales of the artificial food industry, metaphors expressing the means by which media manufactures desire for utterly worthless crap. At the same time, the main character begins to lose touch with her body, with communication and even with common sense. Her character evolves to become after a time, an empty vessel carrying forth only certain behaviors wrought in her by habit. This is where it dovetails for me with The Stranger. And as a side note, she calls her boyfriend C and her roommate B, which reminds me of The Trial by Kafka whose main character is Joseph K. YTCHABLM becomes a modern Existentialist drama/comedy with our character surrendering her identity and personal agency to live in a state of emptiness where nothing really seems to matter.TBB, on the other hand, seems to lack meaningful or profound themes. Which is unexpected, because YTCHABLM comes from a very contemporary moment, while TBB is vaguely more universal in setting (not placed so particularly in our time). Although a few sour notes like repeated mention of the brand “Coca-Cola” marred that. The title of TBB irritated me quite a bit. The plot was a gimmick, and so was the title. The main character gets hired into a job that one would assume is a corporate job in a faceless building in the city. It’s certainly never stated as being a “government” job. The main character is in a data entry/filing capacity but amazingly with her own office. Rather than being labeled a corporate drone, she suddenly calls herself a “bureaucrat,” which as I understand it is a term for a government employee with an implied conservative critique of government, the claim that “all that red tape” is a waste of money for the taxpayer. Also, too many laws get in the way of shit getting done. Yes, our taxes are somewhat complicated, but this is an exaggerated claim simply asserted by an ideology that wants to gut government for private enterprise. So the use of the term “bureaucrat” set up a very particular implication that didn’t sit well with me from the beginning. Then the “Beautiful” reference in the title seems to be about a secondary character? Who is like a slightly overweight Barbie doll? But…why name the book after this secondary character? There was really no reason. A title chosen for greatest draw at the bookstore, I suppose. The wordplay in TBB also was thrown in arbitrarily. Oh the husband and wife like to play on words together? I guess…unfortunately her husband had zero personality so that premise was ungrounded. Another gimmick technique to beef up the literary creds for this empty novel.The surreal aspects of YTCHABLM crept in gradually. I could perhaps quibble with that, but in the end, her approach worked for me. They grew out of the psychology of our culture. By contrast the surreal aspects of TBB hit early on. And they felt utterly contrived. They struck me as the author setting out to “write a surrealist novel” and coming up with a “clever twist” the readers “won’t see coming.” In the end, I saw no point to TBB. It was smoke and mirrors with no substance. On the other hand, YTCHABLM was, in a way, about smoke and mirrors. About the illusions our culture creates distorting our feelings and views about our bodies and our relationships. Kleeman won me over.

Alexandra Kleeman porta nella contemporaneità una grazia claustrofobica e l'estraneità nei confronti del mondo che potrei saper ritrovare solo in Philip Dick. Laddove lui riconosceva che tutto ciò che vediamo è un riflesso in uno specchio (ed è lo specchio la realtà), A. un giorno non riesce più a riconoscere sé stessa. Non riesce più a percepire il proprio corpo, se non attraverso il confronto con quello degli altri. L'alienazione passa attraverso le pubblicità, i cibi confezionati, la mancata empatia e non ci sono volti, veri esseri umani, solo costumi, lenzuoli con i buchi per gli occhi, eroi televisivi.

Recensione: http://bit.ly/2mDKZ7L

Oh my God. This novel so pleasantly intrudes on everything I've ever hoped to write and puts the narrative flesh on the skins of the vignettes I have written. If you enjoy the alternate universe of Atwood's Maddadam trilogy (religious cult re: food and fake food and beauty products) and/or just want to see a novel tackle body dysmorphia in a way that's not grossly chick lit -- in a way that's expressly and uniquely literary -- just read this book.Kleeman paints a here-and-now that's only slightly more hyperbolic than our own. Think couple's reality shows with more grim-dark rules and consequences, pastry ads that take the Trix Rabbit to the next level, grocery stores that use "consumer insights" to rearrange themselves systematically to prolong the shopping experience. Common denominators: food and relationships. And these things just happen to intersect too. You think it would be boring to watch a narrator worry about how she looks in profile while she and her boyfriend watch TV together, but really, it just hits home. The whole thing is like an exestentailist slumber party. And a slumber party does happen, which is even better.…THE PROSE.

If you're like me you've also been hoping Miranda July and Amelia gray would get together and collaborate on a remake of single white female. Except this version has Don DeLillo editing the script into the story of a woman having an existential crisis in a "Wally" an invasive species of chain megastore clearly designed by Ayn Rand. Shoppers are warned "weakness thrives on help". Her roommate has gradually become more her than her, absorbing her boyfriend in the process. She ventures to Wally to find a product, not unlike a crowbar, to make her feel more like herself, and is directed to the veal. Then it gets weird.

Ser, no ser y dejar de ser. La identidad como producto que se publicita, se adquiere, se consume y se desecha. Me ha costado seguir adelante con la lectura porque me producía una ansiedad terrible. Por alguna razón me recuerda a una especie de Black Mirror versión millennial (salvando las distancias y bastante menos casposa que la serie) y solo quería gritarle a la protagonista huye, huye, huye! Hace una crítica mordaz al sistema capitalista y la hace de forma inteligente y original. Toda la novela está aderezada con pequeñas notas de humor ácido, elementos muy «pop», pero el plato principal es esa desazón lacerante que atraviesa todo el contexto social de la historia, los personajes y la relación entre ellos.

Alexandra Kleeman is an impressive talent. Her postmodern, semi-surrealist debut is as sharp as a razor. The protagonist loses her sense of self (literally and figuratively) in a consumerist candyland, her body evaporating by the page, as she becomes a detached observer of her own life. Kleeman's book is full of smart, piquant observations about self, projection, and culture. Can't wait to see what she writes next.

Ho sempre desiderato quel tipo di intimità, profonda ma indiretta, un amore agile ed effervescente come un programma televisivo.Se doveste scommettere su una sola casa editrice indipendente, fate che quest'anno sia Black Coffee e che il titolo sia Il Corpo che vuoi. Una parabola discendente e vorticosa, uno squarcio viscoso sull'americanità post-DeLillo e Foster Wallace. Il Corpo che vuoi è un incubo alla Pynchon con tematiche aggiornate e una scrittura più lineare che non ha niente da nascondere. Veramente forte, uno di quei romanzi che non puoi leggere durante il giorno, perché niente di ciò che racconta può aver senso se letto da sveglio.

A deeply strange novel that, by the end, totally disassembled me. You Too Can Have A Body Like Mine is a hilarious, dark, and indignant vivisection of consumerism, of capitalism, of branding, of the synthetic replications that have come to define our world and ourselves, while also asking profoundly important questions, both existential and ontological, about the way we relate to one another, about the slipperiness of our identities we like to think of as fixed. A debut to beat the band. Can't wait for her story collection next year.

getting in a cult and feeling like i'm doing a bad job at the cult and all the other cult members are making fun of me for sucking so bad at culting is both very specific and very relatable

Video review https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-7m5J...3.5*

This is one of those books that’s bizarre, surreal and unsettling from the very beginning to the very end – to the point where I can’t adequately convey just how weird it is. It’s full of quirky people thinking and acting in absurd ways that brilliantly and hilariously satirize the mindless superficiality of modern life.The narrator of the story – known only as A – begins to notice strange things happening around her. Her roommate is gradually trying to absorb her identity, her boyfriend suddenly disappears and her neighbors abandon their home to join a mysterious new cult. There’s more to the plot than that, but any attempt to explain it here just wouldn’t make any sense whatsoever. Trust me.I truly enjoyed immersing myself in A’s peculiar world, as uncomfortable as it was at times. It’s not easy to create a successful satire – especially in today’s world when it all seems to have already been done before – but Kleeman has risen to the challenge with an imaginative novel about an alienated young woman struggling to find herself. There are many pertinent themes throughout, but above all is the concept of hunger and consumption in various forms: spiritual, emotional and physical.Fans of The First Bad Man, I highly recommend checking this one out.

"La vita è ovunque, inevitabile, imprenscindibile."