This is definitely not a book for children: suicide, rape, heroin addiction, beatings and thoughts of patricide percolate through its pages; there is a sex scene set in a cemetery, a grotesque description of a used condom ("glistening in the grass beside her feet, like the gossamer cocoon of some huge grub") and alarming scenes of violent domestic abuse.
The next stop is Jenny's, a simple shop with a nearly grotesque abundance of description-defying tropical fruits hanging from every beam and sitting on every raised surface.
Carpentier was an admirer of the elegance and wit in the work of satirical French writers and artists of the eighteenth century, and often employed grotesques in his descriptions to ridicule the ostentation of colonial aristocracy.
An exemplar of the "grotesque" aesthetic (a description which only skims the surface of this important text), Berg's words are alive with the transformative processes of the organic: deterioration, deracination, alienation, compulsion.
But that was only the beginning, this time around: from the bizarre ("Varney the Vampire" by James Malcolm Rymer in 1845) to the salacious (Joseph Sheridan Le Fanu's "Carmilla," which started the lesbian vampire genre in 1872) to the grotesque (Charles Baudelaire's description of a vampire as "a wine-skin with gluey sides, all full of pus")--vampires of all kinds have always been the rage.
"The Mystery Is in the Ordinary, Uncool Things" - An Interview with Author Juliet Escoria .
He has a good survey of Jewish involvement in football, including a stomach-churning description of a grotesque game in Theresienstadt concentration camp.
The attempt to find parallels between one's marital unhappiness and the most horrible crime in history is dubious, to say the least -- grotesque might be a better description.
Feitlowitz's analysis of the junta's propaganda also seems somewhat naive, although her description of the grotesque apologies for the dictatorship made by the American public relations company Burson-Marsteller are appropriately horrifying.
The mushroom cloud, Hubbard wrote, rose to a height of 60,000ft - "a sight of such majesty and grotesque beauty that it defies adequate description".
