My only caveat is that I have to find said unlikable characters interesting: Emma Bovary, for instance, is not a particularly clever character, you could say she is quite the opposite. of my time reading this novel was me wondering if what i am reading right now would have any importance later on.

The book this felt closest to for me, however, is the ideas in Roberto Bolaño’s Distant Star and how art can have moral boundaries that, when crossed, becomes evil. sometimes when you read books written by male authors, particularly older books, almost every female character in the book is subjected to a rather scrutinising description of their body and appearance. Eliza Clark did an amazing job with this incredibly original debut and I was intrigued from the first page.BOY PARTS is the incendiary debut novel from Eliza Clark, a pitch-black comedy both shocking and hilarious, fearlessly exploring the taboos of sexuality and gender roles in the twenty-first century. Not unlike Psycho we do see this as a criticism on wealth and consumerism as one of the themes—amusingly, Irina gets termed as a ‘working-class’ artist despite being able to afford fancy universities something she has an uneasy relationship with seeing it as both an insult but not upset it can help open doors for her—and, well, the violence and unreliable narration.

Then things just get messy, and not a good kind of messy where I am enthralled by our mc’s unreliable and increasingly disconcerting narrative, but messy in a poorly executed kind of way.Co-produced by Metal Rabbit, the play will run at Soho theatre, a venue with a history of solo shows about “messy” female protagonists, such as Phoebe Waller-Bridge’s Fleabag and Liz Kingsman’s One-Woman Show. All of this to say is that I can deal with and even appreciate characters who for whatever reason do, think, or say things that are ‘frowned’ upon or downright evil. And don’t get me started on how large chunks of the narrative make her abuse of men seem so f*cking transgressive and hardcore when it was anything but.