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Guest Review of Consumed by Bruce Wagner Photo Credit: Myrna Suarez
Photo Credit: Caitlin Cronenberg
Gore-igami
To say that David Cronenberg's radically poetic, necromantic, numinous, homicidally erotic first novel'if one may call it that because for me his entire oeuvre is novelistic'is about cannibalism would be like saying Borges' work is about libraries or Escher's prints are about crows and staircases. (A character making an off-stage appearance in Consumed is Sagawa, the true-life necrophiliac and murderer who cannibalized a woman in Paris and became a Tokyo celebrity after his extradition and release. He went on to write restaurant reviews. All of which makes Cronenberg's deliriously serpentine narrative more than plausible.) Yet Consumed is a companion to those weltanschauungs, in that it rapturously finger-paints the hallucinatory avalanche of information in our time and how we enter the river of streaming data to emerge from those waters consecrated in the New Dream'the scary, brave old world of unfathomable morphing realities. In this way it resembles Borges' prophetic 'Internet' story, 'Tl+¦n, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius' and even 'The insects of M.C. Escher' (cf. Cultural Entomology Digest. As in many of the great director's explorations, insects buzz large in Consumed as well). This novel is ultimately about the human scanner devouring image and text, thus becoming transformed. Like the Ouroboros symbol of the snake