CUNT BY STEWART HOME - SYNOPSIS

The narrator of Cunt is David Kelso. He's a cunt in search of cunt. He's also a writer who claims to be so lacking in imagination that his fiction isn't fiction. Kelso is completing a trilogy in which he describes tracking down and shagging the first thousand women he bedded. Despite boasting that he is completely uncreative, Kelso dreams up some seriously Machiavellian scenarios in order to get into the knickers of various women he hasn't seen for years. Kelso is also disarmingly candid about the fact that he sometimes fakes his results. Such dissimulation raises serious doubts about Kelso's reliability as a narrator.

Cunt is simultaneously David Kelso's journal and a post-modern variant on one of the oldest genres of prose fiction, the picturesque novel. Kelso's wanderings take him from London to East Anglia and from there to Finland, Sweden, Estonia and the highlands and islands of Scotland. Regardless of whether the backdrop is the beautifully preserved medieval city of Tallinn or the Callanish standing stones, Kelso's primary preoccupation is pussy. However, the relentless sexual action is occasionally frozen so that the narrator can reflect drunkenly on the philosophy of Deleuze and Guattari or literary obsessions that encompass writers as diverse as Thomas Nashe and George Gissing.

While doubling and repetition are a significant feature of Cunt, they are used primarily for humorous effect. Incidents on the road occur in a definite sequence but despite a shock ending, the novel is not strongly plotted. Kelso is a soak and after a bender in Finland he loses the plot completely for a couple of chapters. He can recall sexual encounters with teenage girls, three in a bed romps with older women and even a murder- but finds it difficult to place these events in the correct order or any meaningful context. Rather than worrying about this, Kelso simply fucks his way back to the British Isles. Cunt can be read as pornography, satire, travelogue or a combination of all the above and much else besides.

Cunt was published by The Do-Not Press in 1999 and is currently out of print. A print on demand version of the book may be available in the near future. Check the 'Buy' section of this site!

Cunt as a news story

Bibliography