Severance/Intercourse by Robert Olen Butler

This is a tale of two books, bound together as one. The reader need only flip and reverse to move between a collection of vignettes describing moments of intercourse or the 90 seconds of consciousness following decapitation. So, ‘La petite mort’ or, well… the bigger one.

An initially strange sounding pairing settles into clarity when considering the French term for orgasm translates to 'the brief loss or weakening of consciousness'. Pulitzer prize-winning author Robert Olen Butler depicts the untethered post-chop streams of thought as the viscous liquid of dreams. Worryingly, the carnal ponderings are similarly surreal and meandering.

This is experimental writing in its purest form, comparable in many ways to Édouard Levé's Newspaper – that dark collection of fictionalised reports. While Levé’s aim was to reflect the modern world as reported through our media, Olen Butler’s seems more fragmented. Apart from the title themes, there seems little to build these collections into some grand vision. They are still highly entertaining – these imagined moments of real people (Intercourse features such notables as Charles & Diana, Bonnie & Clyde, Whitman & Wilde. Severance includes Yukio Mishima, Anne Boleyn, Jayne Mansfield. Everyday unknowns also take their place, and in both cases, for some reason, a chicken).

Kudos to indy publisher NOEXIT2 for this beautifully designed, reversible double offering; a curio in form as well as content. A must for fans of sex and death.