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Disco Sour
by Giuseppe Porcaro
(Unbound, £10)
WHEN reviewing a novel it helps to have something to work with — engaging characters, a discernible plot, a carefully penned exploration of human experience.
[[{"fid":"4362","view_mode":"inlineright","fields":{"format":"inlineright","field_file_image_alt_text[und][0][value]":false,"field_file_image_title_text[und][0][value]":false},"link_text":null,"type":"media","field_deltas":{"1":{"format":"inlineright","field_file_image_alt_text[und][0][value]":false,"field_file_image_title_text[und][0][value]":false}},"attributes":{"class":"media-element file-inlineright","data-delta":"1"}}]]But when a book churns through the presses and not only fails to provide any of the above but seems to positively revel in its shameless lack of content, one inevitably smells a rat.
Giuseppe Porcaro's Disco Sour, ostensibly about a dystopian future in which nation states have collapsed and where the European Union “holds on, preventing anarchy” — a theme which takes up, perhaps, a quarter of a very short book — is mostly an agglomeration of autobiographical passages about the author’s tedious sex life, punctuated with random swathes of text lifted wholesale from Wikipedia.
In one of many such instances, there's his observation that in “communist” Czechoslovakia, “only high-ranking party officials and heads of factories were driven in T603s … Former Cuban President Fidel Castro is believed to have owned a white T603 featuring air conditioning.”
Compare and contrast that statement with the Wikipedia entry, “In Communist Czechoslovakia only high-ranking party officials and heads of factories were driven in T603s … Former Cuban President Fidel Castro is believed still to have owned a white T603 featuring air conditioning.”
According to Porcaro, “every author eventually finds their own methodology. Mine has been to alternate solitude with collaboration.” Quite.
One has to admire the writer's brazenness, at least. It seems that Porcaro’s reward for squeezing an heroic European Union into his cut-and-paste-ridden fiction is the Altiero Spinelli prize for outreach — intended to “broaden the ownership of the European project and build trust in the EU” — which brings with it some €30,000. Collaboration, indeed.
Possessing nothing but an insatiable desire for self-promotion and an ability to press Ctrl+C at the same time, Porcaro has nonetheless foisted his Establishment-sponsored ego trip onto an undeserving world.
With such stellar propagandists at the disposal of the EU, one wonders how Brexit ever came to pass.
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