Thongs

Review by Andrew Murray Scott

‘Eroticism is, I believe, the approval of life even to the point of death,’ wrote Glasgow-born novelist Alexander Trocchi in an early student essay at Glasgow University and this statement neatly sums up the half-dozen erotic novels he wrote in Paris between 1954 and 1956.

The theme of Thongs is masochism and brutality, and how they feed off each other. Like much of Trocchi’s fiction, including his better-known novels, Cain’s Book and Young Adam, there is a central character isolated from the mores of normal society.

Alexander Trocchi

Alexander Trocchi was born in Glasgow in 1925. He attended Glasgow University, and served in the navy during the Second World War. Trocchi moved to Paris, where he edited the literary journal Merlin and wrote novels that fell into the ‘Beat Movement’ category as well as pornographic books published by Olympia Press. He also became addicted to heroin. After Paris he spent time in Taos NM and New York City. Trocchi was involved in the 60s counter-culture, participating in the Situationist International and conceiving his own Sigma project. He eventually settled in London where he sold second-hand books. Trocchi died in 1984. He is remembered as a controversial figure, perhaps best known for his reissued novels such as Young Adam, Cain’s Book and Thongs.

Andrew Murray Scott has written a biography, Alexander Trocchi: The Making of a Monster and edited Invisible Insurrection of a Million Minds: A Trocchi Reader.

Beat Writers at Work, The Paris Review Interviews

Review by Andrew Murray Scott

Leaders of the beat generation talk intimately and freely about their literary methods, drug use, sexual activities, politics and the hedonistic 1950s in America in this series of extended interviews from the Paris Review.