Paul Bryant's Reviews > The Tunnel
The Tunnel
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What I learned from this novel is that if you look intensely and soulfully at a painting in a gallery and the artist himself happens to see you doing it and conceives the notion that you and only you alone have perceived the true great meaning of this work you might find yourself cajoled, inveigled, drawn in, stalked obsessively, obsessed over night and day, belittled, berated, bewildered, bamboozled, brutalised and finally stabbed and killed in a blizzard of male rage in just exactly the same way these ghastly things are done in any old vulgar sex crime you might see on Forensic Files or in the pages of your local tabloid, and so the moral is clear : if out of the corner of your eye you do see the famous artist looking at you looking, you should beat it out of there as fast as your little feet can carry you and don’t look back until you’re back behind double-locked doors, because he might, just might, be the protagonist of an existential novel from the 1940s.
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Daniela
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rated it 3 stars
Jul 07, 2020 04:04PM
Or he might be a character from Seinfeld, either Jerry or George! As far as I can remember, this book has a passage that resembles a lot The Lobby Stakeout scene from Seinfeld (here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9tFa5...)
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well I never saw that before and now you mention it, you're right, it is exactly like that in the book, but without any trace of humour. However, later, there is a really funny scene when the paranoid painter gives a registered letter to the post office counter lady then immediately thinks twice and asks for it back and she demands proof of his identity before she does, which he hasn't got. That is exactly like something Larry David would have created in Curb Your Enthusiasm.
Oh, absolutely agree about the humor; well put. And I had forgotten the passage you associated with Larry David, and now I can totally see it. This character really is something else.