Firmin the rat sounds like just her type.
…Firmin takes us back to the night of his birth amid a shuffle of strip joints, seedy bars and pawn shops in Scollay Square in November 1960.
Firmin’s mother to be, “poor, ignorant Flo,” has just escaped the kicks of five sailors by scurrying into the basement of Pembroke Books. Driven on by the 13 unborn creatures inside her, Flo sinks her teeth into the biggest book in sight and rips whole pages into confetti. And so it is that Firmin and his siblings are born in a nest of James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake.
“I was birthed, bedded and suckled on the defoliated carcass of the world’s most unread masterpiece,” he recalls.
Flo has 12 nipples, and the math works against Firmin, whose hunger compels him to gnaw on the Joycean bedding. By osmosis, he learns to read. Soon, he’s working through shelf after shelf.
“My devourings at first were crude, orgiastic, unfocused, piggy — a mouthful of Faulkner was a mouthful of Flaubert as far as I was concerned,” he says.
Soon, Firmin spends most of his time reading and limits his snacking to the margins, working his way through Ezra Pound, Charles Dickens and Leo Tolstoy. When he finds a piece of lettuce, it tastes like Jane Eyre….
And you know, of course, that the anti-hero of Malcolm Lowry’s Under the Volcano is Geoffrey Firmin?
October 4th, 2008 at 12:34AM
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