RaveThe RumpusAs with his complex deployment of the Things Fall Apart reference, Barrett shows a gift for stacking allusions with great irony, which is the true discomfiting power of weep-inward satire, as opposed to laugh-aloud comedy. To read this novel as a contemporary Nigerian take on Kafka is to do it a disservice. There is something more profound at work in the oscillation between the writing and the reading of Blackass.
