POETICS OF THE BOOK THE CONSUMER AND OTHER STORIES BY MICHAEL GIRA (excerpts) The author of the book The Consumer and Other Stories is Michael Gira, world- famous musician and the permanent leader of the increasingly popular American band Swans. In the first place he is known as the founder of one of the most iconic and original projects of underground scene, but Michael Gira is as well an extraordinary person and a writer. His biography is controversial and is full of events and knowledge of life in all its possible manifestations: travelling in Europe, drug experiences, hitchhiking across the United States, the Israeli prison, vagrancy with hippies, working at the plant. Certainly, all of these could not but reflect in his literary work. The Consumer and Other Stories was published in 1995 and was made as a collection of short stories, some of which were written specifically for the book, and some were created long before publication and included in a separate chapter Various traps, some weaknesses, etc. (in Russian edition these chapters are Various traps and Stories Written In Different Years). This book is not recommended for reading by nervous and impressionable people for this collection of stories contains a great deal of repulsive physiological details and descriptions, which often are of violent nature. There are scenes of incest, rape, physical and mental degradation and cannibalism. It is filled with pain, self-hatred, and hatred of people. All the protagonist’s attempts to find his identity are in vain, what’s more, in the majority of the stories he is trying to get rid of himself, his thoughts and body. But despite the surreal, cruel, and at times even perverse images, the reader feels author’s sophisticated perception of reality. Even though many stories shock, at the same time, the book is full of images and philosophical speculations, sincere feelings and emotions. That is why this book will be interesting for people who are curious about the deepest and darkest corners of human mind. In the book some stories are similar in theme and structure and, therefore, accordingly they can be divided into several groups. For example, some of them resemble the autobiographical sketches of childhood and adolescence, while others describe the scenes of violence against children. The idea of one of the key stories The Consumer, Rotting Pig, that is telling about the physical state of degradation in the complex philosophical paradigm, is also repeated in other stories. In some stories there are motifs of travelling and hitchhiking. Yet the most frequently developed theme in the book is self-destruction. By this word I mean self-hatred, causing physical pain to oneself and violence against other people, which also can be considered as a kind of self-destruction because it turns the main character into a bloodthirsty beast. It is important that the destruction and degradation interrelate with the expressed in the stories narrator’s beliefs: the protagonist believes that the modern society did not abandon violence that was typical for a primitive man, but merely disguised it in even more perverse forms. Thus, some of the stories reveal the subject of slavery, submission, domination; many of them develop the subject of social slavery as a conscious subordination to consumer society and established in the society norms. Social submission in its turn is also a way for the main character to escape from himself and his thoughts, because it relieves him from the necessity to think and reason independently. Another one subject developed in the stories is the subject of love and affection. Depicted in its own peculiar way, given in a variety of shades, but mostly in ones of a dark palette.