Review: Oedipus Complex
Rating: 5 out of 5
Date: 09 1, 2012
"I didn't want to follow in my father's footsteps", announces Rusty Hankover in the opening paragraph. This comment can be read in two ways once you've finished reading the short story... And that's precisely what I like about Martin Lastrapes's work: words are not chosen at random, and a ten-page story of his shouldn't be taken as a light read.No one is innocent in "Footsteps", which makes its characters paradoxically both repelling and interesting, human. They can be found involved in one or more of the following: lying, cheating, doing drugs, fetichism, homicide, cannibalism, ... Sometimes in quite a funny way, for instance when Rusty wonders why he hates his father: "Maybe it was the residue of white powder on his nostril the night he gave me a black eye for smoking pot."Nothing is gross or shocking in this short story, but rather literary and precisely constructed. There's a game of mirrors at work that could be interesting to get into (notice the opposition white / black, nostril / eye and cocaine / pot in the quote above...) , from the opening paragraph which announces the last one, to Rusty's penchant for body parts (feet) and the act of cannibalism, not to mention the exact opposition between the male duo he forms with his father and the female duo in the shop's cabin...After reading, the expression "poetic justice" kept coming back in my mind, so I looked up its definition on Wikipedia to make sure I wasn't going the wrong way with this:"Poetic justice is a literary device in which virtue is ultimately rewarded or vice punished, often in modern literature by an ironic twist of fate intimately related to the character's own conduct."And that's when I laughed out loud: Martin Lastrapes managed to write a tale of twisted poetic justice! More seriously though: this is an excellent short story, both funny and deep, way more meaningful than it seems if you read it too quickly.