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Volume 3, Issue 20
Book ReviewsSEX DEATH ENLIGHTENMENTby Mark Matousek I read a book the other day that reminded me of both R. Krishnamurti and Margaret Atwood, and I am now stymied. Never before has there been on the passenger seat of my 1995 Ford Lemon a book so easternly western as Sex Death Enlightenment. Author Mark Matousek proves his worth and authority to share his spiritual discoveries by tracing a past full of substantive experience in a challenging world. There's not a gram of fluff in this book. Matousek was an editor for Andy Warhol following two decades of the most horrific types of abuse imaginable. As a child, he was buffeted by horrible images of his sister's suicide and his father's abuse, not to mention his mother's inevitable alcohol/ promiscuity spiral. There were other things, too, but we shall not speak of them because book reviews aren't $3.95 summaries designed to let students get wasted the night before an essay test and still pass the mid-term. Suffice it to say Matousek went through the wringer early in life. He informs us of his torments with a lyrical style most writers dream of. It's rare to learn so much from an autobiography like Sex Death Enlightenment. What I mean is that students of narrative ought to peruse this book to get insight about making dialogue flow like moonshine from a buckshot-riddled hooch barrel. When I started this book I was lying in the grass fifty feet away from the main stage of a rock festival, with no concentration problems whatsoever. Oh, but then I read some more in bed, but that's nothing to brag about. I was sucked into the beauty of the story. It's a moving tale of a gay writer desperate for the "big answers" to questions he hasn't yet figured out how to ask. His travels take him through countless onenight stands, reverent episodes with a lover in India, and to a house in Germany where he receives enlightenment from a woman he thinks may be his ultimate guru. When Matousek's AIDS-afflicted friend approaches the end of her battle with terminal illness, his answers begin to appear. He experiences a series of phenomena that unify his western background with eastern mysticism and turn his skeptical mind around. His final discovery about life and its purpose brings him around to face his childhood traumas with amazing clarity. This climactic self-discovery is amazing because of Matousek's flair for bringing his life to the reader so intimately. Sex Death Enlightenment is a fantastic journey of philosophy, depravity and virtually every aspect of the modern condition through the eyes of a victim. It's not a feel good, bullcrap manifesto on how to lead the good life. It's an exploration of very real insanity that brings serenity to the table. Matousek is a writer with genuine finesse. He shows us the connectedness of all things by telling a horrific tale at a time when AIDS hit this country with relentless force.
--Christian Lane-Kinne
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