- CRAQUER (an Essay on Class Struggle)
- by Camille Roy
- 2002, published by Second Story
- designed by Mary Burger
- 40 pp, 5.5" x 7.5", hand bound with clips
- only $10.00
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CRAQUER is both a pun on 'cracker' and a term dating from the French Revolution meaning 'to tell dubious stories'. The book delivers a comic yet deft investigation into the secrets of class and family history. The family in question, bohemian and communist, has deep roots in a hard scrabble and inventive lower class clan, as well as a slew of terrifying upper class relations. Roy, caught in these cross-currents, delivers not only a hilarious family history, but also an extraordinary investigation into American social class as performance and as desire.
...Who hasn't been lied to, constantly? Viewed from another angle, it's a gift. I remember Pearl, eyeing me after a few vodkas with the closest thing that she possessed to wickedness, You - she snapped - can write. You're like your father. I just can't. Then stalking off into the remainder of her mysterious evening.
Pearl's stories pulsed with desire, fantasy, and dread. They became me. Then they blurred, disappeared. I live in the aftermath. The snag, its lingering disturbance, feels muscular. It resides there, as I shove one foot ahead of the other, in all the sites of pleasure and aggression, intact as my confidence.