Geek Love is a complex novel that resists definition. Experimenting heavily with all sorts of drugs and chemicals while pregnant, Lil gives birth to a colourful cast of characters that become Geek Love: Arturo, known as Arty or later Aqua Boy, a megalomaniac with flippers instead of limbs gifted musicians and conjoined twins Electra and Iphigenia Fortunato, known in the family as Chick, the youngest born who appears to be a ‘norm’ but is discovered to hold potent telekinetic powers and finally our narrator Olympia, a bald, hunchedbacked albino dwarf who becomes the mouthpiece for her family both at the carnival-where she is trained up by her father as an orator-and in the form of the book itself. Yet the Binewskis are far from being your typical American family, and this is no typical gang of carnies each child, and performer, is a labour of love on the part of Crystal Lil and Alonysius, the matriarch and patriarch of the family who together decide to thwart the declining carnival business they have inherited from Al’s parents by producing their very own panoply of disparate and eccentric performers. The story itself revolves around the Binewskis, a family of carnival performers who travel around the United States flaunting their full array of talents to ever-increasing crowds of spectators. Re-published by Abacus twenty five years after its original release, this brand edition of the American cult classic Geek Love features a handsome new cover boasting endorsements from Kurt Cobain to Douglas Coupland, Audrey Niffenegger to Jeff Buckley, with Terry Gilliam calling it ‘the most romantic novel about love and family I have read’. They would do anything to be unique’” p.319. Each of these innocents on the street is engulfed by a terror of their own ordinariness. Dunn is survived by her son and husband.“‘I get glimpses of the horror of normalcy. Her School of Hard Knocks art project (published here), which chronicled the history of Stateside boxing gyms with photographer Jim Lommasson, notably won the Dorothea Lange–Paul Taylor Prize in 2004. On the nonfiction front, Dunn was especially known for her boxing writings, which, in 2009, were anthologized in One Ring Circus: Dispatches From the World of Boxing. Dunn also penned the novels Attic and Truck, and filed pieces for such publications as the New York Times, PDXS, Playboy, The Oregonian, and Willamette Week, among many others, over the course of a roughly four-decade career.
“It’s so influential.” Now a cult classic, the book was published in 1989 and became a National Book Award finalist that year. The 70-year-old’s son confirmed the update with Willamette Week on Thursday, citing complications from lung cancer. ” Geek Love is a book that will live forever,” said Jeff Baker, a retired Oregonian critic, upon learning the news.
Katherine Dunn, writer of the best-selling novel Geek Love, died Wednesday at her Portland home. Photo: Elisabetta Villa/2008 Getty Images
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