Some more reviews of The Eyes, with commentary by the esteemed Espanish exponent of extremissimity:
I wasn’t half as impressed with this short-story collection as I hoped to be. It’s too well-written to be called bad and too disturbing to be called boring, but of all the stories, only “Ikarus” approaches greatness. The rest begin as vague and confusing messes until they reach that certain moment of horror and atrocity that seem to wake the author up; then they abruptly end. I couldn’t dismiss the impression that Jesús Ignacio Aldapuerta himself took no interest whatsoever in anything he wrote here but for those few paragraphs of shocking perversity. It’s not enough to make The Eyes worth reading. Except for “Ikarus.” This story is like all the others until a nameless man crashes a rocket-powered interceptor called a Bachem Ba-349 Natter into a B-17 bomber. From there the story evokes a surreal atmosphere of cosmic horror and unknowableness as the pilot explores the strange bomber, walking its huge cathedral-like fuselage while the airplane “floated kilometers high over a black, unending sea. Far, very far below, almost directly under him, the reflection of an almost full moon lay flat and corroded on smooth water.” Then he finds an alien device torturing a woman to death. If it had all been like this, I would be calling The Eyes brilliant, but none of the other stories reached this level of fascination for me.
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This isn’t a bad book, just an exceedingly oversold one. It’s the first and thus far only English-language collection of stories by the late Jesús Ignacio Aldapuerta, the so-called “Andalusian de Sade” who specialized in scatological excess. In truth this book’s gross-out quotient is about equal to that found in the writing of better-known practitioners of Sadean literature like James Havoc and Simon Whitechapel, even if the back-cover description proclaims that “to read all the stories of Aldapuerta’s infamous THE EYES is, perhaps in fact, to become mad, or worse” and that “Once read, they will be with you always.”
If the introduction by Lucía Teodora is to be believed, Jesús Ignacio Aldapuerta was a petty thief obsessed with pornography who immolated himself (or was murdered) in 1987. THE EYES, originally translated into English by Aldapuerta himself in 1986, is representative of his many unsavory obsessions, and possibly of his actual crimes. The prose, alas, is only intermittently effective, which may have something to do with the translation, or simply the fact that Aldapuerta, who died at age thirty-seven, still had a ways to go before fully hitting his stride as a writer.
The eleven stories collected here all pivot on death and perversion, more often than not in the form of sociopathic individuals who happen upon the aftermath of horrific accidents that inflame those individuals’ psychoses. Particularly representative examples include “Ikarus,” about a Nazi pilot who discovers a woman enclosed in some kind of bizarre torture-machine, “Yin & Yang,” in which a man makes weird patterns with the flesh and organs of some frozen corpses he discovers in a crashed plane, and “Orphea,” featuring a nut who fellates himself with a woman’s severed head.
The most effective of THE EYES’ stories, and the only one that really lives up to the grandiose back-cover claims, is the startling and repellent “Armful.” It’s about an incarcerated pervert who literally devours a little girl he (rather improbably) finds locked up with him. The poetic grotesquerie of the tale is very much in the vein of the aforementioned James Havoc, yet with a verve unique to Mr. Aldapuerta, who was a sick fuck without question but also a (somewhat) talented one.
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Take De Sade’s “120 Days of Sodom”, add a dash of George Bataille’s “Madame Edwarda”, “Blue of Noon”, “The Dead Man” and garnish with the ‘grand finale’ of André Pieyre de Mandiargues’ “Portrait of an Englishman in his Château” and you have a rough idea of the bloodsport and delights to be found herein. (Don’t forget your “Lobster Bib” and a Big Grin before you dig in!). Positively ‘lip-smacking’!
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