Cows

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On Steven's first day we meet Gummy (yeah....we find out why Gummy doesn't have lips or teeth) and Cripps - damn Cripps.....Cripps who has this insatiable sexual fatherly taste towards Steven and gives us soooo many words of wisdom. We also almost meet a strange pair of eyes hidden behind the grate by Steven's work station.

This is a book about farming. About a family trying to make a living. And even though – as many, many people have repeatedly mentioned here – they accomplish this by “raising cattle just to slaughter them”, they manage to treat the animals with utmost respect. Yes, the cows and calves get slaughtered when their time comes. But that doesn’t influence the fact that, while they were alive, every single person on this farm gave their everything to make the lives of these animals as comfortable as possible.This was a very different kind of read for me and while I'm really happy I branched out and gave this one a go, I'm disappointed by the book in general. There were definitely some good takeaways from it but the whole thing overall left me feeling a bit strange and unsatisfied. One of the darkest and probably the most disgusting thing I have read, but I could not put it down. Undervejs glemmer læseren næsten, at det er køer, der er hovedpersonerne i Youngs fortællinger, for hun beskriver deres individualitet som værende lige så forskellig og kompleks som menneskers. Hos Kite’s Nest har de intelligente køer, dovne køer, stædige køer, generte køer, udadvendte køer og alle de andre egenskaber, man sædvanligvis knytter til en menneskelig personlighed. Men Young beskriver samtidig også, hvordan alle disse karaktertræk går tabt, hvis ikke køer får lov til at udfolde sig og udvikle deres egen unikke personlighed.

Det er en fin lille bog, og der er mange gode fortællinger, men jeg nåede også til at punkt, hvor jeg var lidt mættet i de mange historier fra Kite’s Nest. Jeg savnede mere videnskabelig opbakning og konkrete fakta, men jeg anerkender samtidig også, at det netop er narrativet, der gør den lille bog til noget ganske særligt. Den er både vedkommende og tankevækkende og introduktionen burde være pligtlæsning for enhver. There are only 13 or 14 species of megafauna that humans have ever found a use for. So if you’re an animal and humans don’t have a use for you, your time on the earth is not going to be very long.

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First, the good news. The story that Stokoe lays out in Cows is a road map of the development of a hypothetical sociopath murderer. The twisted tale follows the protagonist (if you can really call him that) from his abusive mother, through a metamorphosis of sorts (brought on by more abuse), and beyond. Stokoe’s writing is very good in that it will make the reader privy to the delusions and pressures within the character’s mind while almost making sense of the insane thought processes. For me, I wasn’t a big fan of the Cripps character. While he was important for Steven’s development and self discovery, I found his character to be too-over the top for the rest of the story. Stokoe : Okay, okay – look – in Cows, cows are completely symbolic. I mean look, I have them talking – in Cows, cows can talk! Which as you know, in real life, they can’t. I’m writing this new book on biodiversity loss. And I put in the original draft “intellectual vanity,” and the editor said, “You’re going to offend too many people.” But biodiversity is so important. I’d much rather they spend the money and the scientific effort to keep what we have left alive.

to avoid going into long physical descriptions of how cows greet, or scold, show distaste, etc, which would make the book much longer and far more scientific than the author intended. I was recommended this book and thought "What the Hell?" and then it was pointed out to me that it was in a genre called "Bizzaro Fiction"....so my nosey mind just had to look up what it meant and all the other books which fell into this. So picture me on a Friday at work...just adding book after book to my TBR shelf! In the apartment upstairs Lucy spends her nights searching for the toxins she knows are collecting inside her body, desperate to rid herself of them. When she enlists Steven's help to manipulate a piece of invasive medical apparatus, he begins to see that a better life might indeed be possible. Lucy could be his partner, they could make a home together, they could have a baby. They could be just like the folks on TV.​ But Willard denies any artistic merit within the book. He follows the trend that many do, that see Matthew Stokoe as a poor writer whose only intention was to cause controversy and sell a few more copies. I can't help but find allegory here for our modern life. We in Western society are so numb to violence, so used to being lied to in our media, so used to extremes in our entertainment, that we behave as those living in war-torn nations. There is an apathy and numbness in even the most privileged of us that drives us to further instant dopamine hits from our social media and from our fentanyl-laced heroin.

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I am one of the few. The very few. The absolute select few. I read Matthew Stokoe’s novel Cows and finished it. I am one of the even fewer, the fewest of the few, the almost singular, in that I believe that even though the words written are more disgusting than few authors dare to go, each scene they construct is intended as a cultural reflection. I'm not normally one to preface a review, or even mention in a review, when a book is not appropriate for certain audiences. (I hope to have duped a few of the weak-stomached into reading, say, Peter Sotos or Pan Pantziarka, because they deserve being read). But I'm going to start this one by saying, quite bluntly, Cows is not for everyone. In fact, Cows may not be for anyone. It is scatological, offensive, disgusting, filled to the brim with sex, violence, and sexual violence, and is probably capable of inciting nausea in those who are perfectly capable of sitting through atrocity footage and w Roxanne : Yeah? And how would you know so much about an obscure avant-garde novelist as all that? Your bluster butters no parsnips with us, buddy boy. We have this! (Five cows simultaneously hold up the photocopied picture.) I cried - yes I did.....and then I tried explaining it to my boyfriend who just looked at me like I had 6 heads....or was that 4 stomachs?? I tried - I really tried and all I could think to compare it to was Jonathan Swift's essay "A Modest Proposal".....OK everyone - go GOOGLE that and I'll wait till you return.......... Another way to put this would be to say that COWS makes a rum mixture of a large number of important provocations: morality, ethics, sexuality, perversity, nihilism, sadism… nearly every concept I have mentioned in this review, including beauty and harmony, is contested. But that observation is just another form of the puzzle I mentioned at the beginning: why, if a book manages to combine all these, is it not more or less automatically an important book?

So, the book opens with Steven starting his first day at work, yup, you guessed it...he is working at the SLAUGHTERHOUSE!! Ahhhh....hah....."Send in the COWS" (clowns? cows?) Christine : That’s right, you tell him! Listen, soon-to-be-trampled author-boy, in the first part of your opus you have your extreme-horror slaughterhouse fun with us cows, and then in the second part, you turn us into a fatuous allegory about fascism, where once again we play the mindless puppets. At every turn you debovinise us! We’re just your fodder! Roxanne: Don’t come the innocent with us, sunshine. You’re Matthew stokoe, author of the notorious novel Cows. Which we have read. And we’re cows, as you may have noticed. Please be aware that this article contains triggering subject matter. While key plot points have been omitted, severely disturbing material is alluded to. I’m going to do my best to stay spoiler free, but I wanted to just say – this is a book that if you need any sort of trigger warning, you’ll not make it very far into it. Have you watched 2 Girls 1 Cup? What was your response? If it was anything other than ‘what is the art behind this’ you’ll be best to pass. Things that occur – animal abuse and torture, self mutilation, matricide, infanticide, beastiality, scat play and ingestion and homicide just to name a few.Detail from Argus, Mercury and Io, by Jacob van Campen, 1630–1640(?). Royal Picture Gallery Mauritshuis. Wikimedia Commons. I can't recommend this book to anybody, ever! I saw the symbolism and got that the author was trying to make a statement and all that shit, but really HELL TO THE NO I was excited to read this because I thought it would give information about the intelligence of cows but I found that this felt like Rosamund just taking notes of the day-to-day happenings on her farm, with the odd preachy section dotted throughout. I completely understand the frustrations that the author has regarding mass-farming and I agree, but on the whole I found that the book was more about describing the personalities of particular cows on her farm rather than a more scientific approach which would have discussed cows as a species.