Tacones

by Todd Klinck

Tacones is a hangout for a subculture of outlaws and rejects--crackhead murderers, transvestite prostitutes, biastogerontophiles, hustler boys, and addicts--all painfully beyond denial, searching for... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 1895636140
• ISBN13: 9781895636147
• Release Date: January 1997
• Publisher: Anvil Press
• Length: 128 Pages

Customer Reviews

Fireworks in purgatory

A mind-blowing slice of bohemian life in modern Toronto, Klinck serves it up with a cool matter-of-factness that belies the outrageousness of his subject.Alternately funny, disgusting, horrifying and even tender at times Tacones (Spanish for "high heels") is a linked series of vingettes (cinematic, journalistic, sometimes epic, always surprising) that the describes the lives of a fabulous assortment of Toronto denizens, from the seemingly ordinary to the downright grotesque.Here is the young trendy couple starting out in life, here the drug-addled drag queens, over there the violently sociopathic ex-con, the chillingly clueless kid-junkie parents and all the rest of the "parade of cockeyed creatures" that exist in the shadow-world of North America's big cities. There is no doubt that these characters are drawn from life, but from a kind of life that few of us ever see and that Klinck makes startingly real and (even worse) more than a little sympathetic. Tacones exposes a world of ruined young lives, addicts, murderers, perverts, selfishness, greed all tied together by a dim thread of humanity that nobody quite understands. But that little gleam of humanity is what makes the novel understandable to the rest of us and makes us root for these already damned souls in spite of everything they do to survive.Tacones is not like any other book I've ever read - well, maybe the shock of it is similar to the feeling that the early Beat poems and novels had on a complacent society. Still, the book is unique and well worth passing around among a group friends. A book to talk about.