I dunno about this book. It is a mystery. It is also sort of nuts.
Only recently re-translated into English from it’s original German this book is the basis for a movie called Innocence that you may remember. You know, it was the one that got everyone super pissed because there was a scene where little girls went swimming with no clothes on a lot of reactionary idiots were like OMG PEDOPHILLIA and everyone else was like LOL WHATEVS IT IS ACTUALLY A VERY GOOD MOVIE. You remember that right?
Well anyway, Frank Wedekind’s Mine Haha, as fucking nutty as it is, is obviously worth reading just because it managed to piss everyone off so much. Which is why when I spotted it on pre-order over on amazon I thought ‘Fuck yeah!’ and ordered it for my birthday. My birthday which is on the 9th of November. Which is much different from the date when I actually received the book, which was around the 15th of last month. Which was March. There was some sort of problem with the publisher etc, etc and what should have been a fairly simple exercise in internet commerce ending up being a test of my resolve to just say ‘Fuck it!’ and cancel my order.
Of course in the end I didn’t because like I said, Mine Haha is an interesting book, dealing as it does with sexual adolescence, naked 8 year olds and creepy theatre trips. It is however, not much different from Lucile Hadzihalilovic’s movie adaptation (which features a bonus masturbation with glove scene) so you may want to save yourself the effort and skip it in favour of the film. Either is fine.