Reviewed: Francis Levy’s “Seven Days in Rio”

Review by R. Stephen Shodin

Seven Days in Rio
by Francis Levy
Two Dollar Radio; 160 p.

Francis Levy’s Seven Days in Rio is an incredibly elaborate and well-crafted satire built around the sex-starved, psychologically fucked up, seersucker-suit-wearing Kenny Cantor. Kenny is a CPA, self-proclaimed amateur psychoanalyst, and sex tourist on vacation from Manhattan. Much like Kenny, Levy’s snappy sentences bound along like a stupid American: all tourism and no regard for any other culture or value system. So much so that there isn’t a single pause, let alone a chapter break to be had. Even a simple word like commerce is pushed through a prism that renders it more like its arcane definition (sexual intercourse), while numerous arrows are flung at psychoanalysis the way monkeys might fling shit or semen at gawking zoogoers. All of which furthers Levy’s cause, and illustrates the defects of Kenny’s character quite well. The drawback is that any remotely literal reader is completely pummeled by the voracity of Kenny’s myopic view of women and his (extremely sexist) relationship to them.