Pull up a stool
A history of faeces favours sensible over sniggery.
Newspapers print its middle letters in coy asterisks. Politicians avoid using it, unless they’re, like, a really smart US president. Even my admirably direct doctor uses euphemisms for it. So, can we not yet talk openly about shit? Or have we got past the stage of needing to? Dunno. But Dutch biologist Midas Dekkers doesn’t hold back in his brimming history.
Anything written on this topic runs the risk of becoming sniggery or tedious. Dekkers’ sprightly, sensible delivery largely avoids the latter. I suspect that much credit goes to his superbly named translator, Nancy Forest-Flier, whose rendering is so natural, you just don’t notice you’re reading a translation. Chapter headings that start with “Simple Pleasures”, then proceed via “Do It Yourself” and “What a Relief” to “Fun and Games”, show you’re in dexterous hands.
You learn a lot. Bird droppings are classified into splerds, sklops, schpluzen and schplerten. Roman villas have been buried by earthworm excretions. The great thing about faecal transplants is that it’s easy to find a donor. Your average turd is “bursting with life”. Meet the Farter from Sparta.
You’ll like the cat who wouldn’t use her kitty litter while the household’s dog was watching. You’ll be delighted to hear about the Lloyd’s Bank turd (human), more than 10,000 years old and valued at £20,000, excavated from under the said building’s foundations. Indeed, a different type of deposit.
The arts get plenty of mentions. Balzac enjoyed writing about shit and shitting; Mozart and Chaucer guffawed at it; Victor Hugo fretted about its disposal; Rabelais and Freud … well, enough said, for antithetical reasons.
It’s a practical text. Gather that bird crap! Reduce those soy beans! Travel that intestine in a rubber duck (p 87)! It offers a few decent truisms: “cleaning up someone else’s creates a bond as strong as a secret pact”. It’ll de-demonise and reassure – if you discount the list of objects found inserted into human rectums (a bottle of “Hungary wine”?). It should encourage self-monitoring and self-maintenance, as in placing your reading material on the floor while enthroned and bending forward to help the puborectal muscles. However, you may choose to live with your haemorrhoids rather than switch to locomotion on all fours.
There are even illustrations: Dutch tiles, Roman sponge-on-a-stick toilets, German military instructions, a coffee-bean advert (true); 18th-century English engravings that show … well, they show. You won’t believe what early Lutherans wanted to do with the Pope’s tiara.
Dekker is inclined to turn the obvious into the orotund. His enthusiasm trots away with him on occasions: “people who can’t make a simple clay ashtray can produce a turd to die for”. I accept his “scatotherapy” and even “thigmophile”, but “humanure” is plain clunky.
So, do I recommend a book that tells how the CIA tried using transmitters disguised as tiger turds to eavesdrop on the Viet Cong? Oh … faeces, yes.
“Cleaning up someone else’s [faeces] creates a bond as strong as a secret pact.”
THE STORY OF SHIT, by Midas Dekkers (Text, $38)