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What was the symbolism of Les Miserables. Having been in the Marine Corps, I have seen my share of mayhem and carnage but enough was enough. only< please). I might just as well as have read a Sears catalog, men's section. Can I recommend this book. But if you want to see the inside of cultural depravity give it a try.
However, I did admire the author's writing style and his depiction of the Yuppie way of life even though it did seem over blown at times. I also became bored with the countless description of clothes and their manufacturers. I know we live in a violent era but when haven't we. I do have one question.
I am not a prude but the sex really turned me off. I'll even send you my copy free of charge. (U.S. For the first time in my reading career (and I have done a lot of reading) I not only didn't finish the book but deposited it in the wastebasket.
I don't really know because I did not complete the book.
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Yet, given the low state of modern literature, that leaves Ellis as, at best a mediocrity. It's a book that has moments and good points, and could have been a classic had someone with editing skills done their job. Its best predecessor is not Fyodor Dostoevsky's Notes From The Underground, but Franz Kafka's The Metamorphosis, another symbolic work that explores what a protagonist who feels the world shuns him will act like. Ellis is not like his POMo brethren- David Foster Wallace, Dave Eggers, T.C. You wouldn't know it from the mainstream reviews of the day, which obsessed over the supposed misogyny of the book (because women's deaths are more brutal and described longer), even though only about a dozen `murders' occur within the fantasy- far less than the typical Stallone or Schwarzenegger film that was coeval with it, and the first hundred or so pages are attacks on 1980s American culture, sans any violence. No, it's not a great book, nor a bad one. Unfortunately for him and his readers, that's no fantasy.
That all said, Ellis is clearly a cut above his published contemporaries. It's far too obvious as to what's going on in American Psycho to forgive the lack of acumen by readers and critics, especially when there are so many obvious faults to the book. Again, were you to read most critics you would hear the idea that the book is plotless being bandied about almost as often as the claim that it's a satire, or existential. I should be angrier about this book's missing the boat editorially, but I guess the fact that so many people simply do not or cannot read is more fascinating to me than why the book ultimately fails.
Those who praise it for being a satire miss the point- it's a fantasy. Those who condemn it for being violent miss the point- it's a fantasy.
I mean, really, really bad- to the point of wretchedness. Add in those people who are deliterate- i.e.- can read and understand grammar, but are clueless as to the deeper things inside a narrative, or even a sentence- and it's no wonder that Bret Easton Ellis's 1991 novel American Psycho is so abysmally misunderstood.
No, again, it's a fantasy in the most obvious, non-Tolkienesque sense possible, but a fantasy it is. Interestingly, it was the violence against women that drew howls, not the violence the fantasies of Bateman hurled in other venues- cannibalism, racism, animal torture, necrophilia, to a point far beyond even worst known serial killers' deeds (another clue to the fantastical nature of the book).
Just yesternight I saw a major network newscast decrying the fact that over 20% of college graduates in this country are functionally illiterate. By now it should not startle me that readers and critics in America, if not worldwide, are bad.
Boyle, nor Rick Moody, to name the most infamous of that band- because he actually has a bit of an idea about what goes into plot structure, as well some talent in humor and the structure of scenes.
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