Review - Bad Monkeys by Matt Ruff

Bad Monkeys by Matt Ruff
Publisher: Harper Collins Publishers 2007
Paperback 230 pages



This book is the perfect blend of science fiction, thriller and absurdity. The world is made up of "Bad Monkeys" and it is up to a secret organization to take them out, one at a time. Jane Charlotte, a former bad monkey in the making, is one of the field agents for this secret organization before she is taken into custody by the real police. In a series of sessions with a psychotherapist in the Las Vegas County Jail, Jane tells the story of her early life in San Francisco and her assimilation into the "Bad Monkeys," an organization devoted to fighting evil. And while we are trying to determine if Jane is crazy or sane, bad monkey or misunderstood, we find that nothing is quite what it seems as Jane's initial story of tracking a serial killer janitor comes under scrutiny and the initial facts about her brother, Phil, get turned on their head. The twists and turns this novel takes is enough to leave you guessing until the final mind bending pages where we learn that reality is often stranger than fiction.

Review - American Psycho by Bret Easton Ellis

American Psycho by Bret Easton Ellis
Publisher: Vintage Books 1991
Paperback 399 pages



American Psycho by Bret Easton Ellis freaked me the fuck out. And I consider myself a person that can usually separate themselves fairly easily from the books that I read, but there was something so intense about Ellis's book that I couldn't help but be drawn into the the stark reality of murder and chaos that is the life of Patrick Bateman. Just imagine that this is a more graphic and violent version of Girl With the Dragon Tattoo and still you don't even come close to this apocalyptic commentary of contemporary society.

In the first part of the book we are introduced to Patrick Bateman, a wealthy stock broker in 1980's New York. In excruciating detail we are given a look into this material obsessed culture where the labels one wears are more important than the substance underneath those labels. Soon we start to see a darker side to Bateman as he begins indiscriminately killing the homeless, prostitutes and even children and friends. All of this is reported in the singular voice of Bateman, in an emotionless and matter of fact manner. This cold detachment from the extreme violence this book entails is what makes the impact all the harsher to bare.

Some may read this and other reviews and dismiss this novel as being too focused on violence, but in reality the book is so much more than that. This is not violence for shock value, the scenes are artfully crafted to draw the reader in, to make them feel everything, every horror filled second, as we are drawn deeper and deeper into this twisted commentary on society's ills. To be sure, the LOC Subject Headings for this book are a clear warning to most: "Serial Murderers Fiction" "Women - Crimes Against Fiction" "Psychopaths Fiction" "Rapists Fiction". No mention of "Contemporary Society - Commentary On".

Review - The Angel's Game by Carlos Ruiz Zafón

The Angel's Game by Carlos Ruiz Zafón
Publisher: Doubleday 2009
Hardback 531 pages




Have you ever made a pact with the devil? What about an angel? How could you tell the difference and at what price would you sell yourself for? Zafón's latest novel is one of suspense, danger and love... and of course, at the heart of everything: books. Surprised? Who wouldn't sell their very soul for chance to write that one novel that will change history; that will win over hearts and crumble empires? For this is what the young writer, David Martín, agrees to do for a mysterious benefactor that promises untold wealth for writing what could possibly be the most important book ever written.

The novel unfolds in a post-WWII Barcelona. Martín is from the lower eshalons of society: orphaned at a young age, he takes a job running errands for a newpaper. He is looked after by the paper's star writer and owner, but while the relationship between the two starts off as mentor/pupil, as Martín finds his own literary voice, he soon far surpasses his friend. After leaving the newspaper and making himself independent by writing cheap crime novels under a pseudonym, Martín moves into an abondended house and falls into a pattern of producing the suspense novels at a rate of once a month. The pace leaves little room for Martín to really express the literary art that is aching to be released from within. It all comes to a head when the beautiful girl he has admired from his youth comes to him to help finish his former mentor's masterpiece. As Martín attends to his friends work, he begins to write in earnest the novel that has been dying to break free from his soul. Upon publication, his mentor's work (secretly written by him) wins national acclaim, while his own novel is lambasted in the reviews by jealous coworkers that he left in the newspaper business. Ashamed and disheartened, Martín is visited by a mysterious benefactor who gives him a proposal too tempting to resist. He asks that Martín dedicate himself to writing a story, a fable, a myth; something that will make me people believe in good and evil, namely: a new religion. In return, he is offered enough money to make him the wealthiest of men. Overcome by greed and pride, Martín quickly agrees. But all is not as it seems. Death follows this strange benefactor: anyone who would stand in his path is quickly put to death, in circumstances that are as incredible as they are graphic. As Martín tries to delve deeper into the mystery of his benefactor he is drawn into a world of crime, deciet and an evil more powerful than he can imagine.

A warning to readers: this book starts off at a somewhat slow pace. Honestly, after the first 200 pages I kept nervously looking at the remaining 300+ pages and wondering how Zafón could possibly stretch the story out that far... but be patient! It is definitely worth it and the last 300 pages flew by with spellbinding storytelling that will leave you guessing until the final thrilling moment. And what is even better.... I just found out that this book is actually a prequel. I will be checking out his other book, The Shadow of the Wind, very soon.

Review - Everyman by Philip Roth

Everyman by Philip Roth
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin 2006
Hardback 182 pages




Increasingly I have noticed that time is slipping away from me. From the piles of books that I have scattered around my bedroom, waiting to be read, to the backlog of reviews that I need to finish, there never seems to be enough minutes in the day to finish all of the tasks that I have taken on. And as the piles of books to read continues to grow and consume my living spaces, I have to wonder: how will I ever live long enough to read everything that I want? And so it may be appropriate that as I was having these thoughts about my own mortality when I decided to read Philip Roth's Everyman.

This book is in the typical Roth style, dealing with the complexities of grief and regret, loss and facing ones own mortality with a sharp, unfailingly straightforward storyline. Like Roth's other books, the protagonist of this tale is a Jewish man from New Jersey, who, as he grows older, is confronted with his own mortality as his health steadily declines. The entire book is about this confrontation, from a small child and his first experience of dealing with death and sickness, to having to face his own mortality and confront the guilt and regrets of his life as he finds himself increasingly alone as friends and colleagues pass away and his three failed marriages leave him isolated.

While this isn't one of my favorite books by Roth, it is still an enjoyable read and is quite accessible to all types of readers. Roth's voice is at turns arrogant and angry, and always, sarcastically funny and wry. Like his other novels he doesn't write to a type (coming of age Jewish-American males) he writes to a condition: the human one.

Review - The Reader by Bernhard Schlink

The Reader by Bernhard Schlink
Publisher: Pantheon Books 1997
Hardback 218 pages




I read this book twice in the matter of two days. I couldn't help myself. As I started to write the review for this book I found that nothing that I said, no words that I could write, could convey the meaning I had found within its pages.

At the very heart of this book, this is a story of love and guilt. Love bred of desire and shame, need and insecurity. The story starts with a love affair. 15 year old Michael Berg falls ill coming home from school one day and is helped by a single woman, 20 years his senior, Hanna. After a long illness, Michael returns to thank the woman and finds himself drawn to her strength and assuredness. His desire and hers, for reasons we never fully understand, draw them into an affair. As part of their daily ritual of love making, Hanna begins to make Michael read to her. As the affair continues, Hanna's erratic, domineering and sometimes violent behavior casts a shadow on his love for her. The affair ends abruptly one day when Hanna leaves town, with no warning and no clue as to where she went. Michael finds himself dead with guilt over her disappearance, blaming himself for her need to flee.

Fast forward ten years later. Michael is a law student, observing a trial of several women accused of war crimes during the second world war. Hanna is one of the defendants. As the trial progresses, Michael is haunted by the guilt of the past, and struggles to find what, if any, responsibility he bears for this woman he once loved. It is during the trial that Michael first comes to realize Hanna's startling secret (and a secret that was obvious to me at the start of this novel). This book is more about a young man's guilt however, it is also about a national guilt that was felt for generations after WWII. Michael's shame at loving Hanna is tied to the greater feelings of shame and guilt that the entire nation felt after the war. The novel also explores the generational differences in experiencing this guilt; from Michael and Hanna and from Michael and his father.

The last act of the book is after Hanna has been convicted and sentenced to life in jail for her crimes during the war. Here is where I will stop, because it is at this point where one must experience for oneself the way love and guilt resolves themselves in Michael's mind. This is a novel that I am sure that I will come to again and again in my life.

Review - Pornografia by Witold Gombrowicz

Pornografia by Witold Gombrowicz
Translated from the Polish by Danuta Borchardt
Publisher: Grove Press 2009
Hardback 221 pages



The Polish writer Witold Gombrowicz's last novel, Pornografia, is a manic, psychologically driven story of youth and desire, religion and power, death and sex. The novel is narrated by an older man named Witold, who, with his friend Fryderyk, fleas wartime Warsaw to a friend's country estate during WWII. Finding a respite from the German occupation, the narrator and his friend turn their attention onto uniting two local youths in an elicit affair. From the beginning we see that the affair means little to the youths, and any desire or sexuality expressed is only for the amusement of these older men.

The entire story takes a strange turn as the whole ensemble gets wrapped up in a murderous plot involving an expatriate of the Polish resistance movement. The ending is abrupt and out of pace with the rest of the novel. Until the very end the story is told in almost a stream of consciousness way, with the thoughts and actions of all the other players coming under intense scrutiny under the narrator's eye. The style of writing is at times seemingly burlesque in nature, jarring to read, yet fascinating all the same. It truly is a novel of the psychological, with Gombrowicz deftly illustrating sexual devastation and the perverseness of youthful desire, social maneuvering within a morally collapsed state and the struggle for power between intellect and religious piety.

Review - The Humbling by Philip Roth

The Humbling by Philip Roth
Publisher: Harcourt 2009
Hardback 140 pages




I am in love. I read this book in a 90 minute car ride. Okay, so it would be more accurate to say that I devoured this book in a 90 minute car ride. I have to say that my first thought after reading this book was a particular episode of my favorite library comic strip Unshelved:

http://www.unshelved.com


It is about the "Seven Stages of Falling in Love with an Author". Currently I'm on stage 4: gluttony. I have ordered every book he has written (which is quite a few!) and have been reading them until I fall asleep with my nose pressed against the pages. (Thank goodness I don't drool!) The last time I did this with an author was after I read Chuck Palahniuk's book "The Diary" that my cousin had given me to read. Now once again, I find myself cautiously in love with this new author.

The Humbling is a story about a distinguished stage actor, who finds that after years at being at the top of his craft, he suffers a breakdown of the spirit and can no longer act. His self-doubt leads to a divorce, a stint in a mental hospital and a self inflicted exile to his countryside estate. While he flirts with thoughts of the shotgun in his attic, a forty-year-old daughter of a longtime friend shows up on his doorstep. While she comes bearing problems of her own; a disastrous breakup that caused her to flee across the country, to a just ended lesbian affair with her supervisor, her passion stirs awake something that had long been dormant inside the older actor.

Within the affair of these two people, Roth delves into topics such as age and success, love and despair, and how the difference between love and sex can either save us or tear us down completely.

Review - Survivor by Chuck Palahniuk

Survivor by Chuck Palahniuk
Publisher: W.W. Norton 1999
Paperback 289 pages


Ever since I read Fight Club many years ago, I've always read Palahniuk's novels with a sense of anticipation. I'm always expecting the world to fall out from under me to reveal some gritty truth about life, society, love, death, sex... you name it. I have to say that in his novel Survivor I wasn't let down. Religious cults, child exploitation, slavery, steroids, mass suicides, collagen injections, celebrity and the Super Bowl, this book has it all.

What I love about Palahniuk is that he can pull off story lines that would leave other novels feeling overwhelmed or contrite. In Survivor we are taken into the last confession of Tender Branson; an abused child of a religious cult or a disenfranchised Messiah, you take your pick. At once, Palahniuk allows the reader to be repulsed and sympathetic to this character Tender. We are allowed to see his pain and his twisted mind as a product of the brainwashing cult he was born into, but we can also see the human side of him crying to get out.

To anyone who enjoyed Fight Club, or readers of Philip K. Dick, Kurt Vonnegut or Hornsby, you will revel in the mastery of Palahniuk's world. And if he isn't our generations answer to Vonnegut, I don't know who is.

Review - The Amnesiac by Sam Taylor

The Amnesiac by Sam Taylor
Publisher: Penguin Books
Paperback 384 pages
Rating:



What is memory? Is what we remember reality or some sort of fiction that our mind conjures up to hide the truer emotions within?

The Amnesiac by Sam Taylor is an engrossing tale of a young man's struggle with the inter turmoil of memory. With many "tales within the tale" Taylor takes the reader on a fantastical ride through the imagination and memory of a young Englishman at the crossroads of his life.

The novel follows the spiral into madness of James Purdew. After his girlfriend leaves James in Amsterdam, he begins to delve into his past, trying to piece together the story of his life, and the years he seems to be missing, by writing it from the present day to the beginning in a book he entitles "Memoirs of an Amnesiac".

While the reader feels a certain sympathy for James, at other times I wanted to shake him by the shoulders and scream, "The answer is right in front of you!". While the storyline is engrossing, one can get lost in the plot and inter-stories that Taylor weaves.

The ending was beyond maddening. After spending almost two weeks reading this book, trying to work through the complex and often labyrinth like plot I felt that a satisfying conclusion would save this book for me. However the author seems to have finished the book 30 pages too soon. After painstakingly taking the reader through this maze of a plot the ending seemed to me to be a hurried attempt at best. Almost like he stayed up the night before a paper was due.

Those who enjoy a more complex storyline, penetrating characters and a read that is more psychologically engaging should have no problem finding this book enjoyable.

Happy Reading!