Take a photo of a barcode or cover
3.27 AVERAGE
3.27 AVERAGE
I don't know if I can even count that I read this book considering I just skimmed it. It wasn't for me. At all. I'm also not sure who exactly this book is for. Within the first few pages he had already punched his wife in the face and attempted to murder his daughter. I am curious (read very concerned) about the type of people who read that and think 'Awesome! Let's keep reading!' I then skimmed the rest of the book which was full of truncated, jolting prose that outlines the life of a sex-crazed, cheating drunk. Not to mention the absolutely horrid way that women are portrayed as stupid, emotional punching bags. Just a horrible, horrible book.
What kind of social lives do the people who review books professionally lead? I honestly looked at the back of the book more than once to make sure I read it right. Anyone who thinks Sebastian Dangerfield is a 'Rougeish cad' and this story is 'picaresque' have all the frame of reference of a 13 year old kid who idolizes the out of work greaser who hangs out by the 7-11 getting stoned as the coolest guy in the world. I have tons of friends who get drunk and loud and make parties happen. I've got a friend who had a bottle broke over his head for one too many wisecracks. I have a friend who chased a 17 year old who didn't kick in for a shared cab three blocks at 3 AM down the shore, screaming he'd kick his head in, because he was so drunk he'd forgotten he was the one who offered to let the kid ride free in our cab in the first place. They're all pretty great boyfriends, husbands, fathers and friends. You have to be pretty desperate for excitement in your life to like a tiresome, abusive, boring sociopath like this, even vicariously through fiction.
If you read On the Road or Big Sur, and WEREN'T constantly furious with how the main characters treat the women around them as walking sexdolls/ATM's you'll like this book. If you read House of Leaves and had a hard time getting to the awesome parts through the scenes where a character inexplicably plows his way through half the females in LA, you might find it a tough hang.
Knew after about one chapter what I was in for, but stuck it out anyway. Not really sure what life was like back in the 50's, but if this guy was considered at all fun to hang around with, then fuck that whole generation. The guy is basically a meth-head, but for a much lamer drug. If you're going to rip fixtures out of the bathroom to pawn for intoxicants while your baby goes hungry, at least set your sights a little higher than booze. Nothing that he did seemed all that funny or redeeming, The only friend we actually see him interact with, O'Keefe, he uses the same as anyone else, but the rest of his buddies seem to think he's the greatest guy they've ever met. Especially the one who magically gets fabulously stinking rich in London, as were poor Irish drunks wont, back in those days.
Well written, but a type of story I loathe. Maybe something else by the author would be better.
If you read On the Road or Big Sur, and WEREN'T constantly furious with how the main characters treat the women around them as walking sexdolls/ATM's you'll like this book. If you read House of Leaves and had a hard time getting to the awesome parts through the scenes where a character inexplicably plows his way through half the females in LA, you might find it a tough hang.
Knew after about one chapter what I was in for, but stuck it out anyway. Not really sure what life was like back in the 50's, but if this guy was considered at all fun to hang around with, then fuck that whole generation. The guy is basically a meth-head, but for a much lamer drug. If you're going to rip fixtures out of the bathroom to pawn for intoxicants while your baby goes hungry, at least set your sights a little higher than booze. Nothing that he did seemed all that funny or redeeming, The only friend we actually see him interact with, O'Keefe, he uses the same as anyone else, but the rest of his buddies seem to think he's the greatest guy they've ever met. Especially the one who magically gets fabulously stinking rich in London, as were poor Irish drunks wont, back in those days.
Well written, but a type of story I loathe. Maybe something else by the author would be better.
"The lyrical quality of money is strange."
- J.P. Donleavy, The Ginger Man
(
It is like J.P. Donleavy lifted Harold Skimpole out of Hard Times and made a whole whore of a novel of him as a young law student in Dublin. There are novels about drinking and there are novels about being shitfaced. This is a shitfaced novel. It ranks right up there with Lowry's Under the Volcano. Except insead of meszcal, there is plenty of stout and Irish whiskey. The prose is distilled three times: once with food, once with f#cKing, and once with irreverant flippancy (maybe once too for finances, but that would ruin my trinity of distilation image).
But the prose? Dear God, Mary and the baby Modern Library, J.P. Donleavy can write crazy post-Joyce juice. He was rock and roll before rock and roll. His sentences hit you like Mick Jagger dancing on John Bonham third drum stick. It doesn't seem like a long novel, but requires slow, devoted reading. You have to put it down and sober up every few pages. More than 80 pages in one sitting will leave you shitfaced with veins breaking and uncontrolled shaking of the hands.
Go easy my friends, and enjoy drowning in the softness.
- J.P. Donleavy, The Ginger Man
(It is like J.P. Donleavy lifted Harold Skimpole out of Hard Times and made a whole whore of a novel of him as a young law student in Dublin. There are novels about drinking and there are novels about being shitfaced. This is a shitfaced novel. It ranks right up there with Lowry's Under the Volcano. Except insead of meszcal, there is plenty of stout and Irish whiskey. The prose is distilled three times: once with food, once with f#cKing, and once with irreverant flippancy (maybe once too for finances, but that would ruin my trinity of distilation image).
But the prose? Dear God, Mary and the baby Modern Library, J.P. Donleavy can write crazy post-Joyce juice. He was rock and roll before rock and roll. His sentences hit you like Mick Jagger dancing on John Bonham third drum stick. It doesn't seem like a long novel, but requires slow, devoted reading. You have to put it down and sober up every few pages. More than 80 pages in one sitting will leave you shitfaced with veins breaking and uncontrolled shaking of the hands.
Go easy my friends, and enjoy drowning in the softness.
A funnier [b:The Beautiful and Damned|4708|The Beautiful and Damned|F. Scott Fitzgerald|https://d202m5krfqbpi5.cloudfront.net/books/1347567298s/4708.jpg|2432116] without Fitzgeralds literary talent. Provides laughs if you can get over how awful most of the characters are as people.
There are a lot of quotes packed in this tome. And there are a lot of failures, but not in the writing.
During the first 20% of this book, I thought the rest of it would be pretty Hunter S. Thompson-straightforwardish, a bit of "oh, this must have influenced 'Withnail % I'", but no. I'm glad to have been wrong.
It's abuse. It's horror. The mundane existence of alcoholics (which is not mundane in the least to a non-alcoholic) embedded in thoughts spun as they're spoken, which is very comparable with an old comic-book without sound effects strewn throughout the pages. With all of the onomatopoetry lost, the reader gains much.
It all flows as stream-of-consciousness, even though it's evident and plain. An adulterer. A man of ill repute, yet of psychopathic tendencies. Some effective short sentences, e.g.
Then there are the near-Shakespeareian dialogue:
...and a simplified notion of why some of them drink:
Still, this is much more than clever one-liners. It's repetitiveness, and what seems not to be repetitive to people who aren't in this disposition, or who have become too old to remember what it was like.
Highly recommendable not due to Donleavy's style or the quotes, but as a whole. As the revolutions heighten, the end of the book is welcome and grand. Which the book is, entirely.
During the first 20% of this book, I thought the rest of it would be pretty Hunter S. Thompson-straightforwardish, a bit of "oh, this must have influenced 'Withnail % I'", but no. I'm glad to have been wrong.
It's abuse. It's horror. The mundane existence of alcoholics (which is not mundane in the least to a non-alcoholic) embedded in thoughts spun as they're spoken, which is very comparable with an old comic-book without sound effects strewn throughout the pages. With all of the onomatopoetry lost, the reader gains much.
It all flows as stream-of-consciousness, even though it's evident and plain. An adulterer. A man of ill repute, yet of psychopathic tendencies. Some effective short sentences, e.g.
O'Keefe filling a bowl with bread crumbs. Night outside and the boom of the sea. Angelus bells. Pause that refreshes.
Then there are the near-Shakespeareian dialogue:
On this June morning, Dangerfield came in the front gate of Trinity and went up the dusty rickety stairs of No. 3 where he stood by the dripping rust-stained sink and banged on O'Keefe's door. A minute passed and then the sound of padding feet and latches being undone and the appearance of a bearded, dreary face and one empty eye. "It's you." The door was swung open and O'Keefe plodded back to his bedroom. A smell of stale sperm and rancid butter. Mouldering on the table, a loaf of bread, a corner bitten from it with marks of teeth. The fireplace filled with newspapers, old socks, spittle stains and products of self pollution. "Christ, Kenneth, don't you think you ought to have this place cleaned up?" "What for? Does it make you sick? Vomit in the fireplace."
...and a simplified notion of why some of them drink:
But Jesus, when you don't have any money, the problem is food. When you have money, it's sex. When you have both it's health, you worry about getting rupture or something. If everything is simply jake then you're frightened of death. And look at these faces, all stuck with the first problem and will be for the rest of their days."
Still, this is much more than clever one-liners. It's repetitiveness, and what seems not to be repetitive to people who aren't in this disposition, or who have become too old to remember what it was like.
Highly recommendable not due to Donleavy's style or the quotes, but as a whole. As the revolutions heighten, the end of the book is welcome and grand. Which the book is, entirely.
Couldn't make it past the first paragraph. I put it in the category of books I call "MEN BEING IMPORTANT." This depresses me because so many "classics" fall into this category. Who decides these are "so good?" IMPORTANT MEN, no doubt. No. thanks.