Okay, so I'm taking a morning break from looking at my, well, I guess my manuscript. That sounds very formal, though, so I'll just call it book-thing. I feel like talking about other peoples' book-things.
Book 1: Twilight. I just can't stop making fun of it. I'm sorry. My rage is freshly fueled every time one of those horrible trailers comes on TV. Edward Cullen (James [eta: Pattinson, not Patterson. My bad.]) looks like a corpse, so explain to me how that is sexy. No, really, I just want to know the thought processes. I don't actually have much else to say about this other than point y'all in the direction of this amazing thing: Twilight. She (the one who drew the cartoon I linked to when I first cursed Twilight's name) wrote a chapter-by-chapter summary of the book. It's remarkably accurate. For extra giggles, read the diehard fans' responses as well. So if you've got some time to kill at wo--er, I mean home, check it out. You won't even need to read the book.
Book 2: American Psycho. Y'all know I have to talk about this one. It beats Blindness for most disturbing read by, like, a parsec. But I knew that going in, so I'll let it slide. I don't really consider myself squeamish. Blindness took me off guard, so I'll just say that's why the book freaked me out. American Psycho makes me feel like a lightweight. I actually had to steel myself to read some chapters, like getting ready to do serious weight-lifting.
It's very tricky, you see. He starts off very slow with the gore--none in the first, um, third, of the book or so. It's kind of mindnumbing, as he describes the typical yuppie boredom that dominated the 80s. It's kind of funny actually. He describes morning routines, people, and meals in excruciating detail. Yet none of the detail is actually meaningful. Every time he sees a person, he has to describe the brand names of every article of clothing. Every. Time. Meals are not described by taste, but by presentation and names of components. I never know if he can even taste the meals. Nothing really interests him and he lives life in a cloudy, rich daze, with a few oblique references to some sort of secret life.
Now, part two is where things get tricky. We start to see the murders. And they're not described as "he stabbed the bum to death with a knife." Oh no. Ellis is very good with, um, imagery. The murders escalate in intensity and duration as the book goes on. He stops flat-out murdering and begins to just torture his victims. It's incredibly disturbing. You never really get a chance to be desensitized to the actions, and since it's written in first-person, you can't ever really escape the action. You see and do everything he does. Eesh. I felt really dirty reading this on the bus; I was also extremely paranoid that someone might be reading over my shoulder. Not that anyone actually does that. I soon became afraid of any chapter that had "girl" in the title. Those were always the worst, because they mixed explicit sex and horrifying torture. Not as fun a read as you might think.
The third part is when things got really interesting. Patrick Bateman had been casually using drugs and prescription medications throughout the whole book, and completely loses it at the end. I mean, he goes batshit crazy. The murders continue increasing in intensity and also in brutality as Patrick Bateman completely decompensates. He becomes even more brutal than Dahmer and three times crazier. The tone of the book gets so paranoid and ramped up towards the end that the entire rest of the book is now ambiguous. Maybe he didn't kill all those people, maybe he did. At the end of the book, it's up to the reader to decide. Either way it was an exhausting read, but overall I recommend it. The contrast between the bored, empty life he leads, and what he chooses as an escape mechanism is very powerful. You get the impression that he just wants someone to notice who he really is rather than the preconceived image his acquaintances (he doesn't really have friends) have of him. In fact, he openly confesses to several of the murders, but nobody pays any attention.
Read it if you want a commentary on the emptiness of a life of blatant consumerism. But, don't read it if you can't handle the word "evisceration." Just trust me.
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3 comments:
Hey, you own Twilight, right? Could I actually borrow it some time? Part of me is still not convinced that it's that bad, so I kind of want to try it out. Or at least, I want to revel in the trainwreck.
Maybe this is all a mistake.
Of course you can borrow it. I've actually been meaning to ask you if you were still interested. By all means try it--it's a total guilty pleasure read, and you've got the right attitude for it. If anything, you can laugh at the ridiculousness of it all.
my sister is reading twilight and I think she likes it. Of course, she's a normal member of society, not like you freaks.
Love,
Alex
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