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Indlæser... Bowl of Cherriesaf Millard Kaufman
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Bliv medlem af LibraryThing for at finde ud af, om du vil kunne lide denne bog. Der er ingen diskussionstråde på Snak om denne bog. This short novel is such fun and so depressing to read--it's a true satire and reminded me of "Catch 22" in its spoofs of the military but is about much more than those misadventures. Kaufman is--not surprisingly, given his roots in comics--a genius at coming up with iconic images for his young prodigy's misfortunes. The larger than life totems constructed of dung that represent other characters in the novel will in particular stay with you. Not a perfect novel, but pretty nearly a perfect satire--so 5 stars! This novel is purportedly the first by the 90 year old screenwriter and WWII veteran. How he made it through a career in Hollywood -- including creating the character Mr. Magoo -- without writing a book, especially a book about all his adventures, is unclear. Nevertheless he's put together a very, very young, light novel. The book is unique and important--as an extension of the frivolous and unexpected meanderings of a Michael Chabon or Thomas Pynchon admixed with the theatricality and cinematics one would find in a feature film. The vocabulary is startling. Without feeling like he's inventorying a daily super-hard word calendar, he's pushing the reader to consult her dictionary. Turning bits like 'phonetic dandyism' and 'lobotomized Esperanto so piss-elegant they self-destruct on the tongue into parody". However, the book seemed to tawdry and liscivious, gratuitously so. This was a turn-off, and continued throughout. The book is set in a mix of locales, including Iraq - an interesting and in itself humorous and ironic choice in our contemporary Age. In all, perhaps not in a class of its own, it is certainly an original worth reading.
Judd Breslau is a prodigy of seriously unrealized promise. At 14, he and his poet mom are abandoned by his dad, an emotionally mingy, mediocre academic. A year later, he's kicked out of Yale. Soon, he finds himself in a minor province of war-torn Iraq in a prison built primarily of human excrement, awaiting execution. How he gets there is a picaresque of inexhaustible comic invention by debut novelist Millard Kaufman, whose dexterous prose swims with Judd's delightfully precocious turns of phrase in Bowl of Cherries. One fave: ''The room was permeated with the lingering stench of old and laminated farts.'' HæderspriserDistinctions
Kicked out of Yale at age 14, Judd Breslau falls in with Phillips Chatterton, a bathrobe-wearing Egyptologist working out of a dilapidated home laboratory. There, young Valerie Chatterton quickly leads Breslau away from his research and into, in order: the attic, a Colorado equestrian ranch, a porn studio beneath the Brooklyn Bridge, and a jail cell in southern Iraq, where we find him awaiting his own execution while the war rages on in the north. Written by a 90-year-old debut novelist, ex-Marine, two-time Oscar nominee, and co-creator of Mr. Magoo, Bowl of Cherries rivals the liveliest comic novels for sheer gleeful inventiveness. This is a book of astounding breadth and sharp consequence, containing all the joy, derangement, terror, and doubt of adolescence and modern times. No library descriptions found. |
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Google Books — Indlæser... GenrerMelvil Decimal System (DDC)813.6Literature English (North America) American fiction 21st CenturyLC-klassificeringVurderingGennemsnit:
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(And better than his second book, Misadventure) ( )