Memoir of a Modern Opium Eater

Rating:
Summary: Creepy, intelligent & NOT like anything else ever
Review: I can sum up this book by saying that it's as if you took a twenty something year old guy off the streets, crammed his head with about a thousand literary references from like recent poetry to plays in ancient german and Italian, then had him sit down to a typewriter and tell an extraordinary story about becoming an opium addict in 21st century america. While checking out books about heroin, I came across this title in my local bookstore. The title stuck in my mind, and by the next night I found myself ordering it here online. When I got it I expected to read a couple chapters a day but wound up reading the whole thing in one wack. While this book is kind of hard reading at the beginning (most because the author writes most of the book in this like street style of talking), it doesn't take long to get sucked into the writer's mind and the story and find yourself like halfway through the thing before you even know it. Told in first person, it chronicles the life of one like lonely street kid who's super bright and follows as he becomes a teenage alcoholic and then an opium addict in his twenties. Most people I tell this to always mention trainspotting and ask if it's like that. I tell them no, it's not like trainspotting at all... it's shorter, much more intelligent, much more readable, it's totally focused on an intividual mind, and it's one of the strangest tales of like modern literature (for its style, its subject matter, and the fact that the actual plot of the book follows a book from the 1800s called Confessions of the English Opium Eaters. This might be the most readable "intellectual" books I've ever read, as it really does challenge the mind and stretch your grasp on the English language and your familiarity with literature references in general. Check it out, and you won't be sorry you did.

Rating:
Summary: Transending the mundane, not for children
Review: This is the tale of a young man searching in his average American life for something to set himself apart from the dreary routine of his existance, and finding it in opiates. The narritive is not so much an existential quest as a study in transformation, growth and realization. The protagonist is at once both accessible, as if it could be anyone you know, and also distant. But distant in that dark secret sort of way that seperates the inner lives of each one of us from another.

The booklover should beware as the diction used here can be offputting for casual readers. This appears entirely intentional and seems used to effect the slowing of the mind of the reader by throwing it off the standard turns of phrasing. This device instead sets a frame of reference for getting into the mind of a struggling youth in a very real and personal way. A warning is warranted as this book may touch you and provide the ability to sympathize with those struggling with this particular pathos, which can be dangerous to any right thinking person's wellbeing.

At times it is challanging in its intensity and ferocity and at times sublime in its mystical, almost lyrical articulation. This is a book that any who seek to understand the psychology of an addict would be well served by reading thoroughly and studying in depth. I look forward to more from this author.

Rating:
Summary: Transending the mundane, not for children
Review: This is the tale of a young man searching in his average American life for something to set himself apart from the dreary routine of his existance, and finding it in opiates. The narritive is not so much an existential quest as a study in transformation, growth and realization. The protagonist is at once both accessible, as if it could be anyone you know, and also distant. But distant in that dark secret sort of way that seperates the inner lives of each one of us from another.

The booklover should beware as the diction used here can be offputting for casual readers. This appears entirely intentional and seems used to effect the slowing of the mind of the reader by throwing it off the standard turns of phrasing. This device instead sets a frame of reference for getting into the mind of a struggling youth in a very real and personal way. A warning is warranted as this book may touch you and provide the ability to sympathize with those struggling with this particular pathos, which can be dangerous to any right thinking person's wellbeing.

At times it is challanging in its intensity and ferocity and at times sublime in its mystical, almost lyrical articulation. This is a book that any who seek to understand the psychology of an addict would be well served by reading thoroughly and studying in depth. I look forward to more from this author.

Rating:
Summary: The unbearable likeness of being - in a drug way
Review: While I've never messed with drugs myself, reading books like this one can really see why a person would yield to them. Mic, the narrator, is a character that you feel is constantly looking for something with real meaning in this world, finding it, then losing it. And with the perpetual losses, as he puts it, he feels he has no choice when he suddenly discovers a way of "charming away those phantom bogeys that beset me." Since the very first part of this book (the "prelude") the sense of loss leaps out at you. While it's subtle at first, talking about parents and growing up in a neighborhood where he has no friends, Mic gradually makes his way through "teenhood" and into adulthood by a constant repetition of gains, losses and escapes (chemical escapes from the pain of the losses). Not to spoil the end, but the reader does get a feeling of hope as he/she finishes up the book. And it's not so much a hope that is black and white (like Mic finally has some great epiphany - nothing cheesy like that), but instead it's more a sense that Mic, through all he's written on the page, has found a way of dealing with the crushing disappointments in life, rather then finding a way to avoid them. This whole aspect of the book is summed up perfectly in a single exchange of dialogue near the end, where Mic is talking to a friend you know he's about to lose. "Mic, do you always get what you want?" "Yes, I do... But I never get to keep it."

Rating:
Summary: The unbearable likeness of being - in a drug way
Review: While I've never messed with drugs myself, reading books like this one can really see why a person would yield to them. Mic, the narrator, is a character that you feel is constantly looking for something with real meaning in this world, finding it, then losing it. And with the perpetual losses, as he puts it, he feels he has no choice when he suddenly discovers a way of "charming away those phantom bogeys that beset me." Since the very first part of this book (the "prelude") the sense of loss leaps out at you. While it's subtle at first, talking about parents and growing up in a neighborhood where he has no friends, Mic gradually makes his way through "teenhood" and into adulthood by a constant repetition of gains, losses and escapes (chemical escapes from the pain of the losses). Not to spoil the end, but the reader does get a feeling of hope as he/she finishes up the book. And it's not so much a hope that is black and white (like Mic finally has some great epiphany - nothing cheesy like that), but instead it's more a sense that Mic, through all he's written on the page, has found a way of dealing with the crushing disappointments in life, rather then finding a way to avoid them. This whole aspect of the book is summed up perfectly in a single exchange of dialogue near the end, where Mic is talking to a friend you know he's about to lose. "Mic, do you always get what you want?" "Yes, I do... But I never get to keep it."