Last Exit to Brooklyn

Rating:
Summary: It shatters your senses.
Review: I picked up Selby on the recommendation of Henry Rollins. It was a wise move on my part! The chapter, STRIKE, simply took me by the collar and shook me senseless until I finished it! It totally shocked and surprised me! The ending was brutal yet fair in a karma-like way. Read it yourself and gauge your own reactions.

Rating:
Summary: powerful (?)
Review: i picked up this book, it being hailed as an "underground classic" and me being a bleak literature enthusiast and all. i read it, and we have a steady narration interupted by quotation-less conversation. schizophrenic? no. rather, the book is like an urban William Burroughs. i guess my one major problem with the book is that very diolouge thing, it just annoys me. other then that it's unsettiling, powerful, and very enertaining. meh.

Rating:
Summary: Through a Glass Darkly
Review: I read this book about 9 years ago, and I can stiil remember the raw power of this novel. It is a brutal account of an assorted cast of characters who are basically human garbage. If they are not misanthropic or misogynistic, then they are poorly guided souls looking for love or meaning in a vile enviorment. This novel reminds me of my old neighborhhood in South Philadelphia, where the only true emotions shown are ones of angry, lust and gluttony. Reading this book should show the reader the evil of men, and what not to do in this world. The language is powerful, the atomosphere is heavy, and the vision is dismal. No other book, with the exception of "Naked Lunch" or "City of Night", shows the strength of great writing style and content. A must read!!!!!

Rating:
Summary: Fantastic writing, strange storyline
Review: I'm a big fan of Darren Aronofsky, which is what turned me on to this book. After seeing Requiem for a Dream, I read that Aronofsky started reading Selby with this book, so I figured I should start reading him with this book as well.

I was surprised to find out what it was about, if that's even possible to determine. It was fantastically written, which is the only thing that kept me turning the pages at first. As for the subject matter, I couldn't really connect with what was being said... for the first 2/3 of the book, it was mostly about drag-queens, homosexuallity, things of that sort. With Requiem, I connected with the characters on a level because of my personal experience with drugs, but with Last Exit, I connected with the characters because of Selby's amazing writing techniques.

I have to admit, though, that as much as I liked this book, I found it hard to follow with his use of the same names in different stories... and the last 1/3 of the book seemed too scatter-brained for my taste, and seemed way off the rocker with the rest of the book... I'm not complaining, just something I wasn't prepared for I guess.

All-in-all, though, this guy is an amazing author.

Rating:
Summary: Do Believe the Hype
Review: If you like requiem for a dream the movie or the novel this book should be right up your alley. Simillar to Ellis' nove "The Informers" this novel is told through the eyes of several differant narratives and characters. Its a very moveing novel that shows the desperation of the human soul in a setting that couldnt be more dark than Brooklyn. Like "Requiem for a Dream" once the characters seem like they are at their highest they are quickly brought back to reality, realities that couldnt be any more devestating. The individual stories work well as a whole novel where the story isnt the driving factor, its the observation of the big city and the lives lived their. Totally disturbing and as dark as any writer has ever wanted to get; Selby's first novel "Last Exit to Brooklyn" is a wonderful piece of work and lays the ground work that was later put in full focus with works such as "The Demon"

Beautifully tragic and dark this novel will aim to please. Selby IS A GENIUS, take a look inside.

Rating:
Summary: What worked in 'Requiem' fails in 'Last Exit'
Review: Last Exit To Brooklyn is a tale of the seedier side of Brooklyn back in the late 1950's. Touted as being both gritty and shocking, I found that it fell flat simply because of Selby's writing style. The surrealistic prose that added delirium to `Requiem For A Dream' only provides detachment when Selby paints his `Brooklyn' characters.

Perhaps in the 50's this book was a bold play on drugs, prostitution, homosexuality, and futility, but it hasn't stood the test of time, in my own humble opinion, like `Requiem For A Dream' has.

Divided into almost separate stories that document different characters from the neighborhood, `Brooklyn' is a choppy and difficult story to follow. Larry Brown has painted horrid characters that still compel me to read more about them, but I simply could not get around the surreal angle to a group of misfits with no depth to them.

We meet a gang of thugs at a diner in a squalid neighborhood in the chapter `Another Day, Another Dollar', a drag queen named Georgette who dances around and pops bennies like gumdrops in `The Queen Is Dead', an uninteresting short about Tommy, his baby, and a motorcycle in `And Baby Makes Three', follow a service-for-substance prostitute in `Tra-La-La', meet a lazy and stupefying ignorant machine worker who falls in love with a drag queen during his union's strike in `Strike', and wind through the dull and primitive lives of the tenants in a low rent project in `Landsend'. That's it.

Of all the tales, `Strike' was the only one that kept any cohesiveness to it, the rest just drifted in and out of focus on a long, meandering path to nowhere. It's not that the characters in the book weren't vulgar and course, but I felt all the while like I was just peeking at them through a scummy window, not involved, no pain or despair leaking through to me. I want to be able to feel the grit between my teeth, to taste the exquisite flavors of misery, human disintegration, and worthlessness, and smell the tangy aroma of demoralized failure. `Brooklyn' simply doesn't satisfy the palate.

If you want to pick up a good Selby novel, then grab Requiem For A Dream instead of Last Exit To Brooklyn.



Rating:
Summary: It's "good," certainly, but almost unbearable.
Review: Last Exit to Brooklyn, Selby's full-length literary debut, is structured more like a collection of stories than a novel. It consists of several episodes that involve completely different characters, have nothing to do with each other, and are structured pretty much the same way - a brief one-page exposition, followed by a buildup of violence all the way to some kind of unspeakably terrifying crescendo whose onset and cessation resolves absolutely no conflict but merely serves to mercilessly cut off the narrative. The last chapter is a series of short, disconnected vignettes that take place in one apartment complex; though they aren't as frightening, the events depicted in them are so uniformly grotesque as to be even more hopeless, even if they're completely banal. For instance, Selby's Naturalistic depiction of the time-honoured pastime of picking one's nose while gossiping is liable to turn one's stomach inside out. You can imagine, based on this example, that Last Exit to Brooklyn is not the most accessible (or even readable) book ever written.

Selby's own voice is not present in the writing; for the most part, the author functions only as a dispassionate chronicler of events that, for the most part, are all completely believable. There are no asides, no motivations, no interpretations - what one sees is very much what one gets, and so one is forced to confront what one sees. It isn't very pretty. However relentless his 1979 masterpiece Requiem for a Dream is, it's much more readable than Last Exit to Brooklyn, mainly because it at least features a "Dream" of some kind. The hapless characters of Last Exit to Brooklyn, however, have no dreams (unless, like Harry Black's, they're about evisceration). Selby himself once characterized this book as an attempt to describe "a world without love," and I think that this appraisal is absolutely accurate. Even the "love" felt by "Georgette" in the first big episode of the book (following a brief introduction that serves to establish what kind of world this is) is a grotesque parody of same. There is no human interaction in this book that does not feature some sort of casual brutality - even the striking workers, who are supposed to stand together in solidarity, in fact have no solidarity or togetherness whatsoever. This lack of love extends to every single member of society - the union leaders and the corporate officials are equally corrupt, the homosexual men and heterosexual women equally selfish, the police and the thugs equally violent, the black people and the white people equally isolated, and no one seems to ever sleep well. Sex is not only just another instrument of violence, it's almost always the instrument of choice. And while people who do bad things very often do get their comeuppance (in truly horrible ways - the robber/prostitute is raped to death, the closet homosexual beaten beyond recognition, et cetera), there is no sense of justice served since everyone is guilty.

Why read it, then? Well, Selby does harbour compassion towards these so-called human beings, but that's more visible in his later books; here, his own choice to recede into the shadows doesn't really show it. Only in the last chapter is it somewhat visible, when he describes a doddering old widow who wonders why no one seems to smile and who is probably a precursor to Sara Goldfarb in Requiem for a Dream. Still, his silence must not be confused with approval, since not only does he not sneer in the book, but his silence seems due to his being overwhelmed by grief. Another reason is that it, assuming the mantle of Naturalism, claims to depict a kind of truth - people can argue about how true it is, but they owe it to themselves to learn it first. But then again, one might quite legitimately ask if there is any value to a truth that is so grimly non-human. Third, one might want to appreciate this book simply based on the writing, and the writing is powerful indeed, but hardly refined enough to place Selby among the stylistic masters. In the end, what it comes down is this: if outright war between reader and writer is what you like, you'll never find a better book; otherwise, you'll have a hard time getting through it once. Also, in either case I would advise you not to eat before reading it.

Rating:
Summary: madman genius
Review: No two ways about it, Selby is one of the best writers in the English language, forget what pussy top100 lists say. Selby's tales will pierce your soul and make it bleed, that is the kind of power his language has. Selby literally creates this euphoria through his language that inserts the reader into the character's mind and soul. Hence, we pity the depraved, the drug addled, the whores who populate this work. Even Ken Starr would let these characters off the hook, that's how humane and brilliant Selby's depiction is of these otherwise unsympathetic characters.

Rating:
Summary: Beautiful & eloquent prose!
Review: No, I'm not being sarcastic, the prose here might be hard to penetrate at first, but it's very deep and moving. I'll admit, I had a hella hard time getting through this book at first, I actually put it down after reading the first story! Then I read up some on Mr Selby, and things became more clear to me.

Yes, there really isn't any punctuation, or any clues who's speaking at the moment, but that's part of the point. A lot of these stories are totally self contained, coming from the point of view of the character. And though the changes the characters go though might not be explicitly stated, you can tell their changes by the way the rhythm of their speech patterns changes.

All in all, it might take two readings before you get on to these things, but once you do, there's no going back. This is one helluva book, and got me into Selby's work, and I'm very thankful for that. He has a way to get under your skin, to know what YOU are thinking and feeling.

And as many others have already pointed out, these are not the usual types of people most would like to be around. In fact, I'm sure a good many of us would try to avoid them at all costs. But the way Selby portrays them here, you genuinely feel compassion and love for them.

This book certainly isn't for everybody, though not really sexually explicit or particularly violent, there are some scenes that could upset many more weak stomached readers, and the dialog is VERY profane. But it never seem out of place, or put in for the sake of shock value. You can imagine these characters speaking and acting this way.

The last story is the most brilliant to me. It has about 6 stories going on at once, told bits at a time. It's the first time I've seen somebody do this, and I wish more would start.

Do yourself a favor and pick up this book as soon as possible!

Rating:
Summary: Concerns drug addled drag queens in every story
Review: Now matter how the stories in Last Exit to Brooklyn start out, they end up with drag queens on benzadrine. Some of this book is good, but then hubert starts talking about drag queens again. It's written well, but it's written about drag queens. I don't have anything against men in drag, I just didn't know that that's what this book was about: Drag Queens. So just to let the reader know, this book is about...