Rating: 
Summary: The best book I've ever read.
Review: Requiem for a Dream is by far the best book I have ever read. I found it in my brother's room and had remembered wanting to see the movie, so I picked up the book and started reading it. I read it cover to cover in about 3 days. I couldn't put it down. I read it at breakfast, throughout school, at lunch, and at dinner. I admitt it is a depressing novel, and I just wanted to let everyone know that because they definetely shouldn't be expecting something with a happy ending. This book is about the tragic downfall of 4 people : Sara Goldfarb, her son Harry Goldfarb, his best friend Tyrone C. Love, and his girlfriend Marione.
Sara is a woman who, for her whole life has wanted to just be on a game show, and one day gets a call telling her a form will be sent to her and she is being thought of for a new gameshow. She becomes wants to lose weight so she goes to starts on a diet of eating certain foods, but she decides that that is very hard, and that it won't work as well as diet pills. Her son notices that the effects of the diet pills are much like the effects of speed, and tells her to be careful. She ignores his worries, and starts obsessing over her lack of a response from the gameshow.
Harry, Tyrone and Marione have very serious drug problems, that they think they could knix at any time if necesarry but are very wrong. Harry and Tyrone decide that if they could score a pound of uncut herione they could gain a great profit. Marione decides that they could create a coffee shop with that money, and she could find promising artists and let them paint pictures for the walls. In their search for heroine, they all start keeping things from each other. One would score some drugs, and think that they needed it so much that they had to hide it from the other. There is a serious lack of drugs in Brooklyn, so Harry and Tyrone drive to Florida where they know they can get some serious drugs, while Marion stays at home and prostitutes herself for drug money.
This book is very deep and powerful and I recommend it to any and every person who likes to read, or just occassionally picks up a book and decides to start it. This would be a fantastic book to pick up...
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Summary: GREAT BOOK GOOD FOR LITTLE KIDS
Review: GOOD BOOK POWERFUL AND SAD YOU WONT FORGET IT AND ITS ABOUT HEROIN NOT THAT THATS GOOD LOL.
Rating:
Summary: Crushing and Beautiful
Review: After I saw the adaptation of this book so brilliantly displayed by Darren Arronofsky a friend of mine went out and bought this novel. A few days later he gave it to me to read. When I asked him how it was and he said that it was good but damn near killed reduced him to tears.
I found this alittle difficult to beleive out of someone like my friend but I read the novel anyway. I however was not damn near reduced to tears. I cried like a moher cries when she loses her family in an airplane accident. This book is a drug addiction within itself. It seduces you with its rythmical poetic structure, lays you into its groove of repetition and then drags you kicking and screaming underneath with the rest of the characters.
After one paragraph in this book in which the mother, drugged out of her mind, is forced to releive herself and is left unattended for two days made my dry heave. I wanted so bad to never touch the book again but soon after picked it up and read the rest into the wee hours of the morning.
This book is nothing short of astonishing. It is not however a triump of the human spirit. I would only reccomend this book to someone with a strong stomach and psyche. Unbeleivable.
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Summary: This book is amazing
Review: I haven't really gotten too far into it yet, but it is one of the mostinteresting books I have read i a very long time. I saw the brillant film adaptation, and decided to get the book. The way Selby writes is unparalleled in modern literature. The way the dialogue is written is incredibly different from any other author i have read. The use of dialect is great. Read the book, and see the movie.
Rating:
Summary: Beautiful
Review: I just finished the novel 10 minutes ago. There aren't many words in my mind right now but of the few, POWERFUL is one of them. This novel is definately the main topic in my next essay at school. I know that this book will stay with me forever...I'm only 16, but I'm smart enough to enjoy it. And enjoy it I did. Personally, I find it hard to like books after the first 10 pages, but this one grabbed my attention after the first page. I can't wait to see the movie, but I heard it's a masterpiece (just like the book).
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Summary: My God, please make it stop
Review: Few books are as powerful as this one. I know that this has been said about many books, and i know that it has been said about this book by many people, but God, once you have read it you will never be the same. Like many people i first heard of this book through the movie of the same name. The movie deeply moved me, so i decided that I wanted to read the book that it is based on. Wow. I was stunned. I was saddened. I was angered. At first it took a while to get into the book because of Selby's interesting way of writing. No quotation marks and no new paragraphs when the next person starts speaking, so the movie actually helped me alot to differentiate the characters. We are introduced to four individuals: Harry Goldfarb, his mother Sara Goldfarb, his best friend Tyrone C. Love, and his lovely girlfriend Marion Kleinmeitz. Harry lives in the Bronx, doesn't work, and likes to have a taste of heroin every now and then. Tyrone basically fits into the same mold as Harry. Marion is from an upper middle class family that she hates. Sara is a widow whose only companion is her television set. The reader slowly watches the characters degenerate. Harry and Tyrone have a dream to get a pound of pure heroin to sell to make enough money so they can live on easy street for the rest of their lives. Marion wants to be with Harry and use the money from the pound of pure to open up a coffee shop to display art, and have performances by various musicians and poets. Tyrone just wants to get set up with a pretty girl and have his life free of hassles. Sara wants to be loved. ...
Rating:
Summary: Brutal, relentless, and.....beautiful
Review: Hubert Selby Jr. is a god!, his writings and books are some of the most incredible, and true statements i've ever read. This one, Requiem For A Dream, is no exception to it's predecessors, it's message is simply this, "the american dream, or the usual goal, has nothing to do with YOUR goals, and YOUR dreams" the book is a slap in the face to anybody willing to take such a slap. THIS BOOK IS BRUTAL, but what about life? is life always peaceful? no....and this book is about a search for peace, a search for love, and a search for purpose, but what selby wants us to know is not that these things can't be found, he wants us to know that they can only be found within ourselves....give this book a chance, and open your mind....
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Summary: A Glimpse Into Hell
Review: I,... was immediately gripped with a desire to read this book after seeing Darren Aronofsky's film. I remember reading a review of the movie calling it the "Feelbad" experience of the year, well this book is a "FeelWorse". This is definitely one of the most powerful works of fiction I've ever read -it left me far more shell-shocked than the movie and even depressed for some time afterwards.
What struck me most of all was the light/darkness aspect of the storyline which pretty much mirrors the experience of using drugs or other stimulants. The first part of the book is generally upbeat with only some hints as to what beckons for our protagonists in the future. Indeed there are many moments of humour and Selby seems to promise some hope and happiness for Harry, Marion, Tyrone and Sarah which is partly why what eventually ensues is so utterly gut-wrenching. I was also struck by the religious overtones to this story, there are a couple of verses from scripture at the start of the book which I read and re-read trying to extract the real meaning, but I think now think are quite straightforward. The message seems to be that simple faith in God is a surer compass than any attempt by human beings to create Heaven on Earth or in Harry's case the quest for a pound of pure. I kept thinking over and over again of the commandment 'Thou shalt not have False Gods before me' while reading this book, is Heroin not unlike the Golden Calf from the Old Testament? With all it's allure and false promises it seems to be just as appealing to mankind and equally as destructive.
I found myself on the point of tears on many occasions during the final odyssey into hell but was particularly moved by the passage where Marion prostitutes herself in return for drug-money. Arnold her shrink, is concerned by the tracks on her arms and scarcely wants to believe the reality of her condition.
She responds to his protests in a way that chills the blood, "Because it makes me feel whole...satisfied.".
This is all the more disturbing because she has already been presented as such an intelligent self-confident young woman who lacks for nothing. You realise that she has crossed that magic boundary into the world of self-delusion.
There is no brighter tomorrow for these characters, just the constant spiral towards destruction. This book will drive an icicle into your spine - I definitely recommend it.
Rating:
Summary: Whoah!
Review: A great piece of work! Better than Last exit... Selby's prose can seem daunting in the beginning, but his story telling is so rich that those three page paragraphs with no qoutation eventually you get used to. What a graphic and total picture of addiction and lonliness, truely a classic.
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Summary: An American *Trainspotting*
Review: Irvine Welch's novel *Trainspotting* depicts a world, set in working class urban Scotland, in which a lost generation sinks into hard drugs to escape a valueless present and a directionless future. The main characters are all dropouts from mainstream society. They want no part of a middle class culture that craves dental insurance and barca lounge chairs. Selby's *Requiem* picks up the ball by focusing not on dropouts from the middle class mainstream, but on the mainstream itself. In describing the destruction of Sara Goldfarb, the diet pill queen, her son Harry and his girlfriend Marion, who sell (and become addicted to) drugs in order to raise cash to start a yuppie business, and Harry's friend Tyrone, Selby forces us to realize that the conventional values we cherish are as addictively destructive as the habits of "junkies" such as Trainspotters. The novel is relentless in its depiction of a society that's addictive to the core. Unlike Welch's *Trainspotting,* there are no moments of hilarious humor. But the book is well worth reading, despite being so painful, because it forces us to question our own addictive behavior as well as our own hypocrisy. *Requiem* forces us into the unpleasant awareness that the "freaks," the "weaklings," the "losers" aren't just the people who stagger around on Skid Row corners or flop in crack houses. They're also us "respectable" types who feed the monkeys on our backs in more socially acceptable ways.
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