Rating: 
Summary: Mind Shattering - Left me Speechless
Review: What can i say...this book left me speechless. when i recommended it to my friends i didn't know how to do so because the book is depressive, bleak, cold, and heartbreaking. i just told them to stick with it and they'd appreciate it. i gave it to another friend of mine and he read it in 2 days (as i had done the previous 2 days). as darren aronofsky says in the foreword to this new edition "You'll never forget this read"
Rating:
Summary: How low can you go?
Review: I've read several books, and seen several movies regarding drug addiction. But none of them compare to "Requiem for a Dream," by far the most accurate and frightening works on the subject. Selby not only gets into the mind of Sara, Harry, Marion and Tyrone, but into the monster itself: addiction. Like a cancer, addiction eats away at ones' soul and dignity. From the beginning the characters are already in a pretty sad state - but they all have dreams. And their dreams are what keep the vicious cycle going. Sara's story made me the saddest. She's so oblivious and so lonely; it's heartbreaking to read. I found Sara's descent so frightening in that she honestly has no clue what's happening to her. Towards the end, I would cringe when a "Sara paragraph" came up as her agony became unbearable for me. Not to discount the others' plights. What made their stories disturbing to me was how they would constantly set new guidelines and restrictions just to keep their habits going. Their decline is so rapid and at times, hard to read. But then again, I was also facinated ("addicted"??) and couldn't put the book down. I saw the movie first before reading the book. That being said, the actors certainly did their homework in understanding their characters. Superb performances by all four, especially Ellen Burnstyn. Hoping Hollywood will ignore the NC-17 rating a recognize those who really deserve an Oscar nod.
Rating: 
Summary: A page-turner of the worst kind
Review: The last 1/3 of this book is like witnessing a train-wreck, you are powerless to avert your eyes or put the book down, as each of the 4 principle characters careen towards their own self-made Hell. Indignity piled on top of degradation, heaped on self-destruction. Yikes! Selby's destruction of the Sara Goldfarb character is the hardest to take. She's just a sweet, lonely old lady. I thought Selby was over-manipulative in portraying Sara's downfall. Surely, one of Sara's long-time friends in her building, like Ada, would have said "Sara, I'm taking you to see my Doctor, you don't look so good." But who knows. Maybe descents like Sara's happen all the time with lonely old people, and many doctor's tendency in our country to over-medicate. I didn't like Harry or Tyrone that much. Harry was just a loser, you knew from the get-go that he didn't possess the work ethic to pull off his "coffee-house" Dream. Tyrone was rather poorly drawn as a character ... who knows what his titular "dream" was other than to 'be left alone'. But, I knew girls like Marion in High School and College. The rich girls that "slummed" for the experience of it. It was fitting therefore, that Selby, made her become the skanky 'ho that she'd been pretending to be. I am glad I read this, but I don't think I need to sit through the movie version. Some of the images in the book will remain with me for a long time, I don't need a movie to reinforce them.
Rating:
Summary: A powerful, bleak (maybe too bleak) vision
Review: Recently, when I read a review of the film version of this book, I took offense at the reviewer's mention of a streak of sentimentality that runs through Selby's work. Yet I couldn't keep that critique out of my head while reading this book. Maybe romanticism is a better word. Books like this and other books about junkies by writers like Burroughs and Jim Carroll walk a fine line between describing from the inside the horrors of that lifestyle (and thus hopefully warning people away from it with much more reality and conviction that any Nancy Reagan-type "Just Say No" campaign) and being somewhat in love with the decadence and fatalism of it. At one point about 3/4 of the way through the downward spiral of one of the characters looks for a second like it might be reversed but that is just Selby teasing the reader with hope and the inevitable doom soon follows. Selby's first book, Last Exit to Brooklyn, was a true breakthrough in the presentation of characters that had never (or almost never) been represented in literature before, but the cumulative negative effect of all those bad things happening to those characters was somewhat mitigated by a final chapter that simply presented the sights and sounds of that Brooklyn neighborhood during a typical day -showing that life goes on. There's no such "happy", or perhaps more accurately, neutral, ending here. And I'm not necessarily saying there should be. There have been many writers with as bleak a vision as Selby. Burroughs, for one, although on the plus side his books have more humor and on the minus side his characters are more one dimensional, as you would expect from satirist. The idea in Requiem that we are all addicted to something (if not junk or booze then sex, food, pills, power, or the American dream itself) can be traced to Burroughs too. Other writers come to mind including Dostoevsky, Melville, Faulkner, Hardy, and Cormac McCarthy. Strangely enough, the religious vision that undermines the bleakness in some of these writers can be found here, too, but outside the story itself - in the dedication and in two quotes from the Bible at the beginning. So while I do recommend this book, the qualms mentioned above prevent me from giving it five stars.
Rating:
Summary: A timeless and astounding masterpiece
Review: Very few books have left such a deep emotional impact,weeks after I finished it I'm still haunted the characters and events that transpired,Hubert is a literary genius,the book is about diferent vices and addictions whitch the charaters use and instead of pulling them closer to their dreams,it pulls them into a series of self deluded nigthmares,and at the end claims their sanity and souls.
Rating:
Summary: a shattering story on delusions of grandeur
Review: Even though, on the face of it, this book may appear excessive and brutal in the latter stages, the true worth of this novel comes from its subtlety. The reader stands in the foothills of hope and glory for all 3 characters at the start, expectations high, their hope feeding into us as we watch there small lives unfold. The book has a pivot that lasts for a very short time as we see them at the pinnacle of their hopes and we are drawn into thinking it all could happen. But with a Selby novel, you know that things will not work out the way you think. What happens is a set of events whereby with each downfall we wonder how the character got there but know that the reasons are imperceptible from the last event. On a downward spiral, this book shows human determination in the extreme. Each person, with only one thing in mind, do anything to sustain the dream, deceiving each other and themselves. I almost wanted to cry after reading this book, coupled with the fact that I have read most of Selby's books, I feel as if I have read the best set of books ever written about human nature, and I am hollow in the knowledge that I will not find anything quite the same
Rating:
Summary: Mr. Selbly tightens the screws down, once again.
Review: What can you say about a story that starts with a son pawning his mother's t.v. set for some junk! It goes down hill from there. It has to be one of the best novels concerning addiction... of every type. One really cares about the charcters, no matter what they started out as. Or have become. Love. Drugs. Guilt... It is relentless. It is almost too much to handle. But, just like the subject matter it's almost impossible to put down. I remember right after reading" Requiem", I saw a quote by Tom Waits saying he was reading a VERY INTERESTING BOOK called Requiem For A Dream. Thank you Mr. Selby. For just being there and writing about how it really is! It is a real horror story. But curiously enough, there is hope lurking in the background. Thank you Mr. Selby. You are the best!!!
Rating:
Summary: Intense Reading
Review: After reading this book my state of mind was altered for days. You get so involved in the lives of these overt junkies, and some not so obvious, that it is hard to pull yourself back out. This is a must read for anybody interested in how people's lives can change so dramatically without them really realizing it.
Rating:
Summary: A very realistic novel
Review: Selby has a really neat style of writing - he uses no quotation marks along with some other things. It was hard to follow at first but gradually got the hang of it. I don't know if he does that for every one of his novels but i think in this novel it symbolizes the craziness of drugs. It was really depressing to read but I am glad i did. I believe it can turn people off of drugs...yes it's THAT depressing!
Rating:
Summary: Selby's drug addiction novel
Review: God knows there have been too many novels written about drug addiction, and our country has become so desensitized to the reality of heroin that by now it is all but considered just another aspect of our dysfunctional culture (herion chic?). The world certainly doesn't need another book about heroin addicts, but, hey, this one is written by Hubert Selby, which means it's a good one. It's basically the same old story: young urbanites become hooked and mess their lives up, but Selby manages to imbue his sordid narrative with genuine feeling and emotion. Depressing as all hell, but when was the last time you read an upbeat novel about junkies?
|
