rafael pyton

I was the only guy in class who liked writing book reports back in elementary school. Picking up on that thread, here is another one. There are books, then there are books - this post concerns the latter category, and the novel in question is ‘Lunar Park’ by the only and lonely (at the top) Bret Easton Ellis.

But before I get there, a digression; all summer I struggled relentlessly to decipher a brick by one Andy that is, gasp, even more famous than me. Andy Warhol’s ‘a: a novel’ took me two months to go cover to cover - I have never yet quit in the middle - and left me more expressionless than the invisible man.

24 hours of incoherent ramblings, recorded on tapes, and transcribed into a ‘book’… the result is 500 pages of amphetamine language [including all the misspelled words - because Warhol found them 'adorable'.] Yet another result is a promise to myself never to open this thing again. This thing, or: A piece of interior.

Exhausted and wasted on the other Andy, I searched for sanity at the Ellis residence. Sanity - Ellis? Oh, irony. But if I was also searching for a literary event and mad excitement, I found it.
Read in two days of feverish fervour and ferocity, Lunar Park is a trip into a writer’s mind and how it warbles on the edge of, on one side, grim reality, on the other side, horror fiction.
It is partly autobiographical, partly a therapy session about the dead father he had hated so much, partly an attempted escape from the demon of one Patrick Bateman, partly about family and how to stay clean but not wanting, really, failing, wildly.

On my bookshelves you can find every book rockstar-like Ellis has written so far; on my all-time writers’ top10 he is ranked 5th; his third novel American Psycho shocked and sodomized the whole world; yes, when Ellis takes time from rolling twenties into tight straws and writes a new book, I go and buy, simple as that.

Lunar Park is interesting, unnerving, complex, wonderfully cool, entertaining to the hilt, and completely mega. I went through the scales of emotions - I was scared witless, I wanted to be him. Gee, you need to buy it - and while you are at the book store, buy all his other books too [in English!]. If you haven’t read the earlier works, you won’t get maximum satisfaction out of Lunar Park, and stand a lesser chance of understanding him - like the title line to this post.

The living legend of Ellis has once again grown fatter. All I hope is, “this is not an exit.”

- scrawled in big red letters, naturally.

This entry was posted on Saturday, September 16th, 2006 at 3:49 pm and is filed under player. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.