Order from a Major Online Bookstore
Ultimate Book Price Comparison Engine
Save Your Time And Money
| AnyBook4Less.com | Order from a Major Online Bookstore |
|
| Home | Store List | FAQ | Contact Us | | ||
| Ultimate Book Price Comparison Engine Save Your Time And Money |
||
 |
Title: Stories in an Almost Classical Mode by Harold Brodkey ISBN: 0-679-72431-1 Publisher: Vintage Books USA Pub. Date: 01 October, 1989 Format: Paperback Volumes: 1 List Price(USD): $18.00 |
Average Customer Rating: 3.67 (9 reviews)
Rating: 2
Summary: Poor Follow Up to "First Love and Other Sorrows"
Comment: I'm reminded of the Native American character in the Jim Jarsmuch movie, "Dead Man" whose name is something along the lines of "He who talks alot but says very little."
I read First Love and Other Sorrows before this and was outraged that more people hadn't heard of this guy. Brodkey was around 25 or 26 when that first collection was published and sadly he hadn't learned much in the 20 or 30 intervening years. Except how to overwrite.
Can't remember the title but there was one story about a guy trying to give a woman an orgasm that may have the most mechanical and unintentionally funny descriptions of sex this side of Norman Mailer.
A weird combo of Updike and Mailer at their pompous "great writer" worst.
Even so, even bad Brodkey has its moments.
Rating: 4
Summary: The Great American Writer That Never Was
Comment: Brodkey is murky, cloudy, discursive, brilliant, static, and often boring--in this collection, not in his First Love and Other Stories, written before he became a literary cult figure. If you've never read him, this is probably the best of his late fiction. Profane Friendship and Runaway Soul are all but unreadable. This Wild Darkness, which was edited by his wife, possibly for intelligibility, is a fantastic memoir and meditation on living and dying. I'd recommend, for a good blast of Brodkey the fiction writer, First Love and also Almost Classical Mode. The former presentes lucid, moving, beautifully written stories. The latter offers mandarin, inaccessible prose that seems to be trying to capture the mind as it oscillates from thought to thought, feeling to feeling. The result is a weird, involuted, sometimes compelling collection.
Rating: 2
Summary: Painfully Self-Absorbed
Comment: Honesty compels me to confess: I stopped reading just over halfway through the book. When I reached, "Largely an Oral History of My Mother" [pg 323], I knew I was defeated; I had lost my will to continue. I sensed the possibility of coming trouble when the initial story failed to deliver sufficient reward for the effort; I read the second, and thought I had underrated the author's ability to sustain my interest. In fact, I liked it a LOT. So, too, "Hofstedt and Jean -- and Others," and "Innocence," as well. But then...the self-indulgent, narcissism, painful, banal, self-absorbtion began to gnaw at my interest, nibbling relentlessly at the raw edges of pleasure, until, finally, by the time I completed "The Pain Continuum," I had begun to root for Big Sister! A few more well-placed whacks of the broomstick, and I might have been SPARED the author's endless whining. My appreciation for the daily grind of psychiatrists, who listen to the unedited versions of this [junk] day-in and day-out, has taken a giant leap.
 |
Title: The Runaway Soul by Harold Brodkey ISBN: 0805055037 Publisher: Henry Holt & Company Pub. Date: 01 October, 1997 List Price(USD): $17.00 |
 |
Title: First Love and Other Sorrows: Stories by Harold Brodkey ISBN: 0805060103 Publisher: Henry Holt & Company Pub. Date: 01 October, 1998 List Price(USD): $14.00 |
 |
Title: The World Is the Home of Love and Death by Harold Brodkey ISBN: 0805059997 Publisher: Henry Holt & Company Pub. Date: 01 October, 1998 List Price(USD): $15.00 |
Thank you for visiting www.AnyBook4Less.com and enjoy your savings!
Copyright� 2001-2021 Send your comments
