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Title: Lookout Cartridge by Joseph McElroy ISBN: 1-58567-352-8 Publisher: Overlook Press Pub. Date: 30 December, 2003 Format: Paperback Volumes: 1 List Price(USD): $16.95 |
Average Customer Rating: 3 (1 review)
Rating: 3
Summary: Not for me- maybe for Pynchon fans
Comment: A man takes a photo, then thinks he may have witnessed a crime. That's the premise of "Blow-up", a movie that asks questions about art and reality, and ranks as one of the great films of the last century. "Lookout Cartridge" is a long, long book about a film-maker who begins to wonder why so many people appear to be interested in the documentary he's making with a friend. Is this book one of the great novels of the last century? It depends on whether you like this kind of fiction. The film-makers are in no way believable in a realistic sense; most of us are familiar with independent film-makers, or, nowadays, perhaps we all *are* independent film-makers, and no one would make a god-awful film like this one (about the flow of "power", including footage of Stonehenge, of a baseball game, of people in a "marvelous country house"), and no one in the real world would fund such a film. The film is therefore a symbol, and has to be treated as such by the reader. The action is rather far-fetched (unless you really believe someone could be impaled by walking into a car antenna), but if you think the coincidences are ridiculous, then you aren't paying attention to the author's intent. More harmful to the book is the lack of personality of the characters; they are just cogs to move the plot forward. The reader never cares much about them and the danger they may or may not be in. Although the narrator may be said to change over the course of the novel, as he develops a God-like sense of understanding of the interconnectedness of all things, you may simply get tired of him, and find his revelations not worth the number of pages you have to read to get to them. The prose is dense, and rather amazing, but if you don't find the themes compelling, your head may begin to ache. This book, written in 1974, has new relevance in the post-9/11 world, but if you are looking for a realistic portrayal of terrorists and their motivation, this isn't the book.
I hope I won't be the only one to review this book, because I'm sure there are people who will enjoy it more than I did; people who like the works of Thomas Pynchon, for instance. This is a book about the elusiveness of meaning, and perhaps about what an individual must sacrifice in order to understand reality, but I wasn't convinced, ultimately, that Stonehenge and liquid crystals have anything to do with it.
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Title: A Smuggler's Bible by Joseph McElroy, Richard Howard ISBN: 158567351X Publisher: Overlook Press Pub. Date: 29 July, 2003 List Price(USD): $15.95 |
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Title: Firewall by Henning Mankell, Ebba Segerberg ISBN: 1400031532 Publisher: Vintage Books USA Pub. Date: 09 September, 2003 List Price(USD): $13.00 |
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Title: Shadow Without a Name: A Novel by Ignacio Padilla Suarez, Peter Bush, Anne McLean, Ignacio Padilla, Peter R. Bush ISBN: 0374261903 Publisher: Farrar Straus Giroux Pub. Date: 01 April, 2003 List Price(USD): $22.00 |
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Title: The Pieces from Berlin by MICHAEL PYE ISBN: 0375714162 Publisher: Vintage Books Pub. Date: 10 February, 2004 List Price(USD): $14.00 |
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Title: The Last Kashmiri Rose by Barbara Cleverly ISBN: 0440241561 Publisher: Dell Publishing Company Pub. Date: 01 September, 2003 List Price(USD): $6.99 |
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