Last Exit to Brooklyn by Hubert Selby, Jr. (Bowie's Top 100 for July)

Megan and Kim are continuing their monthly Bowie's Top 100 read in July with:



From Amazon: An unforgettable cast of characters inhabits the housing projects, bars and streets of Brooklyn: Georgette, a hopelessly romantic and tormented transvestite; Vinnie, a disaffected and volatile youth who has never been on the right side of the law; Tralala, who can find no escape from her loveless existence; and, Harry, a power-hungry strike leader with a fatal secret. Living on the edge, always walking on the wild side, their alienation and aggression masks a desperate, deep human need for affection and kinship. Banned in Britain on first publication in 1964, "Last Exit to Brooklyn" brought its ex-marine, drug addict author instant notoriety. Its truthfulness stunned a generation and continues to shock to this day.

David Bowie's Top 100 Reads:

As I Lay Dying by William Faulkner--January ✔ ✔
In Cold Blood by Truman Capote -- February ✔ ✔
Fingersmith by Sarah Waters -- March ✔ ✔
The Sailor Who Fell From Grace With The Sea by Yukio Mishima -- April ✔ ✔
The Bird Artist by Howard Norman -- May ✔ ✔
White Noise by Don DeLillo -- June ✔ ✔
Last Exit To Brooklyn By Hubert Selby, Jr. -- July

Interviews With Francis Bacon by David Sylvester
Billy Liar by Keith Waterhouse
Room At The Top by John Braine
On Having No Head by Douglass Harding
Kafka Was The Rage by Anatole Broyard
A Clockwork Orange by Anthony Burgess
City Of Night by John Rechy
The Brief Wondrous Life Of Oscar Wao by Junot Diaz
Madame Bovary by Gustave Flaubert
Iliad by Homer
Tadanori Yokoo by Tadanori Yokoo
Berlin Alexanderplatz by Alfred Döblin
Inside The Whale And Other Essays by George Orwell
Mr. Norris Changes Trains by Christopher Isherwood
Halls Dictionary Of Subjects And Symbols In Art by James A. Hall
David Bomberg by Richard Cork
Blast by Wyndham Lewis
Passing by Nella Larson
Beyond The Brillo Box by Arthur C. Danto
The Origin Of Consciousness In The Breakdown Of The Bicameral Mind by Julian Jaynes
In Bluebeard’s Castle by George Steiner
Hawksmoor by Peter Ackroyd
The Divided Self by R. D. Laing
The Stranger by Albert Camus
Infants Of The Spring by Wallace Thurman
The Quest For Christa T by Christa Wolf
The Songlines by Bruce Chatwin
Nights At The Circus by Angela Carter
The Master And Margarita by Mikhail Bulgakov
The Prime Of Miss Jean Brodie by Muriel Spark
Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov
Herzog by Saul Bellow
Puckoon by Spike Milligan
Black Boy by Richard Wright
The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald
Darkness At Noon by Arthur Koestler
The Waste Land by T.S. Elliot
McTeague by Frank Norris
Money by Martin Amis
The Outsider by Colin Wilson
Strange People by Frank Edwards
English Journey by J.B. Priestley
A Confederacy Of Dunces by John Kennedy Toole
The Day Of The Locust by Nathanael West
1984 by George Orwell
The Life And Times Of Little Richard by Charles White
Awopbopaloobop Alopbamboom: The Golden Age of Rock by Nik Cohn
Mystery Train by Greil Marcus
Beano (comic, ’50s)
Raw (comic, ’80s)
Sweet Soul Music: Rhythm And Blues And The Southern Dream Of Freedom by Peter Guralnick
Silence: Lectures And Writing by John Cage
Writers At Work: The Paris Review Interviews edited by Malcolm Cowley
The Sound Of The City: The Rise Of Rock And Roll by Charlie Gillete
Octobriana And The Russian Underground by Peter Sadecky
The Street by Ann Petry
Wonder Boys by Michael Chabon
Last Exit To Brooklyn By Hubert Selby, Jr.
A People’s History Of The United States by Howard Zinn
The Age Of American Unreason by Susan Jacoby
Metropolitan Life by Fran Lebowitz
The Coast Of Utopia by Tom Stoppard
The Bridge by Hart Crane
All The Emperor’s Horses by David Kidd
Earthly Powers by Anthony Burgess
The 42nd Parallel by John Dos Passos
Tales Of Beatnik Glory by Ed Saunders
Nowhere To Run The Story Of Soul Music by Gerri Hirshey
Before The Deluge by Otto Friedrich
Sexual Personae: Art And Decadence From Nefertiti To Emily Dickinson by Camille Paglia
The American Way Of Death by Jessica Mitford
Lady Chatterly’s Lover by D.H. Lawrence
Teenage by Jon Savage
Vile Bodies by Evelyn Waugh
The Hidden Persuaders by Vance Packard
The Fire Next Time by James Baldwin
Viz (comic, early ’80s)
Private Eye (satirical magazine, ’60s – ’80s)
Selected Poems by Frank O’Hara
The Trial Of Henry Kissinger by Christopher Hitchens
Flaubert’s Parrot by Julian Barnes
Maldoror by Comte de Lautréamont
On The Road by Jack Kerouac
Mr. Wilson’s Cabinet of Wonder by Lawrence Weschler
Zanoni by Edward Bulwer-Lytton
Transcendental Magic, Its Doctrine and Ritual by Eliphas Lévi
The Gnostic Gospels by Elaine Pagels
The Leopard by Giusseppe Di Lampedusa
Inferno by Dante Alighieri
A Grave For A Dolphin by Alberto Denti di Pirajno
The Insult by Rupert Thomson
In Between The Sheets by Ian McEwan
A People’s Tragedy by Orlando Figes
Journey Into The Whirlwind by Eugenia Ginzburg

My book is at the library waiting to be picked up! : )

My book is framed, on the wall. Waiting to be picked down! ;)

Do we have an ESD yet?
That would be estimated start date. The phrase has a ring to it! I'm adopting it immediately.

I am wondering if I should bookhorn in a short one between now and then.

Here's my copy.
I'm ready!

I am deep into Last Exit to Brooklyn. What a dark, gritty, relentless tale. This was written in '64? What??

It does take some time getting into the rhythm of it but then it sucks you into an almost hypnotic trance, but an uneasy, sometimes queasy one.

Hey! I am alive and I have a copy of the book!! The ESD (and I like that phrase) is today. Diving in later tonight....

:)

Ok, now I am caught up. I will speed read my last few pages of The Kingdom of This World (a crazy ride courtesy of Jenn/nittnut), and then I'm in!
I hadn't realised you were in Mark! Coolness :)

The writing style takes a bit to get used to: lots of short, short sentences and then he switches to long, meandering, fluid ones. No quotes between the voices, etc. But I am getting the hang of it. I can just see the bar scene and all the guys preening and joshing each other. And then off the story goes with a bang!

I just started Part 2.

Oh oh, I'm not up to that part yet. But I get you with the lack of punctuation in general. It's taking concentration! I have found that if I persevere with colloquial writing it pays off. The Bone People and How Late it Was, How Late are two fine examples of that!
Right now (930pm) I'm packing up my university reading and heading to bed for my Bowie reading!

>10 Berly: woah. I see what you meant.
I am 10 pages into section II. It's a full on life in their world!!

Oh boy.
This book is hard core.
Never mind all the drugs and the stealing and the drinking, it's the violence the violence and the violence that is making me cringe. Ew ew ew. Do people really live like this? (I recognise that I have a very happy position in life even to be able to ask that question.) It makes for pretty raw and unpleasant reading, even if it is also strangely compelling.

My question from not even half way through is, will the characters in the chapters/sections so far be tied together at some stage?

This is a brutal read, with very little hope or humanity. Regardless, it is a minor classic of disaffection, alienation and aggression, populated with a cast of New York misfits, that will be burned into your brain. Hard to believe it was released in 1964.

>13 LovingLit: Unfortunately there is no light at the end of this particular tunnel. That said, I am glad I finally read it, although I have no plans to revisit this one.

Brutal. Now there's the word I was looking for to describe this. So, why can't I stop reading it? Hm, I must be warped.
I very nearly had to stop reading the section about Tralala, which was just too brutal to comprehend really. I think that I must have a safety catch in my brain which switches when I read graphic stuff, and I say to myself "that cannot possibly happen in the real world"- I have to keep telling myself that as the alternative is too heartbreaking.

I see nobody has stood to correct me about my last post.....upon reading the post script by the author I see that these characters (at least some of them) are based on real people and real events. Cripes.

Anyway, I read til the end because it was compelling and I can tell it is/was an important book. The post script(s) gave it a great context in which during the trial for its being banned, a lawyer made the point that it was OK for these things to happen in real life and be ignored, but not OK for someone to address truths in this world. For this reason, I can say that this is a special book. And it just also happens to be terrifying and terrifyingly depressing. I just happen to admire authors who can get me inside the head of a person that I am so different to.

My actual review:


Last Exit to Brooklyn by Hubert Selby Jr. 259p

This book is shocking. It describes the lives of a collection of Brooklyn residents in the 1960s and will leave you wondering how on earth anyone survived there at all with any semblance of sanity left. These are rough characters. On the one had I could talk about their actions as survival techniques in the 'eat or be eaten' atmosphere, or I could talk about their callous gleeful anger and infliction of violence upon each other. I think I'll talk about something different instead.

This book was hard to read, but I kept going because of the post script by the author. I was about to abandon ship, the constant sadness and hardship and faithless violence was too much for me, so I read the post script as a farewell. And in it Selby talked about leaving his mark, contributing something to this world when he thought he had not much time left on this earth to do so. He wanted to leave his legacy, yes, but he also wanted the voices of the people in his neighbourhood to be heard. This is where the power of the book lies. Goodness only knows how many people live like the people in this book- scraping together money from anywhere for alcohol or drugs, fervently seeking validation from peers by being the toughest or the cruelest, desperately craving that buzz from impressing someone with your latest conquest/hairstyle/round of drinks, living in fear of having violated some rule of the neighbourhood and having the local thugs raining their fists and boots on you, the children locked in apartments while their parents yell and scream and worse at each other. It is not pretty, these lives are out there being lived, and my take is that Selby wanted to have their experiences documented. In their own way, all the people in the book are seeking happiness (companionship/acceptance/love). Their ability to find it is seriously hampered by the ways they go about it, and their complete lack of empathy for others.

The bigger chapter in the middle section of the book on the union leader unfolded spectacularly, and although I read it with foreboding, and the ending was not such a huge surprise, it took me to a place I couldn't have reached on my own. This guy was seriously damaged and had no concept of how he was seen by others, or how he was being used, or how he was using or abusing others. That lack of insight can (I suppose) explain the actions of a lot of the characters. As a sociological account it is incredible, as a reading experience it is difficult and upsetting.

Really nice review! And although this book sounds like it has definite merits, this is not the book for me right now. : )

Flaubert's Parrot next?

>19 Berly: fair enough, Flaubert. Yes. The book is at one of my libraries, and it has a target on its back!

Late to the party but I did read this one finally. My favourite part was the the last story (I think?) where he writes little vignettes of some of the different people co-existing in an apartment building. It was written rather like a jigsaw puzzle with all the lives fitting together in a haphazard kind of way. Very clever!

Oh, I still want to read this but I got sidetracked. Maybe I'll make it in August! ?

>21 Yells: glad you got to it. However tough the subject matter, it makes an incredible read.