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HomeShop at BookSurgeHistoryMiddle EastLike the Sun Rushing |
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| Customer Reviews: | | Average Customer Review: ( 3 customer reviews )
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Most Helpful Customer Reviews
1 of 1 found the following review helpful:
 Funny, depressing and worth the ride. Jan 03, 2011
By Andreas
I really enjoyed this book, but I might have put it down when after the first twenty-five pages or so I thought it was getting weird. I mentioned this to my friend who had recommended the book - he's an actor, and he picked out a section that I didn't get and read it out loud. I was ROTFLMAO...it had gone right over my head that it was pretty slapstick humor.
After that I gave it another try, and liked it. Lot's of really funny parts, though it wouldn't win any prizes for political correctness. And lots of really heavy stuff. A bumpy ride, but it kept me going on.
I'd recommend it - especially if you like some pretty rough humor.
1 of 1 found the following review helpful:
 Loved it!!! Aug 05, 2008
By NYC Reader
"ednyc"
I could really relate to this book and the main character, Kevin, mostly through the periods after 1970, probably since I lived a lot of it. It was very interesting to go down memory lane, even though it wasn't always the most pleasant time period in my life.
Although this is a fictional character, it takes place in real places. I like the way Mr. Fitzgerald uses the characters history with family and events to help understand why Kevin is the way he is. I found myself relating to him and really caring about the character and wanting to know what happens to him.
The author is very "descriptive" in his writing, and I found has quite a dry sense of humor, making it also an entertaining read.
There is also a surprise ending, that I didn't expect. I would recommend it very highly.
melodrama, drama and lots of black humor Dec 14, 2010
By jfpessoa
"jfpessoa"
This novel read like A Confederacy of Dunces might have if John Kennedy Toole had asked Andrew Holleran to be his co-author. It's an often sad story, and sometimes even grim, but it has so much outrageous, and often black, humor that I laughed out loud many times. Though it ranges over four decades and two countries, a great deal of the action is focused on New York City gay life in the Seventies and Eighties.
The first fifty pages are a rollercoaster, starting out with some straightforward, verbal jousting between the protagonist, Kevin, and another guy, and then plunge ahead up and down to come to a crashing climax in a lyrically described alcoholic hallucination! The second section of the novel begins a pattern of alternating chapters about Kevin's growing up with ones about two or three weeks in his present life. The humor is often ribald, but other passages are beautiful and elegiac. In the final section of the book the two streams of narrative converge in the AIDS epidemic of the late Eighties. It concludes with a scene between the same two men as the one that began the book, but with almost the exact opposite emotional charge. And there is an extremely short, kind of prose-poem ending, with what for me was an unforgettably poignant final image.
It's definitely a go-with-the-flow narrative style, but if you do it a pretty special trip.
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