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Glamorama

Glamorama

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Product Info Reviews

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Rating: 1 stars
Summary: Total mess
Review: A complete waste of paper/time/money. 500 pages of utter lunacy. No plot, tedious dialog, same scenes repeating over and over, loads of celebrity names to fill the space. Avoid this book and this author whenever possible!

Rating: 1 stars
Summary: yuck
Review: This book alternates between being boring, redundant, and vacuous (is this satire?) and revolting, shocking, and mindnumbingly repulsive. This book has the distinction of being the worst I have read in over a decade. Do not be fooled: this "emperor" has no clothes!

Rating: 1 stars
Summary: Absolutely horrid
Review: But then it's my fault for continuing to read it, hoping it would magically get better. There isn't a single likeable character; the author has only a fleeting grasp of his expansive subject matter (i.e., the fashion industry, international terrorism, copious sex scenes). It seems all he wants to do is talk about dismemberment, violent sex and self-absorbed shallow characters ... and this book is a vehicle to do that. None of it was believable, none of it was enjoyable & my advice is to discontinue reading it because it does NOT get any better.

Rating: 2 stars
Summary: our very own Gertrude Stein
Review: Does any of this matter? It goes on and on and on. You can open it anywhere and read until you're numb and cross-eyed, flip 180 pages, start again. It's all the same. It's all a bit much.

Rating: 4 stars
Summary: the glitzy are blitzed
Review: Initially, this book was very difficult to get into due to the fact that the main character is an ignorant, self-centered model. He somehow manages to miss the significant point of every conversation that is not related directly to his "coolness." He is a most unsympathetic character. However, as the narrative progreses, one comes to realize that this is not really a novel about Victor the Beautiful. This is a novel about the moral bankruptcy of a class of people who many in America aspire to be. In a sense, it asks the reader to, "Think twice!" The beautiful, the rich, the glamorous are all of these things and more: they are also twisted, empty vessals without hope of salvation.

Rating: 1 stars
Summary: How to write a book like this one...
Review: Take Jay McInerney's Model Behavior, rip off the back cover, then take Frederick Forsyth's Day of The Jackal, rip the front cover. Then glue both books together... continuity? Forgetaboutit! This is absolutely one of the worst books I've ever read. Buy at your own risk!

Rating: 4 stars
Summary: A Trenchant Indictment of Our Glam-Obsessed Society
Review: For my money, Ellis is now a colleague of Tom Wolfe and Don Delillo: an observer of our contemporary mores who uses big novels to communicate what he sees. Underneath the surface glitz and surface weirdness of GLAMORAMA is a trenchant indictment of a society in which (as the male-model protagonist reflects mournfully) "being beautiful is considered an accomplishment."

I mean, it's easy enough to read a book like this and say, "Well, I'm not one of those people, and I don't care about those people, who are just a sliver-thin slice of the populace anyway, so what difference does it make?"

But "we"--as a society--pay an extraordinary amount of attention to those people--the celebrities, the glamor queens, the glitterati. The writing about their lives and above all, the footage of their lives, is bought and consumed with ardor by a large proportion of the populace. And I think one has to judge a people in part by whom they elect to worship and/or revile.

Russians pay attention to poets. Americans pay attention to vapid beautiful people. Why is this so?

Rating: 1 stars
Summary: Poorly Written and Terribly Boring
Review: After reading decent reviews of this book, I decided to finally read it. Big Mistake. It's basically 700pgs of name dropping, where Ellis drops names of people whom he most likely doesn't even know. I would be terribly insulted if I stumbled across my name in this book. I suppose this book was supposed to be funny or something, but I didn't find anything of the sort. Satirical or not, the whole book was just absurd. Ellis basically rambles on and on about the fashion industry and society (both which he knows very little about). So here's a future tip for Ellis: Leave Camus to handle the absurd and Dostoevsky to write the 700 pg novels.

Rating: 3 stars
Summary: wait it out
Review: I spent the first 150 pages of this book really hating it, and I think if I had anything else to read I would have put it away and never opened it again. Something about the name-dropping and vapidity of all the model-opening-a-nightclub scenes I found really grating; like it was some sort of MTV description of what "cool" is these days. But after the plot got going and I started to uncover some of the hidden storylines, I really liked this book. While some people might see the main character's lifestyle as something to emulate and others might be totally turned off by it (myself among the latter), Glamorama has a totally self-contained world that has its own logic and morality, and, in some ways, I think it does a really good job of capturing and satiring the way we live today and the things which are important to us. The whole thing is a little wordy and convoluted, and, not knowing much about the designer-label names, I found it really annoying how every article of clothing on every celebrity had to be quantified and attributed. But the book really struck a chord in me, and I recommend it.

Rating: 5 stars
Summary: Ellis is one of the greatest contemporary authors
Review: Bret Easton Ellis has done it again! After the amazing »American Psycho« - which did not only shock some with its explicity but also impressed us with its fantastic telling style - he has now come up with his 700 page novel »Glamorama«.

The universe is the same as in his other books: among the rich, the famous, the beautiful. But »Glamorama« is much less straight forward than e.g. »American Psycho«. It is much more complex, and in fact much more chilling.

Ellis is one of the few authors being able to construct a main character who is in fact not very sympathetic. And yet he leaves you no choice but to be with, to support this main character.

And the effects used by Ellis are absolutely brilliant. Much better than in any movie, and certainly without any clichés! Absolutely catching. Gives you the chills...

A high-quality thriller.

It may be difficult to struggle your way through the first hundred pages, especially if you have not read any of Ellis' earlier work yet. But once you get through, you are highly rewarded.

This is a(nother) piece of art by Ellis. Truly one of the greatest contemporary authors!


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