Glamorama

Rating:
Summary: possibly his best to date
Review: Ellis has done that same something with the protagonist here as he did with that old chestnut american psycho but a little less with the crazies; he made our narrator a complete ... When i first started glamorama (and it is a bit of a trawl) I hated victor ward with such a passion I just wanted to see old Patty Bateman ambush him on the way to his next manicure. However, things certainly got hotted up and the story is by far the most convoluted of his novels so far.

So, basically, this victor ward matey opens up a club with for his boss (he's also sleeping with his boss' neurotic girlfriend) and after a while seems drawn to the idea of skipping town for a while and finding an old school friend at the request of some weird dude named Palakon. The novel then turns into something that wouldn't have been out of place in a Lynch movie; characters turning out to be different characters, characters suddenly acting in a movie whilst doing their daily stuff. Basically it gest weird but in a good way. I love it when characters from the other books here cross over. Remember when Pat Bateman talks about a broad named allison poole that he messed up, well she's in it and he's in it and it's really funny...guess you had to be there. Loads of the old favorites from rules of attraction are there too.

Glamorama deals with ellis' usual themes of appathy, vacuous lives of self-indulgance and hedonism but this time deals with it on a much more metaphorical way, the way there are suddenly vampires in the informers.

If you like ellis, you won't be disappointed but where his other novels I found very episodic, easy to read etc, this is a much more dense, tightly wound novel that, although brilliant, takes a lot of concentration.

Overall, another bit of excellent reading, highly recommended and if this is your first ellis novel, welcome and enjoy, if that's the right word.

Rating:
Summary: This is the continuation of The Rules of Attraction.........
Review: No one has yet to mention that the characters in this novel are the same as the Rules of Attraction. I didn't figure it out until Victor Ward was mentioned as Victor Johnson.

If you are a fan of The Rules of Attraction, then you should continue to read up on these characters in this novel.

Rating:
Summary: beautiful confusion
Review: man oh man, this book is nuts. The first half of the book was pretty linear, pretty easy to understand. Nothing spectacular, but definitely cool. For the most part just character development and giving you an understanding of the scene the main character, Victor Ward, is coming from. And then Victor is approached by a man named Palakon about a job (more of an errand). That's when things get absolutely insane. There are points in which you have no idea what's going on. What's real and what's just a figment of Victor's overtaxed mind. Just when you think you've got things figured out, some small thing will destroy your theory. The thing that puzzled me the most was the presence of the camera crews. i won't say more about them. Overall, i think the book was a raging success. A great satire about the glamorous side of life. Great characters. Great ideas. Great amounts of gore. Great book.

Rating:
Summary: Johnny Bravo becomes real...
Review: The main character, Victor Ward (or Johnson) is as clueless and lightheaded as the Cartoon Network chump. He think he is gorgeous, cool, trendy, and everything that you would ever wanted to be. But also he is as shallow as a kiddie pool. He hangs around with all the supermodels, actors, actresses, writers and producers that you can imagine -and Ellis doesn't miss the opportunity to kick some heads and mock some of our favorite stars-. Huge amounts of cocaine, alcohol, parties and (some) sex add some spice to the history. And frankly, that's the boring part of the book. Almost the first half.

If you are resilient enough and you endure the first half of the book, you'll get into a darker territory. Everything becomes more surreal, and strangely enough, Victor's character becomes more and more real -he becomes human, and that is what saves him and saves the book-.

A friend lend me the book and it took months for me to read the first half. But after that, it will grab you, and you'll end the book in hours. I give 4 stars to it because it has some flaws, the worst perhaps is that this book became outdated in the moment that it was printed since it talks about fashion, fashion, fashion... and bombs. Not for everyone, Glamorama will demand some IQ from the reader.

Rating:
Summary: The Better You Look, the More You See
Review: The above quotation, spoken by the protagonist, Victor Ward, sums up in true Easton Ellis style the themes of this fantastic novel. The quotation, like the whole book (and most of Ellis' writing) can be understood in a number of ways and a reader can find within it many layers of meaning. This isn't a book for everyone, and people who read "American Psycho" and took it literally rather than as a satirical commentary should definitely not read Glamorama. If you can take the above quote, though, with its proper irony and all the meanings that Ellis lays out in this book, you'll really enjoy the whole book. A word of caution, though: though Ellis is rarely what I'd call linear in his narrative in any case, this book may strike some as particularly jumbled or nonsensical. It sort of needs to be read like you'd watch "Mulholland Drive." If that kind of analysis and symbol-seeking is your thing, as it is mine, you'll like this book. But even if you are left confused, the hilarious name-dropping and continuous 90's pop-culture references make it well worth the read.

Rating:
Summary: An insight into the fashion world?
Review: I liked this book. It's full of fashion labels, unexpected twists & humour. This is my second book by Bret Easton Ellis & it won't be the last.

Rating:
Summary: Brilliant. Absolutely Brilliant. What more can I say?
Review: I know that a lot of people sit around scratching their heads when they finish this book- and that makes them conclude that the book must be poorly written. To them, I respond: so what? I don't believe that anything in this novel is superfluous or pointless, and that every action in it delves into the subtext Ellis is talking about, but then again, if some of it still leaves you feeling like a primate, that doesn't neccesarily mean it's poorly written. Regardless of whether you grasp Ellis' central thesis in the novel (which I'm not patronizing enough to disclose here), the book is a visceral experience, and perhaps may simply be read as absurdist simply enough. Anyone out there ever consider that incomprehensibility is part of the subject of this book, not part of its construction? Just a though. That said, Ellis is, in my opinion, the modern bearer of the flame of Oscar Wilde. This novel takes issues raised as far back as "The Picture of Dorian Gray" and looks at them from a modern standpoint- questions about youth, beauty, selfishness, aesthetics, and the very nature of the various media (and I speak formally) themselves. It seems to me that more than anything, Ellis is commenting about the power of the image, if it actually has any, and the art/nature paradigm that most good novelists have struggled with since the invention of the printing press. Still don't get it at first? Let it sit for a while- you will. This novel changed my opinion about what the written word can do, and where literature has both been and is heading. I'd recommend it to anyone- heck, if it wasn't so (necessarily) dirty in some parts, I'd tell you to teach it.

Rating:
Summary: What if we became what we're not?
Review: Awesome novel. My favorite. Better than any movie you'll ever see. And actually they've already talked about making it into a movie. Uh-oh. If you want to read something like you've never read before, and enter a world you'll never step foot in otherwise, READ GLAMORAMA. Ellis will take you to a place no other author has. And leave you wishing that Ellis hadn't spoiled you so much. Because I can't find another book that comes close to this.

Rating:
Summary: What was he trying to do?
Review: I thought that this was a very curious piece of fiction. It starts off in what might be described as prime Bret Easton Ellis territory - the New York celebrity circuit, in which the hero of the novel, Victor Ward, is operating. As usual, it's a world revolving around obessesions with fame, sex and drugs.

As the book moves on, the plot becomes increasingly surreal, the reader being taken into world based upon what seems to be a intermingling of Victor's nightmares. As the scene moves out of New York and on to London and Paris, I thought the story became Hitchcockian at times - almost like an Ellis take on "North by Northwest". Terrorists appear, and Victor becomes trapped at every turn, not being sure who is on his side, and who not. Reality itself is unreliable.

Although "Glamorama" had lots of points of interest for me, I felt that there was too much padding - for example, the graphic descrptions of violence and sex could almost have been lifted straight out of "American Psycho". I felt that Ellis had landed somewhere between a dark satire - at which I think he is skilled - and a Kafkaesque novel, but I thought that he was never really sure what he wanted this novel to be or to say. As such, I felt it drifted along too much and just fizzled out in the end.

Rating:
Summary: worthless
Review: Ellis wrote this book for himself, as he freely admits. That's how he always writes his novels. Of course, he has no problem then selling them and living off the profits.

This book is sensationalistic at best, and incoherent and worthless at worst. The writing is mediocre, and Ellis' is an absolutely incapable orchestrator of the elements of story.

If you want a smart, fast-paced book, try something like Douglas E. Winter's _Run_ instead.