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Breakfast in the Ruins

Breakfast in the Ruins

List Price: $1.95
Your Price: $1.95
Product Info Reviews

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Rating: 2 stars
Summary: Not a good introduction to Moorcock
Review: Strange but true: I got this book as a birthday present from my AUNT when I was 12. Had she read it, I'm sure her heart would have skipped a beat and she would have headed for a confessional fast. This is a dark, disjointed novel which should supposedly please fans of time travel but it doesn't. The main character ages year by year in each chapter, traveling from one depressing historical setting to another. Particularly unsettling is the chapter where he slaughters a whole Vietnamese village. Interspersed are passages on his growing sexual awakening--growing homosexual awakening, I might add: here I was reading this stuff at 12! By the way, doesn't the guy on the paperback cover look like Sting?

Rating: 3 stars
Summary: Downhill
Review: This not-quite-sequel to Moorcock's brilliant award-winning Behold the Man is actually a collection of tales told as remembrances of past lives, held together by a framework of identity-destroying depravity. In all, this book's literary quality is not quite worth the dreary mood it creates in the reader, as it drags you into the heart of hopelessness and insignificance. An effectively disturbing work, much like its loose predecessor, yet it does not have the thought-provoking plot nor the social message of Behold the Man to make the trip worthwhile. Unless you enjoy being depressed, avoid this one.

Rating: 5 stars
Summary: Behold the sequel
Review: Well, not really a sequel to "Behold the Man," but using similar thematics and characters with the same name, Moorcock continues to explore the Glogauer archetype in a series of vignettes that don't build to one culminating picture, but stand well on their own. The other reviews here are misleading. They seem to think that Moorcock was going for a single character or something, and anyone who's read deep into Moorcock's multiverse (especially the Cornelius books) knows that these are a single facet that's been mirrored through a nearly infinite set of universes, and there's no reason to rely on consistency in the character.

I dislike a lot of Moorcock's writing, specifically the sword and sorcery stuff (which he claims is different from the rest of the genre, but looks the same to me) which he's tried to cut and paste into the rest of his schema--but the Glogauer books (Behold the Man and this) are two of his best. I recommend Behold the Man and The Black Corridor if you've never tried him, and if you like that, then go on to The Dancers at the End of Time books. Avoid books with rune, sword, or wolf in their title.

Rating: 5 stars
Summary: Behold the sequel
Review: Well, not really a sequel to "Behold the Man," but using similar thematics and characters with the same name, Moorcock continues to explore the Glogauer archetype in a series of vignettes that don't build to one culminating picture, but stand well on their own. The other reviews here are misleading. They seem to think that Moorcock was going for a single character or something, and anyone who's read deep into Moorcock's multiverse (especially the Cornelius books) knows that these are a single facet that's been mirrored through a nearly infinite set of universes, and there's no reason to rely on consistency in the character.

I dislike a lot of Moorcock's writing, specifically the sword and sorcery stuff (which he claims is different from the rest of the genre, but looks the same to me) which he's tried to cut and paste into the rest of his schema--but the Glogauer books (Behold the Man and this) are two of his best. I recommend Behold the Man and The Black Corridor if you've never tried him, and if you like that, then go on to The Dancers at the End of Time books. Avoid books with rune, sword, or wolf in their title.


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