Jennifer Egan
Hardcover | Pages: 288 pages Rating: 3.66 | 168764 Users | 17285 Reviews
Point About Books A Visit from the Goon Squad
| Title | : | A Visit from the Goon Squad |
| Author | : | Jennifer Egan |
| Book Format | : | Hardcover |
| Book Edition | : | First Edition |
| Pages | : | Pages: 288 pages |
| Published | : | June 8th 2010 by Knopf |
| Categories | : | Fiction. Contemporary. Music. Short Stories |
Ilustration In Favor Of Books A Visit from the Goon Squad
Jennifer Egan’s spellbinding interlocking narratives circle the lives of Bennie Salazar, an aging former punk rocker and record executive, and Sasha, the passionate, troubled young woman he employs. Although Bennie and Sasha never discover each other’s pasts, the reader does, in intimate detail, along with the secret lives of a host of other characters whose paths intersect with theirs, over many years, in locales as varied as New York, San Francisco, Naples, and Africa.We first meet Sasha in her mid-thirties, on her therapist’s couch in New York City, confronting her long-standing compulsion to steal. Later, we learn the genesis of her turmoil when we see her as the child of a violent marriage, then as a runaway living in Naples, then as a college student trying to avert the suicidal impulses of her best friend. We plunge into the hidden yearnings and disappointments of her uncle, an art historian stuck in a dead marriage, who travels to Naples to extract Sasha from the city’s demimonde and experiences an epiphany of his own while staring at a sculpture of Orpheus and Eurydice in the Museo Nazionale. We meet Bennie Salazar at the melancholy nadir of his adult life—divorced, struggling to connect with his nine-year-old son, listening to a washed-up band in the basement of a suburban house—and then revisit him in 1979, at the height of his youth, shy and tender, reveling in San Francisco’s punk scene as he discovers his ardor for rock and roll and his gift for spotting talent. We learn what became of his high school gang—who thrived and who faltered—and we encounter Lou Kline, Bennie’s catastrophically careless mentor, along with the lovers and children left behind in the wake of Lou’s far-flung sexual conquests and meteoric rise and fall.
A Visit from the Goon Squad is a book about the interplay of time and music, about survival, about the stirrings and transformations set inexorably in motion by even the most passing conjunction of our fates. In a breathtaking array of styles and tones ranging from tragedy to satire to PowerPoint, Egan captures the undertow of self-destruction that we all must either master or succumb to; the basic human hunger for redemption; and the universal tendency to reach for both—and escape the merciless progress of time—in the transporting realms of art and music. Sly, startling, exhilarating work from one of our boldest writers.
Mention Books In Pursuance Of A Visit from the Goon Squad
| Original Title: | A Visit from the Goon Squad |
| ISBN: | 0307592839 (ISBN13: 9780307592835) |
| Edition Language: | English |
| Characters: | Bennie Salazar, Lou Kline, Scotty Hausmann, Bill Duff, Jules Jones, Dolly Peale, Kitty Jackson, Ted Hollander, Sasha Blake, Andy Grady, Mark Avery, Rachel Costanza, Beth Grady, Alison Blake |
| Setting: | San Francisco, California(United States) New York City, New York(United States) Crandale, New York(United States) …more Naples(Italy) Pompeii(Italy) Los Angeles, California(United States) Times Square, New York City, New York(United States) …less |
| Literary Awards: | Pulitzer Prize for Fiction (2011), Orange Prize Nominee for Fiction Longlist (2011), PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction Nominee (2011), Los Angeles Times Book Prize for Fiction (2010), National Book Critics Circle Award for Fiction (2010) Galaxy National Book Award for International Author of the Year (2011), Goodreads Choice Award Nominee for Fiction (2010), International Dublin Literary Award Nominee for Shortlist (2012), The Rooster -- The Morning News Tournament of Books (2011) |
Rating About Books A Visit from the Goon Squad
Ratings: 3.66 From 168764 Users | 17285 ReviewsWrite Up About Books A Visit from the Goon Squad
Dubliners for the Digital Age.Whereas Joyce used naturalistic prose to depict a specific time and place, Dublin, Ireland in the early twentieth century, author Jennifer Egan uses the same style and perspective to describe life in the late twentieth century, early twenty first century. Also like Joyce, Egan has structured her work into a series of loosely connected short stories, though Egans novel, or collection of short work, is more narratively connected than the earlier work. Likewise, EgansThe older I get the harder it is for any book to get on my special-place-in-my-heart shelf. The last time I found myself raving about a book as if it was the Second Coming of Christ was when I read Evening is the Whole Day in December 2009. Either I have been reading lots of so-so books lately or I have become jaded. Luckily, here comes this book to prove to me I am not as indifferent as I would like to believe myself to be.Another thing this book proves is that you can have a best selling
I attended a novel-writing workshop last week and one of the things that I took home with me was: write to express and not to impress. I have a feeling, and I could be wrong on this since I am just a paying reader, that Jennifer Egan wrote this novel A Visit from the Good Squad mainly to impress. Well, it won the nod of the Pulitzer jurors so the trick worked!Each of the 13 chapters is told in different points of view mostly by people who the two main protagonists, Bennie, the gold-eating
What a bunch of crap.A thing I find unbearable is the forced pathos of one-dimensional characters.Take Benny, for instance. Benny can't get an erection. So he puts gold flakes in his coffee and stares at his assistant's tits with various degrees of discretion. We get it. Why then are we led through the ritual over and over? Benny starts his day with a coffee, stares at assistant's tits, self-scans and finds no erection. Later, in the car with the assistant, he stares at her tits. No reaction.
Probably not Egan's fault that I didn't love this one -- I'm starting to think it's impossible for me to get behind any novel with this kind of pointillist structure. Maybe I'm more aesthetically conservative than I thought I was, because this year I've read two ecstatically praised novels that use this piecemeal approach (the other being David Mitchell's Ghostwritten) and found it difficult to give a fuck about either of 'em. The idea, I guess, is that the individual fragments add up to a
hell's bells. believe this hype.this book is the saddest, truest, wisest book i have ever read in a single day. which is not to belittle it - my tear-assing through it is because i did not want to stop reading it and resented any interruption that tried to get in my way. i am someone who plans things. i have timetables in my head - i have to, in order to get everything done. nothing important, just "at 8:00 i will untangle my necklaces while i watch my netflix. at 10:00, i will fold my laundry
Um, this is just BAAAAAAD. Bold-face, capital-letters BAD. Absolutely awful! What.....were.....they.....thinking????? Oh, I forgot, they weren't!When did the Pulitzer become the Puke-litzer? I'll never again trust that prize designation except with books from a long time ago. Don't be fooled by the first chapter, which is not too bad. Sort of an interesting start, about a kleptomaniac aging punk rock chick. After that, FORGET IT! Dumpster filler. A lot of people make a big mention of the
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