@Book@ A Visit from the Goon Squad *PDF*
A Visit from the Goon Squad
By : by Jennifer Egan (Goodreads Author)
ratings : 164,842
ratings reviews : 16,958
reviews
Original Title : A Visit from the Goon Squad
ISBN : 0307592839 (ISBN13: 9780307592835)
Edition Language : English
Series : Bennie Salazar, Lou Kline, Scotty Hausmann, Bill Duff, Jules Jones...more, Dolly Peale, Kitty Jackson, Ted Hollander, Sasha Blake, Andy Grady, Mark Avery, Rachel Costanza, Beth Grady, Alison Blake...less
Hardcover, 288 pages
Published June 8th 2010 by Knopf
Characters : 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
Setting : 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) ...more 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) ...less
Description : 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 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.
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) ...more 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) ...less
REVIEWS :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 Spoiler alert: You will get old. You will die. Things will never be like they are right now. And yet, how things are right now will determine how they are in the future. This is so.The "goon" in the title of this book is time. It opens with a quote from Proust, the poet laureate of memory, about how we cannot recapture the people we were in past the places where we were those people, but rather that those people exist within us, always. And that, it seems to me, is more or less the book, in 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 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 This is the best book ever that has a whole chapter done in power point. I hate power point. I think it was invented by the devil and given to humanity to make us even dumber than we are now. I think teachers who use power point should be hog-tied by their intestines and then sodomized by Mary Lou Retton (and probably people in the corporate world too, but I don't know about that first hand, but I'm sure they deserve even worse). I hate hate hate hate hate hate hate hate hate hate hate power The National Book Critics Circle Award. A Penn/Faulkner Award Finalist. The freaking Pulitzer. It has to be good, right? I thought so, to the point that it was the only book that i brought with me on the plane this weekend, but I was really disappointed. This book, a collection of quasi-connected short stories, covers a span of time between the 1970s and 2020s and follows a variety of people, most notably a former punk rocker turned music executive and a young troubled kleptomaniac turned an I was going to post a really cool review of this, post-dated from the year 202X, but I couldn't get Goodreads to display my PowerPoint presentation correctly*.*This is a lie. I did not write a PowerPoint book review because I:am lazy/am not that clever/don't have PowerPoint. Or is it all three*?*It is all three.I loved this book, which is funny because it's basically short stories, and I usually don't have the patience for short stories. But these did me the favor of interlocking nicely in a way Time is a strange old fella, isn't it? It creeps up on you and changes you bit by bit until you the new you and the old you are barely more than strangers to one another.You can see time as a continuum, a line stretching from the past into the future, a long straight road to travel along with occasional proverbial 'road not taken' splitting off to the side - where barely perceptible changes accumulate one by one. Or else you can look at it as a series of snapshots, a deck of cards randomly and Reading this book is like going into the future and eavesdropping on a conversation between two old friends who haven’t seen each other in years:“Remember Bennie Salazar?”“Sure. He was that record producer who used to put the gold flakes in his coffee. Didn’t he used to be in a band?”“Yeah, he was a wannabe punk rocker in the ‘80s. He was friends with Scotty back then.”“Was Scotty normal then? Because I heard he’s completely shithouse-rat-crazy these days.”“Oh, he’s totally insane. Hey, what was Normally I don't start reviewing books before I've finished them, but saying how much I hate this book at the halfway point is cathartic.I hate this book. I HATE IT SO MUCH. Is it well-written? Probably. Complex characters? Yeah, I'll give them that. That being said, even reading one chapter of this leaves me so freaking depressed that I want to put it in the sink and light it on fire. Also, the characters may be complex, but I don't care what happens to any of them. I really don't. There's this There are two paragraphs in Jennifer Egan’s new book, A Visit from the Goon Squad , that heavily hint on its fundamental theme but were not at all written by the author. One is the book’s epigraph, taken from Marcel Proust’s In Search of Lost Time: “Poets claim that we recapture for a moment the self that we were long ago when we enter some house or garden in which we used to live in our youth. But these are most hazardous pilgrimages, which end as often in disappointment as in success. It is Taking home the Pulitzer, it's clear to me what type of novels are favored: the novels deemed fresh and classic simultaneously. Like "Olive Kitteridge" or "The Interpreter of Maladies", this is a novel made up of short stories, all of them vivid anecdotes of people surrounding the music industry (as in musicians, roadies, fans, relatives... etc.) in precise clear-cut slivers of everyday life. Jennifer Egan's prose is exciting, her method of bleeding one story onto the next, of building up these, Christmas Eve, 2011. The foreboding sheen of a room filled with excited anticipation and beautiful glimmering presents piled up under the Christmas tree. This traditional family habit blending festive elation with infantile sibling jealousy and rivalry ever fuels surreptitious reflections on the guileful art of giving. Every year, I ingenuously and silently wish for a book. (Oh frustration! Do you recognize this experience? Having to live with an avid or obsessive reader, people might think they A must-read for "creative writing" types interested in POV/style variation. Otherwise, for the second consecutive year, the Pulitzer committee awards nearly empty formalism (see "Tinkers"). Both "Tinkers" and this one are formally "unconventional" and concerned with time, yet otherwise seem to have very little to say, as they used to say.I liked the PR/General chapter. I liked a description of old tattoos on saggy flesh. I liked the big fish caught in the East River. I really liked the sudden.
Posting Komentar