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Loading... Vernon God Littleby DBC Pierre
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will love Sign up for LibraryThing to find out whether you'll like this book. Gripping novel combining satire (on media, justice system, family) with a well thought out coming of age story. (  )kaushikn | Jun 16, 2009 |   The back cover of the copy I read was blurb after blurb about how funny this book is (all from UK publications). I hadn't picked up the book looking for a comedy, I picked it up because the Booker list leads me to great reads. But there was a giant disconnect between the blurbs and the book. I just didn't find the subject very funny. I was moved and frustrated by Vernon, but left cold by the leaps of logic that are usually acceptable in a comedy. Call me humourless. (  )sushidog | Jan 30, 2009 | No question about the quality of the writing (it's high: the modern American teenager's verbal awkwardness released through a lyrical written consciousness), perhaps more about whether this is for everyone. It's filthy and shot through with bleakness. Then again, it's the filth and bleakness of the modern world, nothing more or less. Pierre has nailed the internal grindings of an adolescent boy, and much of America too. I couldn't have enjoyed it as much as I did were it not for the lively sense of humour, and the redemption which is given room to breathe. Tellingly, it's the redemption Vernon envisages; he's a product of his world to the last. ( )hazzabamboo | Dec 10, 2008 | 1  Set in the small US town of Martirio it follows the life of Vernon Little. Atfer the school shooting by his friend he is seen as the one to be held accountable for this act - regardless of whether he was involved or not. The local police are after him, the conman arrived in town is after him and even the girl he fancies is after him. All to get what they want at his expense. This follows his life and how he tries to get across that it was not him who killed those people. But in the end all he can do is give them what they want to hear but at the sametime plot his revenge. Will he live to see this though or die in prison? (  )StuartAston | Dec 7, 2008 | I'm going to keep this short. One of the worst books I ever read. Too many swear words. Infantile language. I couldn't relate. (  )krista | Nov 21, 2008 | 0.024 seconds to build listing  no reviews | add a review
Amazon.com (ISBN 0156029987, Paperback)The surprise winner of the 2003 Man Booker Prize, DBC Pierre's debut novel, Vernon God Little, makes few apologies in its darkly comedic portrait of Martirio, Texas, a town reeling in the aftermath of a horrific school shooting. Fifteen-year-old Vernon Little narrates the first-person story with a cynical twang and a four-letter barb for each of his diet-obsessed townsfolk. His mother, endlessly awaiting the delivery of a new refrigerator, seems to exist only to twist an emotional knife in his back; her friend, Palmyra, structures her life around the next meal at the Bar-B-Chew Barn; officer Vaine Gurie has Vernon convicted of the crime before she's begun the investigation; reporter Eulalio Ledesma hovers between a comforting father-figure and a sadistic Bond villain; and Jesus, his best friend in the world, is dead--a victim of the killings. As his life explodes before him, Vernon flees his home in pursuit of a tropical fantasy: a cabin on a beach in Mexico he once saw in the movie Against All Odds. But the police--and TV crews--are in hot pursuit.Vernon God Little is a daring novel and demands a patient reader, not because it is challenging to read--Pierre's prose flows effortlessly, only occasionally slipping from the unmistakable voice of his hero--but because the book skates so precariously between the almost taboo subject of school violence and the literary gamesmanship of postmodern fiction. Yet, as the novel unfolds, Pierre's parodic version of American culture never crosses the line into caricature, even when it climaxes in a death-row reality TV show. And Vernon, whose cynicism and smart-ass "learnings" give way to a poignant curiosity about the meaning of life, becomes a fully human, profoundly sympathetic character. --Patrick O'Kelley (retrieved from Amazon Fri, 24 Apr 2009 07:58:19 -0400) The first test round has been closed. Visit the Open Shelves Classification group for details. |
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