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Loading... Another Bullshit Night in Suck Cityby Nick Flynn
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Sign up for LibraryThing to find out whether you'll like this book. No current Talk conversations about this book. This book stays flatter than its cocky title for a while, and I almost abandoned it midway. It finishes strong, though, combining some flashy formal fireworks with a much tighter narrative grasp. ( ) Somehow simultaneously tender and candid, this memoir might qualify as required reading. Not only does it provide insight into the status of one of our society's most invisible and underrepresented castes, it also makes careful and thoughtful statements about human vulnerability, the tenuousness of relationships, and the status of narrative as a means of expressing the inexpressible.
This story of two reluctantly converging lives emerges from a book that is written in an impressionistic, fragmentary style. The short chapters describe events in non-chronological order, in a style sometimes so subjective that it actually seems to capture the banal, confusing mind of a homeless drunkard. This is close to how memory must work: moments of past and present, mingling in no particular order, are capable of being organised into a semblance of narrative by a normally functioning mind. Yet when normality is broken down, by drink, drugs or a concussive accident, the randomness comes to the fore. The style of this book is its main achievement. Belongs to Publisher SeriesGallimard, Folio (4584)
Biography & Autobiography.
Nonfiction.
HTML: "Sometimes I'd see my father, walking past my building on his way to another nowhere. I could have given him a key, offered a piece of my floor. But if I let him inside the line between us would blur, my own slow-motion car wreck would speed up." With a raw authenticity stripped of self-pity and a powerful narrative voice unlike any other, Being Flynn illuminates the hidden story of fathers and sons in America. Nick Flynn has written a remarkable testament to the enduring strength of one boy's struggle for survival. Nick met his father when he was working as a caseworker in a homeless shelter in Boston. As a teenager, he'd received letters from this stranger, a self-proclaimed poet and con man doing time in federal prison for bank robbery. Being Flynn tells the story of the trajectory that led Nick and his father onto the streets, into that shelter, and finally, to each other. .No library descriptions found. |
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