|
|
Loading... ▾LibraryThing recommendations ▾Will you like it?
Loading...
 Sign up for LibraryThing to find out whether you'll like this book. ▾Work-to-work relationships
|
|
| Series (with order) |
|
| Canonical title |
Information from the French Common Knowledge. Edit to localize it to the English one. | |
|
| Original title |
Information from the French Common Knowledge. Edit to localize it to the English one. | |
|
| Alternative titles |
|
| Original publication date |
|
| People/Characters |
|
| Important places |
|
| Important events |
|
| Related movies |
|
| Awards and honors |
|
| Epigraph |
Information from the French Common Knowledge. Edit to localize it to the English one. « L'histoire répète les vielles poses, les réponses désinvoltes, les mêmes défaites... »
Elvis Costello, « Beyond Belief »
« Pas de piège plus mortel que celui qu'on tend à soi-même »
Raymond Chandler, The Long Goodbye  | |
|
| Dedication |
Information from the French Common Knowledge. Edit to localize it to the English one. Pour R. T. | |
|
| First words |
They had made a movie about us. The movie was based on a book written by someone we knew. The book was a simple thing about four weeks in the city we grew up in and for the most part was an accurate portrayal. It was labeled fiction but only a few details had been altered and our names weren't changed and there was nothing in it that hadn't happened. For example, there actually had been a screening of a snuff film in that bedroom in Malibu on a January afternoon, and yes, I had walked out onto the deck overlooking the Pacific where the author tried to console me, assuring me that the screams of the children being tortured were faked, but he was smiling as he said this and I had to turn away. Other examples: my girlfriend had in fact run over a coyote in the canyons below Mulholland, and a Christmas Eve dinner at Chasen's with my family that I had casually complained about to the author was faithfully rendered. And a twelve-year-old girl really had been gang-raped--I was in that room in West Hollywood with the writer, who in the book noted just a vague reluctance on my part and failed to accurately describe how I had actually felt that night--the desire, the shock, how afraid I was of the writer, a blond and isolated boy whom the girl I was dating had halfway fallen in love with. But the writer would never fully return her love because he was too lost in his own passivity to make the connection she needed from him, and so she had turned to me, but by then it was too late, and because the writer resented that she had turned to me I became the handsome and dazed narrator, incapable of love or kindness. That's how I became the damaged party boy who wandered through the wreckage, blood streaming from his nose, asking questions that never required answers. That's how I became the boy who never understood how anything worked. That's how I became the boy who wouldn't save a friend. That's how I became the boy who couldn't love the girl.
| |
|
| Quotations |
"Because you're just a writer."156 There were pictures of the boy as well, head-shots of him blond and tan and flexing-he had wanted to be an actor - and there was the fake smile, the pleading eyes, the mirage of it all. 159 | |
|
| Last words |
There are many things Blair doesn't get about me, so many things she ultimately overlooked, and things that she would never know, and there would always be a distance between us because there were too many shadows everywhere. Had she ever made promises to a faithless reflection in the mirror? Had she ever cried because she hated someone so much? Had she ever craved betrayal to the point where she pushed the crudest fantasies into reality, coming up with sequences that only she and nobody else could read, moving the game as you play it? Could she locate the moment she went dead inside? Does she remember the year it took to become that way? The fades, the dissolves, the rewritten scenes, all the thing you wipe away - I now want to explain these things to her but I know I never will, the most important one being: I never liked anyone and I'm afraid of people.
1985-2010 (Click to show. Warning: May contain spoilers.) | |
|
| Disambiguation notice |
|
| Publisher's editors |
|
| Blurbers |
|
| Publisher series |
|
▾References References to this work on external resources.  Wikipedia in English (2)
▾LibraryThing members' description ▾Book descriptions Amazon.com Amazon.com Review (ISBN 0307266109, Hardcover)
Donna Tartt is the author of the novels The Secret History and The Little Friend, and is currently at work on a third novel. Read her review of Imperial Bedrooms: 
As Dante’s hell is circular, so is Bret Easton Ellis’s L.A. Everywhere in Imperial Bedrooms there is a sense of time frozen, time collapsed and time rounding back on itself in various diabolical ways. The novel marks a return to the characters of Less Than Zero, twenty-five years on, where it’s still the same old scene, camera flashes and sun-blinded gloss--only this time, there’s a persistent echo of unease, the sadness of moving in a young world while no longer young in it. Clay, casting teenagers for his eighties period film, ominously named "The Listeners," finds himself eyeing the sixteen-year-old actors dressed in the style of his youth and thinking they are friends of his, though of course they aren’t. His old friend Julian, affable as usual, is rumored to be running a teenage hooker service ("Like old times," as Clay comments acidly), while Rip, he of the trust fund that "might never run out," is in his middle age so disfigured from plastic surgery as to be practically unrecognizable, though he still has the whispery voice of the handsome boy he once was. This is the most Chandleresque of Bret’s books, and the most deeply steeped in L.A. noir. No one is trustworthy; everyone is playing everyone else. Moreover, as in all Bret’s novels, fiction collides with reality, and fiction with fiction. Clay is being followed, for reasons he comes to suspect may have to do with the girl he’s fallen for. There are mysterious texts (from a dead boy? the previous tenant of Clay’s apartment?) a message written in red on a bathroom mirror: Disappear here. Running throughout are cocktail-party rumors of vans in the desert, ski masks, chains and mutilations, mass graves, a videotaped execution, though--as will be no surprise to any reader of Bret’s books---the rumors aren’t entirely rumors, in fact, the truth is rather worse than anything one has imagined. But what stays with one is not so much the concluding note of betrayal and horror as the mournfulness of the book, its eerie sense of stasis: clear skies, vacuum-sealed calm, the BlackBerry flashing on the nightstand in the middle of the night, everywhere the subliminal hum of menace, while the surgically-altered Rip brings his lips close to the ear and whispers in a voice so quiet as to almost be swallowed by the surrounding emptiness: Descansado. Relax. (Photo © Timothy Greenfield-Sanders) (retrieved from Amazon Thu, 14 Feb 2013 13:45:52 -0500) (see all 5 descriptions) ▾Library descriptions Clay, a successful screenwriter, has returned from New York to Los Angeles to help cast his new movie, and he's soon drifting through a long-familiar circle that will leave him no choice but to plumb the darkest recesses of his character and come to terms with his proclivity for betrayal.… (more) » see all 3 descriptions |
 Google Books — Loading... An edition of this book was published by Audible.com. See editions
|
)
)
)
2
Finis: nope, didn't enjoy it. Its main advantage is length (it's a quick read). Was BEE trying to do noir? to revisit AP? The label-dropping and street names -- am I supposed to have a mental map of LA? -- read as schticky and a replacement for actual writing. For all he relies on LTZ's reputation to sell this book, especially as a sequel, these events and characters don't follow the earlier book's.
Worse, it makes no sense, in the time, in the city, in the culture, for the friends of 1985 still to be so much in each other's pockets in 2005. I just whinged about that in Here I Go Again, but for BEE it's more egregious, since he's the more experienced author and since this is LA, not even Lancaster's Chicago.
Speaking of 2005, you can't have Blair call Clay on page 70 and then on page 71 Clay not able to call her back because he doesn't have her number.