- Paperback: 384 pages
- Publisher: Spiegel & Grau; Reprint edition (Mar 9 2010)
- Language: English
- ISBN-10: 0385527993
- ISBN-13: 978-0385527996
- Product Dimensions: 13.2 x 2.1 x 20.1 cm
- Shipping Weight: 272 g
- Average Customer Review: 4.0 out of 5 stars See all reviews (1 customer review)
- Amazon Bestsellers Rank: #244,438 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
|
||||||||||||||||||
|
||||||||||||||||||
|
||||||||||||||||||
| ||||||||||||||||||
Product Details |
Product Description
Review
“Fractures all of our notions of how well-made fiction ought to behave. . .idea-hungry and haywire, too alive and abrasive to be missed. The multicultural novel has come of age — smashingly.” — Kirkus (starred)
“LaValle is as much wry fabulist as he is dogged allegorist, and his flights of grim fancy are tethered by acute observations. He can be awfully funny, too. [His]devilish fable renders the visible world–of science, social hierarchies, and New York Times headlines–a load of cultish hooey.”
--Bookforum
“Beautiful.” — Vanity Fair
“If Hieronymus Bosch and Lenny Bruce got knocked up by a woman with a large and compassionate heart, they might have brought forth Big Machine. But it is Victor LaValle's peculiar, poetic, rough and funny voice that brings it to us, alive and kicking and irresistible.”—Amy Bloom, author of the New York Times bestseller Away
“Big Machine is like nothing I’ve ever read, incredibly human and alien at the same time. LaValle writes like Gabriel Garcia Marquez mixed with Edgar Allen Poe, but this is even more than that. He’s written the first great book of the next America.”—Mos Def
“If the literary Gods mixed together Haruki Murakami and Ralph Ellison, and threw in several fistfuls of 21st century attitude, the result would be Victor LaValle. Big Machine is a wonderful, original, and crazy novel.” —Anthony Doerr, author of The Shell Collector and About Grace
“Victor LaValle is one of the finest writers around—puzzling but never abstruse, compassionate but never pitying. With The Ecstatic, he produced one of my favorite novels of the decade, and now, with Big Machine, he has produced another: a pristine window into a flawed human soul, but also a daring fantasy through which America and all its troubles come sliding gradually into focus.” —Kevin Brockmeier, author of A Brief History of the Dead
“Sure to up his critical standing while furthering comparisons to Haruki Murakami, John Kennedy Toole and Edgar Allan Poe. Ricky’s intoxicating voice—robust, organic, wily—is perfect for narrating LaValle’s high-stakes mashup of thrilling paranormal and Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man, as the fateful porter—something of a modern Odysseus rallied by a team of ‘spiritual X-men’—wanders through America’s ‘messianic hoo-hah.’”—Publishers Weekly, starred
From the Hardcover edition.
“LaValle is as much wry fabulist as he is dogged allegorist, and his flights of grim fancy are tethered by acute observations. He can be awfully funny, too. [His]devilish fable renders the visible world–of science, social hierarchies, and New York Times headlines–a load of cultish hooey.”
--Bookforum
“Beautiful.” — Vanity Fair
“If Hieronymus Bosch and Lenny Bruce got knocked up by a woman with a large and compassionate heart, they might have brought forth Big Machine. But it is Victor LaValle's peculiar, poetic, rough and funny voice that brings it to us, alive and kicking and irresistible.”—Amy Bloom, author of the New York Times bestseller Away
“Big Machine is like nothing I’ve ever read, incredibly human and alien at the same time. LaValle writes like Gabriel Garcia Marquez mixed with Edgar Allen Poe, but this is even more than that. He’s written the first great book of the next America.”—Mos Def
“If the literary Gods mixed together Haruki Murakami and Ralph Ellison, and threw in several fistfuls of 21st century attitude, the result would be Victor LaValle. Big Machine is a wonderful, original, and crazy novel.” —Anthony Doerr, author of The Shell Collector and About Grace
“Victor LaValle is one of the finest writers around—puzzling but never abstruse, compassionate but never pitying. With The Ecstatic, he produced one of my favorite novels of the decade, and now, with Big Machine, he has produced another: a pristine window into a flawed human soul, but also a daring fantasy through which America and all its troubles come sliding gradually into focus.” —Kevin Brockmeier, author of A Brief History of the Dead
“Sure to up his critical standing while furthering comparisons to Haruki Murakami, John Kennedy Toole and Edgar Allan Poe. Ricky’s intoxicating voice—robust, organic, wily—is perfect for narrating LaValle’s high-stakes mashup of thrilling paranormal and Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man, as the fateful porter—something of a modern Odysseus rallied by a team of ‘spiritual X-men’—wanders through America’s ‘messianic hoo-hah.’”—Publishers Weekly, starred
From the Hardcover edition.
Product Description
Ricky Rice is a middling hustler with a lingering junk habit, a bum knee, and a haunted mind. A survivor of a suicide cult, he scrapes by as a porter at a bus depot in Utica, New York, until one day a mysterious letter arrives, summoning him to enlist in a band of paranormal investigators comprised of former addicts and petty criminals, all of whom had at some point in their wasted lives heard what may have been the voice of God.
Infused with the wonder of a disquieting dream and laced with Victor LaValle’s fiendish comic sensibility, Big Machine is a mind-rattling mystery about doubt, faith, and the monsters we carry within us.
Infused with the wonder of a disquieting dream and laced with Victor LaValle’s fiendish comic sensibility, Big Machine is a mind-rattling mystery about doubt, faith, and the monsters we carry within us.
Inside This Book
(Learn More)
Browse and search another edition of this book.
Browse and search another edition of this book.
Tag this product(What's this?)Think of a tag as a keyword or label you consider is strongly related to this product.
Tags will help all customers organize and find favorite items. |
Customer Reviews
|
Share your thoughts with other customers:
|
||||||||||||||||||||||
|
Most helpful customer reviews
4.0 out of 5 stars
Fantastic,
By
This review is from: Big Machine: A Novel (Paperback)
It's rare to find a book with aspects of horror and the supernatural that isn't trite, senselessly gory, maudlin or revisionist in some way...this book is that rarity, and even more so for having the honest voice of an American American protagonist. Absolutely recommended for everyone who likes clever and well-written original fiction - the author cites Stephen King as an influence, and I enjoyed this book as much or more than many of King's novels (which can sometimes veer toward hokey).
Share your thoughts with other customers: Create your own review
Most Helpful Customer Reviews on Amazon.com (beta) Amazon.com:
3.9 out of 5 stars (32 customer reviews) 18 of 18 people found the following review helpful
4.0 out of 5 stars
AWEsome Writing -- Story? Well....,
By Peter - Published on Amazon.com
This review is from: Big Machine: A Novel (Hardcover)
Plenty of folks have provided plot summaries, so I'll forgo boring you with another one.I found the writing in this book just brilliant. A real pleasure. Funny, insightful... A genuine joy to read. On the other hand, the plot *does* descend into the supernatural and (as others have said) the just plain "weird" -- Too weird for me to really love the work. The book is very richly detailed and well crafted. But throughout the book, I kept asking myself "What's he GETTING AT here? This character exposition is interesting, the writing is fun, the dialog is terrific... But what do ALL these various and interesting details MEAN in the larger scheme of things?" For example, what are we to take away from Adele's pre-Washburn torment? How does all the rich description of the washerwomen cult contribute to the overall theme of this book? Are we supposed to draw some sort of parallel between the lights in the hallway of the By The Bay hotel being smashed, and the lights in the stairwell during Ricky's last night with the washerwomen? I couldn't help but wonder about these things. And when things got supernatural I just wanted to know how everything ended. In fact, I didn't think the supernatural parts towards the end were the best crafted parts of the book -- I certainly felt there were some pretty weak plot turns (from the girl in the folklore society, to the guys who just happened to be in the lobby of By The Bay). So... that's a conflicted review. I'm definitely looking forward to reading LaValle's next work. 15 of 18 people found the following review helpful
5.0 out of 5 stars
Bleeding-Edge Cross Between Don DeLillo and Ralph Ellison,
By Daniel J. Klotz - Published on Amazon.com
This review is from: Big Machine: A Novel (Hardcover)
Ricky Rice, the protagonist in Victor LaValle's second novel, begins telling us his story in Utica, NY, which he has reached by way of even more podunk towns like Kingston, Elmira, and Troy. It's amazing to witness Ricky's transformation from a beaten-down bus-station janitor to a lead investigator on supernatural incidents for a covert operation.The insight into cultish responses to supernatural phenomena, coupled with fast, modern writing rings of Don DeLillo (Mao II: A Novel) or even Chuck Palahniuk (Survivor: A Novel). That the author is a black novelist writing of a black everyman protagonist, in a very tour-de-force way, puts me in the mind of Ralph Ellison (Invisible Man). This novel is a fiercely sweeping and original take on contemporary America as it wrestles with its demons, be they literal or metaphorical. 12 of 14 people found the following review helpful
3.0 out of 5 stars
Well written, but unpleasant,
By Miki - Published on Amazon.com
Amazon Verified Purchase(What's this?)
This review is from: Big Machine: A Novel (Paperback)
I'm surprised at the rave reviews for "Big Machine: A Novel." It does have some strong points, especially an original plot. But it also has a lot of weaknesses. First, none of these characters are likable, and it is hard to care about them for the entire duration of a novel. They are all psychologically damaged, mostly by class, economics, and drugs. But the characterization is heavy-handed. We hear, seemingly every few pages, how Adele will not let anyone touch her. Instead of creating sympathy, I wanted to yell "enough already -- we get it!"Second, the plot is, as others have mentioned, just weird. It starts out interesting, but just turns slow, disjointed, and odd. The author alternates chapters set in the present with chapters that describe past traumas. This approach works fine in other books, but here it just seemed contrived and choppy. Also, there is a lot of killing in this book. Almost all of it is done in the name of a religious cult. And, speaking of cults, while some reviewers have asked about the "why" of this book, for me it's about cults. Ricky was raised in one (the Washerwomen), joined another as an adult (the Washburn library), tried to stop a third (Solomon Clay), and at the end, is well on his way to starting his own. The first three of these cults all involved murder. Will the fourth end up there as well? |
|
Listmania!
Look for similar items by category
Look for similar items by subject
Feedback
Would you like to update product info or give feedback on images?
|
