- Paperback: 224 pages
- Publisher: Vintage Books; New edition edition (July 20 2004)
- Language: English
- ISBN-10: 0099437333
- ISBN-13: 978-0099437338
- Product Dimensions: 13 x 1.4 x 19.8 cm
- Shipping Weight: 159 g
- Average Customer Review: 3.6 out of 5 stars See all reviews (14 customer reviews)
- Amazon Bestsellers Rank: #390,127 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
|
||||||||||||||||||
|
||||||||||||||||||
|
||||||||||||||||||
| ||||||||||||||||||
Product Details |
Product Description
Review
“It’s transfixing… At first it’s funny. It teases, exaggerates, deliberates. Then it becomes ferocious, stricken, moving.” - The Times
“Viciously funny, at once a hilarious joke and a technical triumph.” -- Financial Times
"Sparkling might not be the first adjective that springs to mind to describe a novel packed with the concentrated disgust which Dead Babies contains. Nevertheless, Martin Amis's version of the bleak and wrecky future that awaits a sex-and-drug-addicted society is so fizzing with style, so busy with verbal inventiveness, that the adjective is impelled upon one." -- Julian Barnes
“Viciously funny, at once a hilarious joke and a technical triumph.” -- Financial Times
"Sparkling might not be the first adjective that springs to mind to describe a novel packed with the concentrated disgust which Dead Babies contains. Nevertheless, Martin Amis's version of the bleak and wrecky future that awaits a sex-and-drug-addicted society is so fizzing with style, so busy with verbal inventiveness, that the adjective is impelled upon one." -- Julian Barnes
Book Description
Blitzed on uppers, downers, blue movies and bellinis, the bacchanalia bent on bon-vivants, ensconced at Appleseed Rectory for the weekend, are reeling in a hallucinatory haze of sex and seduction. But as Friday spirals into Sunday, and sobriety sets in, the orgiastic romp descends to disastrous depths.
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
3.0 out of 5 stars
me and Amis,
By blicero (Queens, NY) - See all my reviews
This review is from: Dead Babies (Paperback)
In the Rachel Papers, Amis claims that as a modern writer one can no longer write seriously about such things as love, the moon's reflection in the pond, the stars... This may be the case, but that doesn't mean that you are confined to writing only about pornographers, seedy, violent urban people and wise-acre nihilists. These types of people (and they are merely types) fit better in movies and TV than they do in fiction. Because they're boring and wooden, is why. The dialouge in this book (and man, is there a lot of it) is comprised of the characters (or caricatures) all trying to be more witty and nihilistic than each other. The reader comes away with feelings about how essentially boring human conversation is. Also there is something old-fashioned about the fascination in this book with sex and drugs... If you've already had sex and experimented with drugs (as presumably most of Amis's readers have) then this book just often seems juvenile.Also, a bone to pick re: Amis's Americans: They are wooden and reflect common Euro misconceptions about what Americans are like. Boy, I don't want it to seem like I don't like Amis; he's great and really funny, but this is the weakest novel of his I've read, so everything that bothers me about him kinda stood out. His influences are so clearly felt (Bellow, Nabokov, Updike, Delillo) that you can almost pick any paragraph and easily see which of these four comes through the most. I'm not saying Amis is derivitave, though; he's got his own thing going on... The cool thing about Dead Babies is the "time situation": in the narration, the events that you are reading are still off in the future; "now" all the characters haven't even met, the situations have barely even come together. So there is a subjunctive, elusive feel to the narrative...cool. Personally, I'd suggest the Information if you've never read him before. And really maybe the reason his characters grate on me is because I'm too "tender and wooly" as Updike has said of himself.
2.0 out of 5 stars
A Disappointment,
By next (San Francisco) - See all my reviews
This review is from: Dead Babies (Paperback)
Initially, this book looked rather promising. Amis's stylistic touches were nice as usual and for the first hundred or so pages it seemed as though this was really building up towards an intense and revealing climax. Unfortunately, Amis failed to make the plot nearly as interesting as the setting or characters. The ending was horrid and sudden and although it appeared to say something, it really said nothing about either our condition or the mindset of the characters. All in all, an easy read with its fair share of good lines and amusing scenes, but ultimately as unsatisfying as the drugs the characters intake.
5.0 out of 5 stars
Feelgood hit of the century.,
By A Customer
This review is from: Dead Babies (Paperback)
This book touched me in places no other novel could. I felt so impressed by Amis' ability to handle drug abuse in a way that wasn't belittling or mocking as far as the victims went. He makes it very clear that these are people who deserve all the help and sympathy we can give them. Page after page, Amis' empathy flows while he presents truly alive characters who any one of us would want to meet and help. If you want a book that makes you feel like life is worth living again, this is your book. You could make the difference. Help an addict today!
Share your thoughts with other customers: Create your own review
Want to see more reviews on this item?
|
Most recent customer reviews |
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?
|
