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The most successful stories in the collection offer moments of startling clarity. In "Car Crash While Hitchhiking," for instance, the narrator feels most alive while in the presence of another's loss: "Down the hall came the wife. She was glorious, burning. She didn't know yet that her husband was dead.... What a pair of lungs! She shrieked as I imagined an eagle would shriek. It felt wonderful to be alive to hear it! I've gone looking for that feeling everywhere." In "Work," while "salvaging" copper wire from a flooded house to fund their habits, the narrator and an acquaintance stop to watch the nearly unfathomable sight of a beautiful, naked woman paragliding up the river. Later the narrator learns that the house once belonged to his down-and-out accomplice and that the woman is his estranged wife. "As nearly as I could tell, I'd wandered into some sort of dream that Wayne was having about his wife, and his house," he reasons. Such is the experience for the reader. More Genet than Bukowski, Denis Johnson lures us into a misfit soul's dream from which he can't awake. --Langdon Cook --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
From Publishers Weekly
Copyright 1992 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
Browse and search another edition of this book.
A salesman who shared his liquor and steered while sleeping... A Cherokee filled with bourbon... A VW no more than a bubble of hashish fumes, captained by a college student... Read the first page
Concordance
Front Cover | Copyright | Table of Contents | Excerpt | Back Cover
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1.0 out of 5 stars
Lost in A Drug-like World,
By
This review is from: Jesus' Son: Stories by (Paperback)
This was seen on a recommended list by a somewhat famous author. I was sadly disappointed. The book had a number of short stories of which NONE inspired me. One of the stories mentions how one can't just sit on the bus as 'you've got to have a destination'. It's too bad the author of this book had no true destination. I was simply lost in nonsense. Don't give this your time--it's a waste of time. I felt the same way the author did on the last page of the book when he wrote 'Sometimes I heard voices muttering in my head, and a lot of the time the world seemed to smolder around its edges'. That's for sure...what a shame.
5.0 out of 5 stars
Heroin, beutiful,
By
This review is from: Jesus' Son: Stories by (Paperback)
Absolutely entrancing book. I'm already halfway done my second reading of the book this week. Johnson's prose is electric and hard hitting. As with most of the best writers, what he doesn't say is as enticing as what he says.
Lucid, clear, yet muffled and hallucinatory. A truly fantastic and beautiful book.
5.0 out of 5 stars
Worth You Time!,
By Robert Salas (Clemson, SC) - See all my reviews
This review is from: Jesus' Son: Stories by (Paperback)
Jesus' Son: stories / by Denis Johnson is a collection of short stories by Denis Johnson. The stories center around the meanderings of a heroin junkie--a dude named F'head (Apostrophes signal omissions, okay?)--who never really knows where he is, or what's going on. Like the protagonist in the movie Trainspotting, which is very similar to Jesus' Son, F'head realizes his life is going nowhere, but he finds himself trapped in a cycle of hopelessness and addiction and fantasy. And I quote: "I'm not ready to go into all that," I said. A yellow bird fluttered close to my face, and my muscles grabbed. Now I was flopping like a fish. When I squeezed shut my eyes, tears exploded from the sockets. When I opened them, I was on my stomach." p.12. F'head's friends, Tom, Richard, Jack Hotel, hang out at a shady bar called The Vine and get involved in junkie intrigue: shootings, pill-poppings, and meetings to hatch petty heists. Much of the miserableness starts there. Later (earlier?), F'head works as an orderly in a hospital and a nursing home. As a narrator, F'head is incredibly unreliable, sprinkling hallucinations into his stories, telling stories that he later realizes never happened, and often going "unstuck" in time, Vonnegut-style, throwing any sense of continuity right out the window. Knock, knock. Who's there? A surrealist. A surrealist who? Banana. Like that, just smarter and silly-less. Denis Johnson's prose is magnificent. Look: "...this afternoon was the best of those times. We had money. We were grimy and tired. Usually we felt guilty and frightened, because there was something wrong with us, and we didn't know what it was; but today we had the feeling of men who had worked." p. 65. Jesus' Son's F'head is probably the most sympathetic anti-hero you'll find. You'll laugh at the dead-on dialogue, smile at F'head's innocence, sympathize with his loneliness, wonder at the wonderfulness of the writing, and act out any other verb that can be associated with a butt-busting good read. Warning: Jesus' Son contains lots of profanity and random violence -- just like in real life. If that is the kind of stuff that bothers you, then you should definitely stay away from this great book. If not, definitely check it out! Another Amazon pick I need to mention, lighter and funnier in tone, is The Losers' Club: Complete Restored Edition by Richard Perez, a fun novel I've already read twice this one week.
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