Wide Open: Amazon.ca: Books

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Each day Ronny saw the same man waving. Read the first page

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Front Cover | Copyright | Excerpt | Back Cover

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Customer Reviews

7 Reviews

5 star:		(3)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(2)

Average Customer Review

3.4 out of 5 stars (7 customer reviews)

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1.0 out of 5 stars Save me from important books from important authors, Mar 1 2001

By A Customer

This review is from: Wide Open (Hardcover)

The review excerpts on the back of this book are glowing and lead me to expect a satisfying and rich character study of some rather odd and eccentric people. Well, the characters are odd but the author's disjointed writing style and uneven storyline left me cold. It was absolutely ponderous wading though this book and I found it quite hard to care about the characters or their lives. I would occasionally be drawn in and believe that the book was finally going to get interesting but was inevitably disappointed.

Wide Open left me cold and disappointed.

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5.0 out of 5 stars A work of "cornball perversion," staggering originality!, Aug 13 2000

By

Mary Whipple (New England) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Wide Open (Hardcover)

Barker herself once described this as a novel of "cornball perversion," and no one who reads it will ever dispute that! It is filled with the weirdest group of gonzo characters ever assembled, among them Ronny, a homeless man whose real name is Jim; Jim, a hairless man whose real name is Ronny and who works spraying weed killer along the roads; Luke, a photographer of pornography who smells like fish; and Lily, a violent and rebellious teenager who suffers from a clotting disorder and worships The Head. And if these characters were not already bizarre enough, Barker also opens the Pandora's box of their not-in-the-textbook psyches to the reader--showing them to be even more off-the-wall than we had ever dreamed! Providing fertile ground for all the aberrations to flourish, the author sets the characters in a remote seaside resort/nudist colony during the off-season, with additional forays to a nearby boar farm, the Lost and Found Department of the London Underground, and a bat cave in Sumatra, where a character we know only from her letters is searching for a hairy hominid with no big toes. Obviously, not your grandmother's novel.

Wide Open is like nothing you've ever read before-absolutely original, sometimes wacky, sometimes poignant, sometimes violent, and always fascinating. The fluidity of Barker's prose keeps the reader zipping along, despite the fact that we can't always tell when she's putting us on, aren't always sure what's going on, and often suspect there are deep themes here if only we could catch our breaths long enough to figure them out. This is an absolutely exhilarating wild ride if the reader is willing to be "wide open."

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3.0 out of 5 stars mildly disturbingly addictive, Aug 10 2000

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MELISSA (hong kong) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Wide Open (Hardcover)

i managed to finish this book in the matter of a few hours ... bt not because the book was wildly thrilling -- honestly the book is about a group of very odd people who happened to meet at a point in time and managed to witness a "triumphant tragedy" ...

WIDE OPEN isn't madly suspenseful but it was very addictive. The characters were very queer but you could imagine that there are people like them lurking on the streets. The treatment of the book was mildly disturbing and very intriguing. The most satisfying thing about this book is the fact that it ends -- not like books that you can imagine might recur over and over again. WIDE OPEN is an account of an episode that only happens once and like Nietzsche's theory of eternal return states, this could be the reason why it is so significant and unforgettable a book.

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