(DNF) I tried my absolute best to finish this but I couldn't. Too long and too many fruitless details with seemingly no payoff (I googled the ending). Maybe one day I'll go back and properly finish it but not today.

Unless you're already an out and out misanthrope, Glamorama will probably challenge what you think of the human race as a species. It's not a novel for the squeamish or the sentimental or even the steadfastly humanitarian. You know how at the end of the news there's generally a feelgood story designed to make us love our species? Well, this is like ending the news with a story about some kids torturing a kitten or a story of a gang rape. Human nature is in the dock here, and in particular the viral increase of unthinking narcissism as a founding tenet of individual philosophy. I couldn't help imagining someone reading this novel far into the future when the planet has been all but destroyed and receiving an insight into why the planet had all but been destroyed.

Glamorama is narrated by Victor, a minor celebrity, who, like everyone else in this novel, is entirely dependent on his appearance for his livelihood and self-esteem. His mantra is to slide down the surface of things and at one point he tells someone reality is an illusion. He's not interested in thought; only flippant soundbites. There's never not a film crew in his vicinity. Sometimes there's talk of a script. Easton Ellis kind of creates a doppelganger universe and cleverly posits us between these two worlds where it soon becomes impossible to decipher what's scripted and what's spontaneous. Victor and everyone else's only important relationship is the one they share with their mirror image and publicity footage. Success is exclusively a matter of social climbing, here gauged by celebrity status. (I wonder if anyone has counted the number of real life celebrities namedropped into this novel.) However, there's the constant sense that Victor is in danger, that he's a kind of patsy. He's often seen in places he has no memory of visiting. The first half of this novel was flawlessly brilliant. A novel is always fabulous when a gripping mystery has been eloquently sustained and heightened page by page.

The satisfactory resolution of mystery is probably one of the hardest things of all to pull off in fiction. There's generally some sense of being let down because the solving of mystery in fiction mirrors the underlying craving we all have in life and only very few explanations ever give us the feeling of now knowing more about the nature of life on earth. Perhaps this is why Easton Ellis never explicitly explains the mystery at the heart of this novel. What the resolution of this novel signifies has probably been endlessly debated by book clubs. I'm not sure I could give a lucid explanation. And yet it works. It retains the unsolvable mystique of any complex conspiracy theory. The second half, beginning with a graphic and largely gratuitous torture scene where Easton Ellis too excitedly indulges his tendency towards overkill, introduces terrorism and political shenanigans into the mix. It draws a compelling connection between celebrity culture and terrorism - terrorists too after all seek publicity, their fifteen minutes in the media spotlight. I missed the plausibility of the first part in the second part but it remained an incredibly compelling and thought-provoking read throughout. Written in 1998, it's no less relevant now than it was then. I concurrently read a novel by William Trevor written four years later than this and Easton Ellis made that book seem like a broken antique rooted in some long since vanished culture. There's no disputing Easton Ellis has a finger on the pulse of these times, rather like Fitzgerald did in the 20s and 30s. Except Easton Ellis' world is not one you'd want to live in.

Thanks to Steven and his review for giving me the nudge to read this.

GLAMURAMA-BRET ISTON ELIS
✒️"Najvažnije je ono što ne znaš."
✒️"Ko je ovaj klovn? -pita Dejvid ostale.
-Stara priča-uzdiše Mat. -Niko,u prodoru,zvezda,propao. Ne obavezno tim redom."
✒️"Umem da se smejem,da aplaudiram,da zapanjeno viknem,sve na znak. Zar nisi impresionirana?"

3.5 fun at times… you can see the outlines of lunar park and the shards but this one was not quite there…. some insanely fun one liners of dialogue though. but… hm. thank you to richard for the discount because i only paid basically 25p so i can’t be too mad.

[Reviewed in 1999]

Bret Easton Ellis’s literary voice emerged fully-formed in his first novel, Less Than Zero, published to acclaim in 1985 when he was 20 years old and still a student at Bennington College. In stark minimalist prose Ellis chronicled the desultory world of wealthy L. A. teenagers living a hollow existence of drugs, soulless sex, casual violence, and consumer extravagance. Comparisons to F. Scott Fitzgerald and a latter day “lost generation” were drowned out by the more derisive label of “brat pack” that was soon attached to Ellis and several other hot young 1980s authors with splashy book contracts, in particular Jay McInerney (Bright Lights, Big City) and Tama Janowitz (Slaves of New York).

All hell broke loose with Ellis’s third book, American Psycho (1990), which is one of the more genuinely shocking novels of recent years and perhaps his masterpiece. Using the same flat, emotionless narrative voice from his earlier work, Ellis clearly laid the blame for his generation’s—and the country’s—moral meltdown at the feet of Reagan’s “morning in America” symbolized by the deregulated Wall Street boom of the 1980s. American Psycho is narrated by Patrick Bateman, 26-year-old investment broker and serial murderer. The novel’s chilling deadpan style is perfectly tuned for embodying the widening gulf between rich and poor, between men and women, between exploiters and the exploited.

Ellis’s publisher, Simon and Schuster, refused to have anything to do with the horrifying and controversial manuscript. (Ellis, however, was contractually allowed to keep the sizable advance he’d been paid while writing it.) The novel was eventually published by Random House as a Vintage paperback amid protests that it be boycotted. There were a handful of critics who realized that beneath the gore, American Psycho was a sardonic satire comparable to Norman Mailer’s scabrous 1967 novel Why Are We in Vietnam?, in which a brutal Alaskan bear hunt became a metaphor for military folly.

Ellis later insisted that the theme of American Psycho wasn’t violence at all, but rather rancid consumerism. Furthermore, as if to save us the ordeal, he even recommended that readers could skip most of it once they understood that the book was reducible to the following narrative schemata: “Shopping, shopping, shopping, clothes, clothes, clothes, sex, sex, murder, shopping, shopping, clothes, murder …”

The surprise of his ambitious new 482-page novel, Glamorama, is that Ellis has reinvigorated his style with a more reader-friendly comic energy and a hapless Candide-like protagonist. Victor Ward is a typical Ellis character in many ways: a male-model and New York dance club promoter living a pampered life of easy money, easy drugs, and easy sex with multiple girlfriends. He’s also a monumental doofus and often the butt of his own vacuous insights:

“Baby, Andy once said that beauty is a sign of intelligence.”

She turns slowly to look at me. “Who, Victor? Who? Andy who?” She coughs, blowing her nose. “Andy Kaufman? Andy Griffith? Who in the hell told you this? Andy Rooney?”

“Warhol,” I say softly, hurt. “Baby …”

Even minor characters are etched with witty precision, such as interior designer Waverly Spear—“dead ringer for Parker Posey”—and her breathless inspirations for Victor’s nightclub: “I see orange flowers, I see bamboo, I see Spanish doormen, I hear Steely Dan, I see Fellini… I see the 70s, baby, and I am wet.”

For the first hundred pages or so, Glamorama maintains a screwball-comedy pace with puns, jokes, and rapid-fire dialogue. The story then proceeds to add a few more dimensions, both figuratively and literally. We meet Victor’s dour father, a U.S. senator considering a presidential bid. As a public official he’s deeply embarrassed by his son’s tabloid lifestyle. In short order Victor finds himself involved with a shadowy government agent and an overseas mission to locate and bring home one of Victor’s former girlfriends, a film starlet who may be involved with terrorists. The satire is rich: the clueless Victor is suddenly set down in the middle of an espionage thriller with overtones of everything from Hitchcock and James Bond to spoofy films like Modesty Blaise and Austin Powers.

The strangest turn taken by Glamorama is an absurdist postmodern leap that’s entirely new to Ellis’s fiction: a film crew makes an appearance midway through the book and they never leave. In fact, Glamorama evolves into a looking-glass alternate reality in which Victor is simultaneously living the book’s story and acting in a movie version of the story. It’s a fiendishly clever and complex literary ploy, with Victor adrift in a media-saturated nightmare of escalating violence. He unwittingly joins an international terrorist cell—while, at the same time, acting in a movie about an international terrorist cell—comprised of bomb-throwing fashion models.

Ellis never shies away from detailing the carnage that ensues from deadly explosions in a crowded Paris cafe, or a train, or a 747 in flight. And the novel’s most gruesome locale: a basement torture chamber used by the terrorists to punish and/or execute anyone who gets in their way. Here is where Glamorama revisits the graphic horrors of American Psycho, reconfigured this time around for a commentary on real-world violence versus the comfortable distance we’re used to from CNN and newspaper accounts of geopolitical struggles. Ellis would no doubt approve of us skipping over the stomach-churning passages in Glamorama once we get the “point” that real violence is repulsive.

The ideology of the terrorists is never specified and Ellis demurs from offering anything like the critique of right-wing politics that kept American Psycho focused in its outrage. (Psycho-killer Patrick Bateman makes a sick-joke cameo appearance in Glamorama. Several of the characters in the new novel, including Victor himself, also appear in Ellis’s 1987 book, The Rules of Attraction.)

Is Glamorama for everyone? Not a chance. But in an era when Thomas Harris’s grim flesh-eating opus, Hannibal, can shoot to the top of the summer bestseller list, I’m beginning to suspect Bret Easton Ellis has a larger potential audience than previously assumed.

Merítés-díjátadótól felspannolva, három pohár bor után értékelésírással próbálkozni, nos, ez bátran tekinthető kísérleti recenziónak. Mondjuk azon gondolkodom, hogy ez Bret Easton Ellis világával éppenséggel kompatibilis, igaz, az ő szereplői ezt kokainnal szimulálnák. De hát magyarságtudat is van a világon.

Démoni húzása van ennek a könyvnek. Kicsinál - de meg kell dolgozni azért, hogy ezt a(z amúgy marha kellemetlen) hatást váltsa ki belőlünk. Van ugyanis egy óriási érzelmi szakadék a kötet két fele között. Az elsőben Victort követjük jobbra-balra, aki klubot nyit, modelleket kefél, kockás a hasa, és annyira fancy, annyira menő, hogy hujjuj. Ez a vonal (nevezzük Menőség Vonalának) körülbelül a kettőszázötvenedik oldalig tart, amely kettőszázötven oldal alatt bennem többször felmerült a kérdés, hogy miért is olvasom ezt a kötetet valójában, amikor nem történik benne semmi lényeges. Nos, egyfelől a híresember-fétisem miatt, valóban. Aligha akad még egy könyv a világirodalomban, aminek a híresember/oldal együtthatója ilyen magas lenne: tömegével jönnek szembe a Johnny Deppek meg a Kate Mossok, meg a többiek, akiket ki kellett gugliznom, mert a '90-es évek bizony nem most volt. A másik, amiért a könyvben marad az ember, maga a szöveg. Például a párbeszédek, ezek a kristályfényű konstrukciók, amelyek felszínességükkel, lenyűgöző hajlékonyságukkal tökéletesen leképezik Victor világának totális értéknélküliségét és gondolattalanságát. Ezeket a párbeszédeket (meg egyáltalán: ezeket a kopogó, karcos mondatokat) Ellis valami bitang jól teszi oda, felépítve belőlük az Üresség Űrhideg Üvegpalotáját.

Aztán Victor, úgy fest, a kettőszázötvenedik oldal táján eltaknyol, Tuti Srácból totális vesztes lesz. Kénytelen hát elvállalni egy zavaros megbízást, és behajózni Európa felé. Innentől kezdve ez szemre egy másik regény: riasztó és félelmetes. Rémálom-labirintus, egy kalandregény perverz paródiája, amiből lehetetlen felébredni. Közben meg persze a két regény ugyanaz. És visszanézve világosabban látjuk, hogy ami az első etapban történt, az csak egy ravasz, nagyon ravasz felvezetés volt ahhoz a világhoz, ami az általános morális nihil törvényszerű végkifutása. A semmiből előszállingózó konfettik, a hideg, amire Victor folyton panaszkodik, a különös emlékezetkihagyások - minden egy irányba mutatott, de mi, olvasók, nem hallgattunk a jelekre, és balgán besétáltunk a csapdába. Most pedig vergődünk a brutális (mert értelmetlen - igen, pont attól brutális, hogy értelmetlen) erőszak örvényében, és nosztalgiával gondolunk vissza arra az időre, amikor Victor egyszerűen csak egy szánalmas kis csíra volt, számunkra értelmezhetetlen célokkal. Bárcsak megint abban a regényben lennénk, gondoljuk, ami az első kettőszáz-ötven oldal volt, abban az üres, de többé-kevésbé biztonságos létezésben, ahol csak a reputációnkat veszíthettük el... de nincs visszaút.

Ellis érzéssel, okosan és ráérősen rétegzi egymásra a nyomasztás fojtogató szintjeit, olyan világot teremt, ahol gyakran csak utólag ébredünk rá, hogy bizonyos dolgok nem pusztán dolgok voltak, hanem figyelmeztetések. Lehet belekötni, lehet mondani, hogy az alapozás (az ominózus kettőszáz-ötven oldal az elején) hosszú, kilöki magából az olvasót. Lehet panaszkodni továbbá arra, hogy az erőszakot túl stilizáltan ábrázolja, ami elidegenítően hat. És mindez alighanem igaz. De akárhogy is, ez a regény olyan diszkomfort zónába taszított az utolsó harmadával, hogy aludni se tudtam tőle. Komolyan, nem mertem letenni, mert arra gondoltam, ha nem olvasom végig azonnal, egészen bizonyosan kísérteni fog. Túl akartam lenni rajta, hogy eresszen el végre. És ezt most egy marha nagy bóknak szánom.

You are telling me, you overwrote to just say that?
Cmon man, you are better than that.

Ellis throws in everything in this book which tries to be a whole lot of different genres from contemporary fiction, to mystery, to thriller, and throws in very detailed mayhem and destruction.
Celebrities and entertainers big in the late 1990's from Naomi Campbell to Christian Bale to Sara Gilbert and various other actors, actresses, models, etc... are named, name dropped, in the background, in the foreground, and it gets rather tedious. He is a character from a prior Ellis novel and as Ellis does he cameos or brings in other characters from prior books or name drops them.
The story centers on Victor Johnson or Victor Ward as the main character who is a self absorbed model, musician, and actor in New York who is co-owner of a new club opening in town. Themes of identity play through out the novel as a film crew shoots a movie a little later into the book which really was throwing me off as a reader.
The back nine of the book takes a major left turn and devolves into a thriller. Extremely graphic in both a hard "R" and a hard "XXX" rating to be honest.
I had this book on loan from a library that threw a recall on it so I was able to finish it a few days prior to how long I was able to have it.

-La crítica como revulsivo o como asunción defensiva de las limitaciones… quién sabe… -.

Género. Novela.

Lo que nos cuenta. Victor Ward, modelo (barra) actor y figura empresarial del ocio nocturno, se ve involucrado en el mundo del terrorismo internacional de pasarela durante un viaje a Europa por encargo de un oscuro personaje.

¿Quiere saber más del libro, sin spoilers? Visite:

http://librosdeolethros.blogspot.com/...

I didn't think this was a successful novel but it has ideas about celebrity and spectacle that are of this moment and interesting. I'm not sure that what he's trying to say about those things is coherent. Those ideas ultimately feel underdeveloped because he's determined that the novel must also be about his "signatures" - The graphic violence that I find disgusting and unbelievable as well as the graphic superficiality that I find disgusting and believable. And the brands. So many brands. Maybe the novel would've worked better if he'd left those things behind (I believe American Psycho was successful) and worked harder to develop the celebrity/political/terrorism/spectacle thing he seems most interested in anyway.

if you were to ask my what my favorite work of fiction was, on most days, I would respond with Glamorama. Celebrity fashion models become terrorists. Photographs and appearances in the gossip columns of the worlds major newspapers begin to replace reality. Sex and drugs are consumed in mass quantities. Bombs go off. Celebrities die horrific deaths, told in a cold, obsessively detailed manner. There is a chapter long description of an passanger airlplane explosion that I now, unfortunately, think of every time I am strapped into one, preparing for takeoff. This book is not for the squeamish.

Repeating the words of Godlin, 'not many books leave me in a state like this one did'.

Glamorama is fundamentally a book about the depravity of celebrity culture, and, on a wider level, a stripping away of all positive attributes that humankind likes to characterise itself with and its replacement with a rank immorality that seeps through all aspects of the novel. Easton Ellis uses a microscopic lense to reveal to us the ugly extremes of humanity in graphic detail.

It begins deceptively simple - we are introduced to the character of Victor Ward (or Johnson), a minor celebrity engrossed in appearing 'hip' - before all unfolds before the reader's eyes and suddenly you find yourself in the midst of conspiracy, a group of celebrity terrorists, and an uneasy feeling that one never truly knows what is real and what fabricated, this information at the whims of Easton Ellis, whose characters' actions are contained in the boundaries of script - until they aren't.

An incredibly dense book full of complexities, Glamorama's world fades in and out of reality, where nothing is ever fully explained, calamities crescendoing into an explosion of fractured truths, scattered throughout Victor Ward's narrative, the reader straining to piece these fractures together to form a picture of what truly occured. What was the true role of Palakon? Why the confetti? Why is Victor duplicated?

And, perhaps resoundingly, was there any meaning to the violence? Although the other questions are left to interpretation, this question is answered resoundingly. The acts, explained in detail bound to make even those most resistant to gore's stomachs churn, had none. It is these senseless acts of violence that truly create a sense of moral panic within the reader. Humankind's capabilities are bloodily revealed under the blinding light of Easton Ellis' film camera. (which is what makes this work such a brilliant work of satire.)

I feel this has further secured Bret Easton Ellis' place as my favourite author, rivalling the similarily depraved novel that is American Psycho.

It is definitely a novel that makes me want to pick it up again to try and make sense of its bizzare and gruesome occurances, and for that I commend it greatly.

As Nick Morris states perfectly in his review for the Books etc. Magazine:

'You may feel lost, but it's OK. You were never there in the first place.'