I feel like I've been writing a lot of negative reviews lately. I wish it weren't so but apparently I need to be more discerning in my choices. Sigh.

So, whatever. I get it. I'm supposed to hate Clay and everyone else for wanking off 24/7, for spending all their time coked out and fucking each other mindlessly. I'm supposed to be critical of their wanton lifestyle and soulless existence. I'm supposed to actively want to life a life unlike theirs.

That's all true. I do. Mission accomplished.

But honestly, is that all? That feels pretty softcore. McInerney's Bright Lights Big City pretty much has the same goals and does it in a way that's a lot more interesting, relevant, and human.

It's a tough world growing up rich and jaded in Los Angeles in the 1980's. Everyone has coke but you're sick of doing it; your nose is bleeding. You just watched someone shoot up heroin and you can't remember your youngest sister's name; your best friend wants to borrow money, which is no big deal, but he won't call you back and you wonder what he's doing with all his time since he dropped out of college. Your beautiful, intelligent girlfriend wants to rekindle things now that you're back from college, but man...it's just tough to care about anything.

Reading this book is almost a painful exercise. Everyone is drugged up, f*@$ed up and nobody cares about anything other than getting high and wasted. Everyone is literally sleeping with everyone. Many meaningless sexual encounters where morals are left by the highway. The 80's were really about living the excess lifestyle and no place more than L.A where this book centres around. The book is one painfully awful situation after another, a lot of aimless wanderings, with lots of bad pointless dialogue. Nihilistic youths with too much money, too much time and hormones is always a cocktail for unhealthy choices. Despite the seeming negatives I didn't completely hate this book, if that was it's intention to shock and display the vulgarities and vapidness of youth of the 80's then this delivers it's purpose.

4th read: Reread because this is a strong contender for my dissertation. This read of it really troubled me for some reason and all of the freaky parts were 100% more freaky, and it was 100% more American gothic than I remember with all the coyotes wandering around killing pets and cars just driving off the end of roads into nowhere. The lack of friction between any of the characters is one of the most unsettling things about this book - people just relaying their internal monologues without really speaking or listening to each other. And all of the 80s music and culture references really freezes it in time so that you're kind of encased in this social bubble where everyone's devoid of morals and social interaction so they just self-destruct. It's weird. But I love this book a lot.

Also noticed how much the phone is used in this book and how people are never answering or forgetting to call or leaving messages that are never received. Really reminded me of the phone booth scenes in The Catcher in the Rye.

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3rd read: Upping to five stars because I love this so much and it's so depressing but so good.

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2nd read: How glad am I that I reread this book? Post-American Psycho I got a lot more from it. Ellis is a writer who completely litters his work with meaning and symbols, ironically which in Less Than Zero creates a world of disassociation. Clay and Blair are two characters I really warmed to reading about near the end and his outlook on life changed to something quite sinister. It wasn't as good as American Psycho simply because there was something missing from it, possibly to do with the setting/atmosphere which I didn't find as dark. But Ellis' style is still as minimalistic and meaningful as ever and I love it.

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I don't know what happened here, and whether it was me or Ellis who went wrong. I'm leaning towards saying that it was me, as the whole time reading this I could see how this novel could easily become someone's favourite book. There was something about the prose though which made the whole experience of this feel like I was always underwater. Everything seemed just hazy and all over the place - it was like I was drunk and at a party going from one place to another and not knowing what I was doing. There was also not really a plot in this novel, and usually I don't mind this because it means there's something else which hooks me instead. However, nothing seemed to hook me in this which meant I got kind of tired at the end.
That said, I love cult novels and this was definitely up there as one of the best ones. The themes of loneliness and life were deep and thought-provoking. I loved the characters and how screwed up they were, but they all seemed to kind of revel in it.
I look forward to reading Ellis's other writings because I am DEFINITELY going to read more of his work, it's just a shame that I wasn't in the right frame of mind to full appreciate this. I think I'll re-read it next year or something and hopefully my outlook will change.

(Yes, it is humiliating and debasing to be reading something with such an 80s cover. But every other edition at the library, all 16, was checked out. I literally grabbed this off the senior citizen volunteer reshelver's cart as she trundled past me.)

This had little to no redeeming value and I'm glad it wasn't the first BEE I read, because I might not have gotten past it to read American Psycho and Lunar Park, which do.

Bret Easton Ellis lays the groundwork for the discussions of "surface aesthetics" in literature: Contrary to the reigning attitude of the dominant literary elite in the 60's and 70's, he relentlessly focuses on surfaces, insisting that they are, in fact, deep. Everybody in his debut novel is blond, tan, rich, and on drugs, even male prostitutes drive Ferraris. The soma (hello, Brave New World) that 18-year-old protagonist / narrator Clay and his, ähem, "friends" use has different forms, but much like in Huxley's novel, it's mainly there to numb the senses to the real world where violence has become the new sex.

Clay has returned to L.A. for his winter break from college in New Hampshire. It's the mid-80's, Clay tries to re-connect with the people he knows, tumbles from party to party and searches for his old friend Julian, whom he finds after some one-night stands with men and women and doing lots, and I mean LOTS of cocaine - only to join Julian in a quest to see the worst of the worst. The title of the novel is taken from an Elvis Costello song of the same name, Clay has a poster of the singer on his bedroom wall (as does a character named Bret Easton Ellis in The Shards).

The most prominent feature of Clay is his apathy: When he sees things that he identifies as morally wrong, he either stands by or leaves, he never acts. His life is a repetition of expensive nothingness, which is mirrored in the language, most prominently in the famous sentences of "disappear here", "is he for sale" and "people are afrid to merge" that are repeated again and again throughout the book. The cold, detached language develops a strong pull, mainly because there is almost no emotional judgement, as Clay explicitly declares that he avoids caring about anything to shelter himself. And while the whole thing reads like an over-the-top, cheeky satire to me, it's apparently rooted in Ellis' own experiences, a statement corroborated by some other people who have lived through it.

It's pretty fascinating that this novel inspired a whole genre in German-language writing, pop literature: The book and Ellis feature prominently in Stuckrad-Barre's memoir Panikherz, Kracht's first award-winning reportage was titled after it and his debut novel Faserland inspired by it, and the art project Tristesse Royale. Das popkulturelle Quintett pushed Ellis' recipe for triggering morally upright citizens to its limits.

Is there a moral core in all of this? Ellis and pop literature writers refrain from answering this question unambiguously and direct it back to the audience. This is a postmodern playground that remixes music, culture, and sociology. People who want their writing to send a clear message that is easy to stomach and agree with will hate this. But it's not like Ellis wants these readers, they can disappear elsewhere.

"Rip glances at me and says, 'Jesus, dude. You look really bad. What's wrong? You want some coke?'" -- on page 185 (although arguably this line could've been on EVERY page of the book)

Even 35+ years later I can recall the flashy TV commercials for the 1987 film adaptation of author Ellis' Less Than Zero -- a dizzying montage of dramatic scenes (featuring then little-known performers like Robert Downey Jr. and James Spader - oh, how the times have changed!) scored to the pulsating tempo of the Bangles' pounding cover of Simon & Garfunkel's 'Hazy Shade of Winter.' However, the book's style is the opposite side of the coin from said advertisements - it is a slow-moving dirge of a barely-there story about unhappy and upper-crust Beverly Hills teenagers stuck in some sort of extended hyper-adolescence. (Yes, another one of those 'pretty people with problems' narratives.) Protagonist Clay returns home to the family mansion for Christmas break after his first semester at college in New England and . . . nothing much else really happens in a dramatic sense. He attends countless liquor- and cigarette-fueled parties, scores drugs, and then watches as so-called friends and acquaintances make bad choices as he stubbornly remains a passive character to the point of being comatose. Some truly disgusting plot devices such as child pornography and sex-trafficking / forced prostitution - introduced in the final forty or so pages - certainly don't help to make the sad storyline any better. The one compliment I can give to Ellis is that he is a descriptive writer and can describe the setting of a scene with a certain style and ease, but otherwise Less Than Zero probably seemed more shocking or groundbreaking during its 1985 debut than it does in the 21st century.

Meno di zero, di Bret Easton Ellis, ti spinge nella stessa voragine allucinata di Le schegge. Solo che Meno di zero è molto più breve, e pare sia stato il romanzo d’esordio dell’autore. In germe contiene tutti gli spunti che sono stati così intensamente espressi nel suo romanzo più recente.

Chi ha letto l’autore sa com’è il suo stile: pungente, senza filtri, anche ironico e satirico. Ma la parte che preferisco è la qualità della malinconia made in Los Angeles. Quello che preferisco sono le descrizioni dei protagonisti che vagano per le varie strade della città, di notte, al tramonto e all’alba, con la sensazione di sparire. Sunset Boulevard, Mullholland Drive, Rodeo Drive, Bel Air, Beverly Hills.
Leggendo senti di cadere lentamente in un tramonto che non finisce mai, e di essere avvolto da un senso di disperazione e solitudine crescenti. Questo perché i protagonisti di Ellis sono giovanissimi e ricchi figli di papà. Hanno tutto ma non gli basta niente. Sì lasciano andare quindi alle droghe, al sesso e alle feste, raccontandosi sempre gli stessi discorsi e rimanendo indifferenti a tutto.

L’indifferenza di Clay, il protagonista diciottenne, si espande fino a diventare nociva per tutti i rapporti che ha e per se stesso. Diventa indifferente davanti a situazioni malsane, e tremende, e rimane a guardare. Rimane proprio a guardare, mentre un suo amico si prostituisce, e non fa niente davanti ad uno stupro di gruppo. Ai suoi amici sembra giusto prendersi le cose che si vuole, ma anche se per lui forse non è così quello che pensa non basta a scuoterlo.

Dei romanzi di Ellis mi piace anche la presenza di musica perfetta per accompagnare la lettura.
Di meno di zero ho ascoltato:
• Crimson and clover, Joan Jett & the Blackhearts
• Do you really wand do hart me
• Hungry like the wolf, Duran Duran
• Somebody got murdered, The Clash

Libro que no es facil de leer, ya que no tiene una estructura determinada, es un continuo pasar de acontecimintos de los amigos del protagonista en california, fiestas drogas prostitucion, snuff movies...etc

Bret Easton Ellis is one of my favorite authors of all time.

"Set in Los Angeles in the early 1980's this coolly mesmerizing novel is a raw, powerful portrait of a lost generation".

This book contains my favorite exchange between any two characters in any book I have read.

"Where are we going?" I asked
"I don't know," he said. "Just driving."
"But this road doesn't go anywhere," I told him.
"That doesn't matter."
"What does?" I asked, after a little while.
"Just that we're on it, dude," he said.

Video Review: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OisRM...

There are some books that after you finish, you sit there holding it, the last page, the last word staring back at you, and you just kind of zone out and ponder everything that's happened since you picked it up; everything that happened in the story, everything that happened in real life.

Before I drove back from my folks today, back to hit the road again, I was watching the news. On the news crawl at the bottom of the screen a snippet kept passing that said 31 people had died in a blast in Syria. And all those 31 lives merited was an insignificant mention in a news crawl.