Pulse en una miniatura para ir a Google Books.
Cargando... Black Swans: Stories (1993)por Eve Babitz
Cargando...
Inscríbete en LibraryThing para averiguar si este libro te gustará. Actualmente no hay Conversaciones sobre este libro. sin reseñas | añadir una reseña
A collection of original short stories offers an intimate and dark portrait of life in the United States as they journey through California seeking answers to our changing world, dealing with such topics as jealousy, AIDS, sex, and Jim Morrison. No se han encontrado descripciones de biblioteca. |
Debates activosNingunoCubiertas populares
Google Books — Cargando... GénerosSistema Decimal Melvil (DDC)813.54Literature English (North America) American fiction 20th Century 1945-1999Clasificación de la Biblioteca del CongresoValoraciónPromedio:
¿Eres tú?Conviértete en un Autor de LibraryThing. |
I was marking passages like crazy because the writing is just so remarkable. The first page of the story titled “Slumming at the Rodeo Gardens” had me chuckling. It begins this way:
”It seems that the only people on TV who don’t dye their hair these days are recently released captives….This mentality, alas, is really bad in L.A., where the light is so pitiless….If you want to see all this striving against the ravages of being human in state-of-the-art proportions, go to the Rodeo Gardens on any Saturday afternoon; it is there that body lifts, skin peels, fat suctioning, teeth bonds and collagen flourish in the gracious noonday sun.”
California’s reputation is well-deserved I guess.
Literary references abound in this book. Apparently Babitz is just like us: a voracious reader. Proust, M.F.K. Fisher, Barbara Pym (that startled me. Only a reader like myself would mention the highly under rated Barbara Pym.), Virginia Woolf and….Joan Didion:
”I wanted to look up to and admire men, not be like Joan Didion, whose writing scared the hell out of most men I knew…Joan Didion, who knew how to wear clothes, was too brilliant and great for anyone to write like and too skinny and sultry to look like. I thought if I couldn’t be like Joan, then I’d have to be dowdy and/or crazy, like Virginia Woolf.”
I thought Babitz reminded me a little of Didion but I changed my mind. Didion never made me laugh out loud. I’ll be reading more by Eve Babitz. I’ve found a wonderful new writer who’s been writing for over thirty years. ( )