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The Mars Room: A Novel
Publicado por Simon & Schuster Audio
Acciones del libro
Comenzar a escucharNota del editor
New release…
Kushner is a national treasure. Her newest book lurks in gritty San Francisco strip clubs and grim prison cells, but is alive with wit and humanity. A must-read for fans of “The Flamethrowers,” as well as readers of Denis Johnson.
Descripción
FEATURING ORIGINAL MUSIC BY SONIC YOUTH'S KIM GORDON!
From twice National Book Award-nominated Rachel Kushner, whose Flamethrowers was called "the best, most brazen, most interesting book of the year" (Kathryn Schulz, New York magazine), comes a spectacularly compelling, heart-stopping novel about a life gone off the rails in contemporary America.
It's 2003 and Romy Hall is at the start of two consecutive life sentences at Stanville Women's Correctional Facility, deep in California's Central Valley. Outside is the world from which she has been severed: the San Francisco of her youth and her young son, Jackson. Inside is a new reality: thousands of women hustling for the bare essentials needed to survive; the bluffing and pageantry and casual acts of violence by guards and prisoners alike; and the deadpan absurdities of institutional living, which Kushner evokes with great humor and precision.
Stunning and unsentimental, The Mars Room demonstrates new levels of mastery and depth in Kushner's work. It is audacious and tragic, propulsive and yet beautifully refined. As James Wood said in The New Yorker, her fiction "succeeds because it is so full of vibrantly different stories and histories, all of them particular, all of them brilliantly alive."
Acciones del libro
Comenzar a escucharInformación sobre el libro
The Mars Room: A Novel
Publicado por Simon & Schuster Audio
Nota del editor
New release…
Kushner is a national treasure. Her newest book lurks in gritty San Francisco strip clubs and grim prison cells, but is alive with wit and humanity. A must-read for fans of “The Flamethrowers,” as well as readers of Denis Johnson.
Descripción
FEATURING ORIGINAL MUSIC BY SONIC YOUTH'S KIM GORDON!
From twice National Book Award-nominated Rachel Kushner, whose Flamethrowers was called "the best, most brazen, most interesting book of the year" (Kathryn Schulz, New York magazine), comes a spectacularly compelling, heart-stopping novel about a life gone off the rails in contemporary America.
It's 2003 and Romy Hall is at the start of two consecutive life sentences at Stanville Women's Correctional Facility, deep in California's Central Valley. Outside is the world from which she has been severed: the San Francisco of her youth and her young son, Jackson. Inside is a new reality: thousands of women hustling for the bare essentials needed to survive; the bluffing and pageantry and casual acts of violence by guards and prisoners alike; and the deadpan absurdities of institutional living, which Kushner evokes with great humor and precision.
Stunning and unsentimental, The Mars Room demonstrates new levels of mastery and depth in Kushner's work. It is audacious and tragic, propulsive and yet beautifully refined. As James Wood said in The New Yorker, her fiction "succeeds because it is so full of vibrantly different stories and histories, all of them particular, all of them brilliantly alive."
Reseñas
A bit anticlimactic. Some interesting characters but at the end I was wishing the last 9hrs of listening was refunded to my brain.
Rating: 2Why the hell did the author narrate this?! Her voice is so painful to listen to I can’t even finish it. Someone really should have talked her out of this. Huge mistake.
Rating: 1Typical liberal viewpoint. Enabling others to get money with no effort and no calling to account is widely touted by the “progressives”. If poverty inevitably leads to crime, why are there many ethical people of low socioeconomic status? Drug abuse, laziness, and a sense of entitlement expecting others to support a life of indolence certainly are main contributors.
Rating: 1
3-3.5. I was pulled deeper into this as I went on and as the author went into the character’s inner monologue. Well-written about people whose reality we don’t often consider, how fragile their existence, how poverty and abuse lead to criminalization. While some bark about their “choices,” this lack of empathy and denial of two systems just ensure that stratification continues. No one chooses where or when they are born, who their parents are, or has any meaningful control over these significant factors the first 18 years of their life. Books like this are important if they can bridge a gap, engender greater understanding. I did not like the author’s voice at first, but it just grew into Romy’s voice. And Kim Gordon did the music!! ?
Rating: 3
Shattering , taut, accomplished, full of sardonic wry hidden wells of wisdom and truth, unnerving and deeply disturbing portrait of what our America has really become for way too many of us.
Rating: 4