Books286 entries
Jonathan Lethem - Chronic City
Released: 07/01/2010
Faber and Faber
One-time child actor Chase Insteadman is the star of the New York social scene, and his relationship with Janice Trumbull (who is trapped on the International Space Station, sending back lovelorn letters) has captured public imagination. Set in an alternative and delusional Manhattan, Lethem's new novel is as zany and tragic as it sounds.
For more information visit: http://www.faber.co.uk/work/chronic-city/9780571235667/ Buy: http://www.amazon.co.uk/gp/product/0571235662?ie=UTF8&tag=cultur00-21&linkCode=as2&ca… Watch:Page [1]
90%
The Scotsman“Dickensian in its ravishing, complex evocation of a city...” Its resistance to synopsis is not only its charm, but its genius. Giving even a flavour is like explaining a joke. Every page of Chronic City shines with a striking image, a wry observation or a piece of stunning rhetoric...
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75 %
The Independent“This book provides rich reading pleasure. ” Only through careful reading and regular trips to the internet can the reader truly inhabit Chronic City. Forcing us to adopt this approach is Lethem's true achievement...
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75 %
The Telegraph“Nervily flashy sentences and superb intellectual one-liners...” Although not every idea comes off and the novel lacks some of the emotional power of his Motherless Brooklyn, one comes to take real pleasure in the company of these narcissistic weirdos...
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50%
Guardian“It's a struggle to see through the sheer haze of pot smoke...” What starts as a genial, if overly spacey, story gently darkens into something far more downbeat. But it's hard not to think that inside these 467 amiable pages is a really corking 300-page novel struggling to clear its lungs...
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30%
Financial Times“sentence by sentence, the prose is fuzzy, careless and inert...” Dialogue is showered with references to books and films both real and invented, cultural in-jokes and petty ironies. All of this is entertaining enough, except that this is an eighth novel, not a gauche debut...
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100%
The New York Times“Flinging Manhattan onto the page in all its manic energy...” “Chronic City” is a dancing showgirl of a novel, yet beneath the gaudy makeup it’s also the girl next door: a traditional bildungsroman with a strong moral compass...
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90%
Publishers Weekly“The key to his city lies in the very notion of reality...” It is a luxuriously stylized paean to Gotham City's great fountain of culture that is slowly drying up. Like the city itself, the book sways toward the maximal, but its prose shines like our skyline at sunset...
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