Surani Bandara từ Nœux-les-Mines, France

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05/16/2024

Dữ liệu người dùng, đánh giá và đề xuất cho sách

Surani Bandara Sách lại (10)

2019-03-23 22:30

Sẽ Ra Sao Nếu Thiếu Sách? Thư viện Sách hướng dẫn

Sách được viết bởi Bởi: Alex Woolf

In honor of the boozing and projectile vomiting going a couple of blocks from my apartment I thought it might be a good time to finally write a review for The Brooklyn Book of the Dead. Sadly, it's been a few weeks since I read the book and some of the details have been mushed in my head, but here we go anyway and hopefully the few minor errors I might make don't mean too much in the big scheme of things. So happy St. Patrick's Day! The premise of the book is the father of an Brooklyn raised Irish family dies and as a last wish wants to have his wake in the old neighborhood of East New York, which has since turned into one of the worst slums in all of Pre-Guiliani New York. He then wishes to be buried in one of the big sprawling cemeteries that border Brooklyn and Queens. At the time of his death he was living in Florida, estranged from pretty much all of his children. Being a good Irish Catholic family there are like fifteen children (maybe it was twelve, or maybe that was how many children were in my grandmother's family, either way either my Grandmother was the eldest of twelve or fifteen kids and the book has the other number. Here is where my grandmother and all her siblings lived: and this is what East New York looks like: I don't have the picture of all her brothers and sisters, but here is a picture of my grandmother and grandfather on their wedding day: My grandmother is from the same part of Ireland as the degenerates in this book, it makes me happy that my own family turned out much better than this family). The book is about the wake, and all of the kids, now grown up in varying states of dysfunctional lives. Almost all of the kids (well adults, but I'll call them kids) hate their father for various reasons, but the common denominator was that their father was a belligerent drunk, prone to violence at the slightest slight and the kind of father who couldn't even remember the names of his kids so he would usually just call them something derogatory or call all of the kids by the name of the oldest of their gender. None of the kids really like each other that much either. Most of them terrorized at least one of their siblings growing up, often times in very brutal and/or disturbing manners. Most of the kids haven't kept in touch with each other as grown ups and even meeting at their father's funeral anger and violence keep threatening to erupt. Oh, and as adults most of the kids have varying degrees of alcohol and drug problems. More than one of them is certifiably bat-shit crazy by the DSM-IVR, one is homeless and lives in an abandoned school bus out on Long Island, another makes Harvey Keitel's character in The Bad Lieutenant look like he has his shit together (but with many of the same vices). Even the 'good' kids (at least on the male side of the family) would probably rate fuck-up of the family in most families. Among the girls one grew up to marry a Mafia hitman, and one became a lesbian nun. This whole family of drunken Irish world class fuck-ups make the trek from their separate existences to see off their dad in the neighborhood they grew up in, much to the annoyance and anger of the street gangs who don't like all these white folks invading their turf. The novel is a stream of stories jumping between characters that paints a picture of their growing up in the shadow of their tyrant father. All of the boys at one time had to win their independence by beating the shit out of good ol'dad, which usually came sometime in their teenage years after years of getting beat up by the old man on a fairly regular basis. The good memories of dad for most of the characters coalesce around him teaching them to fight dirty, kick opponents in the balls, go for the maximum amount of blood and disfigurement in a fight, and always carry a bunch of dirt in your pocket to throw in the eyes of an opponent so you can blind him temporarily and get in a few good shots; and around the good times like when someone honked and yelled at dad for his bad driving and dad pulled the guy out of his car and kicked the crap out of him while his kids stood around cheering. I'm only giving a few highpoints in the book here, and I'm making it sound possibly worse than the book really is. At it's heart the book is pretty sad and isn't so much about kids coming to mourn their dead father but a requiem for the lives destroyed by the father. Think something like what Kafka's short story, "The Judgement" would have been like if Kafka had been Irish Catholic. As you might have guessed this is a pretty bleak book, there is little (actually nothing) uplifting. It's a testament of broken people leading shitty lives that they seem trapped into all because of one broken person who led a shitty life and left a wake of animosity and destruction behind him. Go, black Irish! Happy St. Patrick's Day!

Người đọc Surani Bandara từ Nœux-les-Mines, France

Người dùng coi những cuốn sách này là thú vị nhất trong năm 2017-2018, ban biên tập của cổng thông tin "Thư viện Sách hướng dẫn" khuyến cáo rằng tất cả các độc giả sẽ làm quen với văn học này.