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Alexander Afonasyev biorobot_okosten — Starting as a classical romance novel, I was of course enthralled. At first. But I was soon disappointed by the lack of character develpment and the many historical innaccuracies. I was never sure how events connected and why characters seemed to react unnaturally. From quaint European countryside to 21st century vampire cult, I was put off, to say the least. Obviously I am not "for this novel".

Luka Ritonja lukaritonja — Fascinating premise: create a story around an ancient, mythic character, as if she is a real person, but the epic poem keeps bleeding into her "real" life. I couldn't finish it however, because I kept losing the thread of the story and it was never quite compelling enough to have me finish it at one sitting.

Qiang Liu fang45449f56 — Although the love for jazz comes through page after page, where a reader can hear the music through Allen’s words, Chasing the Dragon is not just a jazz history, though you could do worse to read it as such. It is also a love story--whether love of the art one creates, despite the toll it takes, or the love of another person, romantic or otherwise. Nick Flynn’s love for Wardell Gray, a man he previously considered just short of a close friend, is as real and deep as his love for Sarah, the woman he meets and falls for, against what he believed to be his way of life, otherwise, the burning need to redeem Wardell could never have rooted. Perhaps it’s more accurate to say that the love comes first from Wardell’s art, and then from the realization that there must have been something special in the life, and something dark and untoward in the death. It is then also a first class mystery, with crooked cops and unreliable witnesses, dead-ends and shocking revelations--some large, some as small as can be contained in a living room, in hard talk between family. There’s a breathtaking range and quality to Allen’s writing, veering from smooth flowing narrative to the colloquial speech of the interludes that appear throughout the book. These interludes capture the personalities, passions, pettiness, ambitions and fears of these musicians--some in the voices of the musicians themselves--with someone like Charles Mingus it could be no other way--but the ones that are not monologues do their work just as well. This could easily become one big jazz blur--there are dozens of artists portrayed in Chasing the Dragon, and for someone who does not have a particular knowledge of jazz and its history, the danger would be that the players would merge into one indefinable ball. But they don’t. Allen creates perfect moments--the first interlude with Art Pepper, wasted and pathetic, terrifies. The interlude with Coltrane is vibrantly emotional, and precariously hopeful, the moments after his deciding to kick, where we still fear for him, for relapse, and yet--there’s a sense of oncoming recovery, and a movement toward peace through the struggle that inspires. The players’ unique qualities come easily to the fore, allowing us to hone in on their specific story, while their insertion into the larger frame moves the central story forward. In the main narrative, there’s the quest for belonging, of being an outsider, whether it be because of one’s skin color--for Nick, being a white man, and a non-musician who to a large degree loves jazz music as much as the artists performing it, or the musicians themselves, predominantly black, during a time where race relations in the country were at their nadir, pre or just immediately post-Brown, where a black musician, no matter what level of genius, was still considered less than a person in much of the 48 states, north and south. This book, as with so much of Allen’s non-prose writing, does many things, and does them all amazingly well. It takes chances with form and style, and nails them on all counts. For me, it is like watching a great athlete whose skills are not limited to one aspect of a game. Or, better yet, like hearing a musician whose innate talent, honed by untold hard work and continuous effort, have made him formidable, in every aspect of his art.

Jen Kern writergirl1c9d — a bit wordy.