Antoine Monfajon itibaren Weinberg, Austria

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11/21/2024

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Antoine Monfajon Kitabın yeniden yazılması (10)

2018-08-06 00:41

Şuursuz-Selim Akgün TrendKitaplar Kütüphanesi

Tarafından yazılmış kitap Tarafından: İkinci Adam Yayınları

Having lived in Los Angeles for 11 years now, I am fascinated by LA fiction. Indeed, it was a sad day when I realized that I probably now know LA better than I do my own little hometown in New Jersey. "The Day of the Locust" is yet another work that came to me via my voluminous film-viewing experience. It was ten years between my experiences of film and book but I'm supremely glad I picked up Nathaniel West's eulogy for Depression-era Hollywood. West, himself one of many successful novelists from the East who came to California only to find himself run over by the Hollywood scriptwriting machine (a trend that has continued for 70 years and sadly shows no signs of letting up), plays TDOTL like one long funeral. There is a literal funeral in the novel--of Harry, an aging vaudevillian who scrapes by in the age of "talkies" by hawking shoe polish--but the entire work is working towards a great demolition, right up until its incredible, almost biblical climax. The humans who populate TDOTL--indeed, those who populate Hollywood then and now--face, indirectly or not, repression, self-imposed or otherwise. There is no sex in the book. Todd, the artist, is madly in love with Harry's young daughter, Faye, an aspiring ingenue. She rebukes him yes, but Todd also rebukes himself, sublimating his frustrated sexual energy into his eerily foreshadowed painting, "The Burning of Los Angeles." And then there is Homer Simpson (YES, Homer Simpson!) the middle-aged Ohioan who has come to California "for the fresh air." Homer is a man so repressed and lost in his own ingrained compulsions that he can scarcely notice as Faye directly causes the ruin of his apartment, his possessions, his little remaining self-respect. He suffers from the perverse delusion that acting paternalistically towards Faye will earn him her love. But sex, for Homer, with Faye or anyone, is entirely out of the question. So he is left frustrated, stupidly chaste and unfulfilled, just like the millions and millions of hopefuls who get off of buses, trains, and airplanes in LA on a daily basis. TDOTL was as prescient 70 years ago as it is now, in a time when Hollywood, for better or worse, still rules American culture and all worship, in some form, its 10-story-high letters on the hillside. So much emotion, so much anger, so much yearning--personal and on a city-wide level--all waiting to boil over. One need only think of Paris Hilton to realize that the climax of the novel is only a slight stretch on reality. Slight...and scary.

Okuyucu Antoine Monfajon itibaren Weinberg, Austria

Kullanıcı, bu kitapları portalın yayın kurulu olan 2017-2018'de en ilginç olarak değerlendirdi "TrendKitaplar Kütüphanesi" Tüm okuyucuların bu literatürü tanımalarını tavsiye eder.