- Paperback: 320 pages
- Publisher: Viking (3 July 1997)
- Language English
- ISBN-10: 0670874728
- ISBN-13: 978-0670874729
- Product Dimensions: 21.2 x 13.4 x 2.8 cm
- Average Customer Review: 4.6 out of 5 stars See all reviews (7 customer reviews)
- Amazon Bestsellers Rank: 552,396 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
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Product Description
Product Description
Gabriel's obsession with pornography destroyed the love between him and Alicia. Now he lives only for his appointments with Hope, a prostitute, yet remains obsessed by his memories of true love. As he searches for redemption, he is also haunted by another figure in his past, his childhood love.
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Customer Reviews
Most Helpful Customer Reviews
7 of 7 people found the following review helpful
Format:Paperback
"Hope" is a brilliant novel written from the heart and reading it is an immersive and intoxicating experience.
What makes this novel unique is the combination of its confessional style and unparalleled insight into young adults' experience of love, sex, loss and loneliness. The result is an intellectually charged, astounding achievement of heart wrenching candour.
The main character, Gabriel, seductively pulls you not only into his world but into the darkest and brightest recesses of his mind where you will instantly recognise yourself, if not someone you know.
I love this novel and have spent the last four years looking for another as good as this. Until then, Hope is a pleasure to open to a random page and start reading. Every sentence is resonant of some kind or truth and how it feels to be human.
4 of 4 people found the following review helpful
Format:Paperback
Hope is a story of living in the past. It is a story of a man, not yet 30 but feeling at life's dead end, who cannot forget having experienced true love. It is a novel soaked in despair, burning and urgent despair, and self-loathing and guilt, for having brought about his own destruction.
The book can sometimes be a little repetitive, and the constant angsty mental self-flaggelation of the narrator made me skip the odd paragraph, as the book takes its time to tell a fairly limited amount of plot and story. But it is well-written, with real craftsmanship and care for the writing.
It is also a completely soul-destroying, depressing read for anyone who has felt real love, but lost it, and for romantic males. It's a tale about pornography and objectification, about soul destruction and the brutality of purchased artificial sex, not on the willing participants, but against the mind of the consumers.
The book moved me. As I don't really enjoy feeling crushed, I wish I had not read it. It is genuinely oppressive, pessimistic and cynical to read - but very well done despite it all.
The frank pornographic and graphic language takes a while to accustom to, however.
The book can sometimes be a little repetitive, and the constant angsty mental self-flaggelation of the narrator made me skip the odd paragraph, as the book takes its time to tell a fairly limited amount of plot and story. But it is well-written, with real craftsmanship and care for the writing.
It is also a completely soul-destroying, depressing read for anyone who has felt real love, but lost it, and for romantic males. It's a tale about pornography and objectification, about soul destruction and the brutality of purchased artificial sex, not on the willing participants, but against the mind of the consumers.
The book moved me. As I don't really enjoy feeling crushed, I wish I had not read it. It is genuinely oppressive, pessimistic and cynical to read - but very well done despite it all.
The frank pornographic and graphic language takes a while to accustom to, however.
4 of 4 people found the following review helpful
Format:Paperback
I read this book in two sittings, both on trains. This is best way to do it. The prose is dense and intense, the lead character wrings his hands, beats his breast, and leads you slowly through the twists and turns of his life. If you can't stand angst, you won't enjoy this book. Unless you can spare the time to read it in large chunks its oppressive weight won't build up on you and you'll miss its greatest effect.
The plot is simple boy-meets-girl stuff: nothing spectacular. None of the characters, except Alica, the glittering centre-piece of the narrator's life, are particularly admirable and as time passes each of them undergoes some unpleasant experiences. As expected these are all tied together albeit occasionally with co-incidence rather than a linear story. Their collected woes are seen only though the narrator's eyes and he gallantly suffers them for us, so we can seen how bad they are, hence all the aforementioned hand-wringing and so forth.
A wistful nostalga for the superficially idylic life of students in love (the narrator and Alica) and young children at play is well evoked, whilst simultainiously tainting it. This is achived through the narrators dual view: a rose tinted view of past happiness and a rain smeared vision of his, and others', shortcomings.
Do the characters emerge as better people? Well, no, mostly they emerge as sadder, somehow less alive people. By the end of the novel the pathos is palpable and where the characters once were there is left only a hole. The final pages contain two shocks both of which change the reader's view of the narrator. They are either trite and out of character or they finally reveal the (ficional) world without the narrator's self-serving filter. I can't decide.
And what does the reader take away? I was left with a ringing sense of emptyness and dispair but no real insight into the book's alleged subject (the effects of pornography). It's a book about people, not about society.
It reminded me a little of Interview With The Vampire, but with less blood and blunter teeth.
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Most Recent Customer Reviews
Was it ever enough? Welcome *home* darling...
Darkly humerous as well as unflinching, this is a novel which purports to tell the truth about male sexuality. Read more
Published 5 months ago by Eileen Shaw
An under-appreciated masterpiece
I first discovered Glen Duncan's writing a few years ago after reading a few reviews of I, Lucifer on Amazon. Read more
Published 14 months ago by Cult Fiction
A difficult book, but extremely rewarding
Having read all Duncan's books (except "The Bloodstone Papers", which I'm saving) I am completely at a loss to explain why he is not regularly in the top five writers in English. Read more
Published on 2 Feb 2009 by E. W. Collier
A brilliant book that simultaneously makes you sigh & laugh.
If you like your novels straight forward with a distinct beginning, middle & end then this isn't the book for you, however if you like your mind & emotions teased &... Read more
Published on 6 Dec 1998
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