| ||||||||||||||||||
 Trade In this Item for up to £0.25
Get an extra £5 when you trade in books worth £10 or more until June 30, 2012. Trade in Try (Cooper, Dennis) for an Amazon.co.uk gift card of up to £0.25, which you can then spend on millions of items across the site. Trade-in values may vary (terms apply). Find more products eligible for trade-in.
|
Frequently Bought Together
Product details
|
More About the Author
Product Description
Review
"'He nauseates and enthralls, but is unquestionably a new and major talent' Observer; 'Dennis Cooper's Try is the ripest literary harvest of the season... Cooper is a perky, witty and revolting writer, who provides an important outlet for the often ignored violent anger of Generation X. Here is the son of Rimbaud, de Sade and Genet. Ignore him at your perit' Time Out"
--This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
Product Description
Simultaneously deadpan and queasily raw, Try is the story of Ziggy, the adopted teenaged son of two sexually abusive fathers whose failed experiment at nuclear-family domesticity has left him stranded with one and increasingly present in the fantasies of the other. He turns from both of these men to his uncle, who sells pornographic videos on the black market, and to his best friend, a junkie whose own vulnerability inspires in Ziggy a fierce and awkward devotion. Terminally insecure and yet inured to sexual brutality, Ziggy questions his two fathers, his uncle, his drug dealer, his friends, and himself in an attempt to isolate and define the vagaries and boundaries of sexuality, attraction, and abuse, compiling their responses into a magazine that he calls I Apologize. In prose that is taut, rhythmic, charged, chillingly precise, and beautifully controlled, Cooper examines his characters' motivations not as the product of cultural coercion but as the emanations of something hungry and amoral and essentially human. Try explores "that buried need to go all the way and really possess someone, " that place where desire disintegrates into the irrational. He illuminates with utter clarity the need to claim the desirable, to possess wholly something that will fulfill the profound emptiness of the human soul. With Try, Cooper has produced a novel even more complex than his previous books, dangerously innovative and with the startling familiarity of truth in its examination of love, obsession, devotion, and the depths of human need.
Inside This Book
(Learn More)
First Sentence
Ziggy's splayed in bed editing I Apologize, "A Magazine for the Sexually Abused." Read the first page
Front Cover | Copyright | Excerpt | Back Cover
Ziggy's splayed in bed editing I Apologize, "A Magazine for the Sexually Abused." Read the first page
Explore More
Concordance
Browse Sample PagesConcordance
Front Cover | Copyright | Excerpt | Back Cover
Tag this product(What's this?)Think of a tag as a keyword or label you consider is strongly related to this product.
Tags will help all customers organise and find favourite items. |
Customer Reviews
Most Helpful Customer Reviews
17 of 18 people found the following review helpful
Format:Paperback
Although a lot less superficially shocking than his previous novel 'Frisk', Dennis Cooper's third work of fiction is in many ways infinitely more dangerous and disturbing, dealing as it does with the profoundly contentious issue of homosexuality's relationship with paedophilia. Ziggy is the adopted son of two gay men, whose attempt at heterosexual-style domesticity has collapsed spectacularly. Now a deeply disturbed teenager, Ziggy lives with one father in Los Angeles who has been raping him since he was eight, while his other dad, a music critic in New York, has only reestablished contact with his son as a result of his own sexual agenda towards teenaged boys in general. Added to this are Ziggy's Uncle Ken, a producer of home-made kiddie porn who spends most of the novel in the company of Robin, a thirteen-year-old Heavy Metaller who has come to Ken's house in the expectation of payment for sex; Nicole, a poor-little-rich-kid who is interested in Ziggy principally as a status symbol; Cricket, a teenaged transvestite with an Edward Furlong obsession; and Calhoun, Ziggy's herion-addicted 'best friend', whose drug dependence inspires in Ziggy an intense love and protectiveness which Calhoun cannot reciprocate. The novel follows the lives of these characters over several days as their paths cross and collide, charting their abortive attempts to articulate what they think and feel, frequently revealing their inability to actually feel anything.
In Ziggy, Cooper manages to capture the psychology of the helpless victim more convincingly than any other sufferer of literary sex abuse. The complexity of the character stems from his capacity to experience a wide variety of contradictory emotions simultaneously. The prolonged persecution he has faced from those who should have protected him only causes Ziggy the persecute himself even more, while his crippling 'neediness' makes him cling feebly to his abusers - his fathers, Uncle Ken - or to those he knows cannot or will not return his affection - Calhoun. As is usual in Cooper's work, most of the characters try to blot out, or at least blunt, the harsh realities of their lives through drugs, a strategy which ultimately only makes things all the more confusing or depressing, no matter how much they might help in the short term.
In this book, Cooper goes some way towards jettisoning the more deliberately sensationalist aspects of his previous work in favour of a deeper, more emotionally complex study of an intricate and unhappy situation. Given the explosive nature of the subject matter, the novel is actually remarkably tender and funny. His ongoing struggle to find a vocabulary to describe such a complicated set of cirsumstances is more immediately evident in the text than ever, filled as it is with 'um's, 'er's and innumerable sentences which trail off with a... It's also the first of his novels to come with something approaching a soundtrack, and a knowledge of the bands Husker Du and Slayer certainly contributes to a greater appreciation of the book.
Having attained this new level of complexity in his work, having said pretty much everything there is to say about perversity and obsession, Cooper's subsequent novels begin retreating into increasing minimalism and self-referentiality. Situated in the centre of his five novel cycle, 'Try' is perhaps the most emotionally accessible, but also the most emotionally disturbing of the lot. It is also, in my opinion, the best.
1 of 1 people found the following review helpful
Format:Paperback
I saw this book hiding underneath the bottom of a shelf in my local book store, picked it up and found myself attracted to the cover. It's the gray version, featuring a bed, television, etc.
As I began to read, it horrified me but I had a strong urge to continue reading. Ziggy reminded me of a friend of mine, loveably confused and obsessive .. I don't think I could read it again, nor would I recommend it to anybody else - it's just a truly horrific, very surreal look at child abuse.
As I began to read, it horrified me but I had a strong urge to continue reading. Ziggy reminded me of a friend of mine, loveably confused and obsessive .. I don't think I could read it again, nor would I recommend it to anybody else - it's just a truly horrific, very surreal look at child abuse.
2 of 3 people found the following review helpful
Format:Paperback
First I was confused: Was this a novel about gay adoption - promoting child pornography - necrophilia - abuse - abuse - abuse and drugs - trying to find something funny in all that - which would be awful and deserve a rating below zero.......but then I realised what the author is trying to do: he shows us how it happens and how people deal with it. Complete and utter madness has become the normal daily life for Ziggy and the others in this novel and they survive somehow. Ziggy abused by his to adoptive fathers writes a magazine about abuse and goes so far as to interview his uncle (a child pornographer) and his victim during the act - a scene which would be extremely funny if it wasn't so ugly.
In all of this the author succeeds somehow to include a sensitive love story as well - an unlikely one between Ziggy the probably-gay-but-not-sure-about-anything abused young guy and his friend the young writer Calhoun - a heroin addict and manages a quasi happy ending - which of course will not last.
I gave it 7 out of 10 but the book is really unrateable - it is well written on the whole but might be misunderstood.
Read it if you like controversial stuff.
In all of this the author succeeds somehow to include a sensitive love story as well - an unlikely one between Ziggy the probably-gay-but-not-sure-about-anything abused young guy and his friend the young writer Calhoun - a heroin addict and manages a quasi happy ending - which of course will not last.
I gave it 7 out of 10 but the book is really unrateable - it is well written on the whole but might be misunderstood.
Read it if you like controversial stuff.
Would you like to see more reviews about this item?
Were these reviews helpful?
Let us know
Most Recent Customer Reviews
A fan as old as Dennis.
I read Dennis Cooper's first five novels when they were first published and was an avid fan. I really liked the others, apart from Period, which was too obtuse, but Try is the best... Read more
Published on 16 Jan 2007 by Gary Mcghee
...Strange
Whilst finding this book completely OTT and, quite frankly, disgusting at times, i forced myself to read to the end to see if there was actually any point or moral to this book,... Read more
Published on 19 Jun 2006 by LA
Boring
I tried this book because I had heard Cooper compared to J T Leroy, whose books I really enjoyed. However, I found the book really boring mostly because of the characters. Read more
Published on 5 April 2005 by Blue_fox
Ruthless in the face of beauty
Have Placebo read dennis Cooper? has Cooper heard Placebo (bet he has - they got a pretty bass-player!)Try is his best to date. Read more
Published on 17 Feb 1998
whatever
A friend recommended this book. Here is what he said, "Cooper attempts to find beauty in the profane." Simple, isn't it? Read more
Published on 14 Oct 1997
Customer Discussions
|
This product's forum
Active discussions in related forums
Search Customer Discussions
|
Related forums
|
Listmania!
|
|
Look for similar items by category
Look for similar items by subject
Feedback
- Would you like to update product info or give feedback on images?
- I am the Author, and I want to comment on my book.
- I am the Publisher, and I want to comment on this book.
|
