A Walk On The Wild Side
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"Deserves to be read by every Catch-22 and Cuckoo's Nest freak" ROLLING STONE "The intensity of his feeling, the accuracy of his thought, make me wonder if any other writer of our time has shown us more exactly the basis of our democracy. His hell burns with passion for heaven." NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW "Mr. Algren, boy, you are good." ERNEST HEMINGWAY"
Ernest Hemingway
"Mr Algren, boy, you are good."
--This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
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Most Helpful Customer Reviews
5 of 5 people found the following review helpful
Format:Paperback
This is a fantastic novel by one of the greatest American writers of the last century. An unflinching, sometimes harrowing portrayal of a doomed drifter and the low life characters he finds himself rubbing shoulders with in a New Orleans brothel.
Algren, like his French equivalents Celine and Zola, manages to inhabit a world of impoverished dreamers and losers, holding up a cracked mirror to their tragic lives without ever patronising or judging them. Instead he depicts them as real people trapped in a cycle of poverty and despair, people who dream of something better despite having been damned to a lifetime of anything but. People who dare to hope in the face of inevitabilities older than the ground they walk on, setting themselves up for tragic endings they see coming from a mile off.
This was Algren's gift and that is why this is a great book.
Algren, like his French equivalents Celine and Zola, manages to inhabit a world of impoverished dreamers and losers, holding up a cracked mirror to their tragic lives without ever patronising or judging them. Instead he depicts them as real people trapped in a cycle of poverty and despair, people who dream of something better despite having been damned to a lifetime of anything but. People who dare to hope in the face of inevitabilities older than the ground they walk on, setting themselves up for tragic endings they see coming from a mile off.
This was Algren's gift and that is why this is a great book.
3 of 3 people found the following review helpful
Format:Paperback
Algren makes the early thirties in America come gloriously alive in this book. Dove, son of a preacher, leaves home in the country to live in New Orleans and make his fortune. What he finds in that benighted city is a scum of thieves and bar girls, men on the make, and a city of violence and beauty. In the language of the time Nelson Algren creates a heartstruck and brutal poem of his time in this truly original book. Rape, murder and robbery, conning, pimping and boozing, are just some of the crimes perpetrated by Dove, yet he remains supremely human and understandable throughout.
This is a different world, America growing more grotesque in the light of it's political will and it's heaving, spitting, degenerative hypocrisy. It is funny, gripping, heartbreaking and tremendously alive. Thrumming with heat and dust and dirt; a fantastic read, headlong and unremitting, it grabs you by the throat and squeezes a half-horrified, half-entranced reaction. Brilliant, linguistically groundbreaking, emotionally roller-coasting, beautiful and terrible, a surreal dream of lives and deaths - it is stunning.
This is a different world, America growing more grotesque in the light of it's political will and it's heaving, spitting, degenerative hypocrisy. It is funny, gripping, heartbreaking and tremendously alive. Thrumming with heat and dust and dirt; a fantastic read, headlong and unremitting, it grabs you by the throat and squeezes a half-horrified, half-entranced reaction. Brilliant, linguistically groundbreaking, emotionally roller-coasting, beautiful and terrible, a surreal dream of lives and deaths - it is stunning.
1 of 1 people found the following review helpful
Format:Paperback
Interestingly Algren punctured the American balloon of pomposity and alerted the world to the preening lack of confidence in the new world. The heir of Celine, Dreiser and Upton Sinclair, Algren materialises a world lying the in the recess of the collective memory. He captures a time when the American economy snapped like a rubber band. The result literally was no work and no money for the mass population.
During the American collapse Algren went to New Orleans and plied a hairdressing scam, extracting money from women equally poor. This book is based on the devastation of the 29 crash on the young growing up with literally no future carved out for them and how they twist and turn to survive. This period from 1930-1940 stretched as an infinity for the participants. Now the memory ducts have been backfilled with musicals and Roosevelts New Deal, as if the future was always bright and it just had to unfold as it did. For those who existed at the time there was no emotional lifebelt of a secure future just the endless capracity of existence. the 2nd world war had yet to unfold and save America from financial and social ruin through bleeding Europe of its possessions.
When Algren published, the plaudits were slow to emerge. Whilst the books shifted units, the literary establishment looked askance at why anyone would want to immerse themselves in the attributes of lower life forms. A sense of reading about working class life would inevitably taint one's culture and pollute the reader. The bourgeois performing similar animal functions and having venal jealousies and a will to power had been carefully disguised under the camouflage of manners. Its exposure marked a social and cultural distance.
Celine and Algren paraded their dirty underwear and rubbed the noses of the reader in the skidmarks and cesspit of life. Instead of sand and dust and dirt a new form of beauty emerged, a more realitic world than the watercolour pastellated world of the considered 19th C greats. It is only through confronting the void it can be transcended, the greatness of Algren, he journeyed to those places in the mind and did not flinch with hypocracy whilst a lesser writer may have rolled with the punches.
Instead he gave society a haymaker and paved the way for realism, banging down the doors for Bukowski and the beats. Before the Beats; Studs Terkel, Algren, D Beauvoir and Sartre were fathered by the bete noir of the 20th C Dr. Destouches. The midwife of the 20thC fathered many children and each of them added another dimension to existence and being.Algren pushes aside the velvet curtains of the Musical and brings you real life for those who have the stomach, steeped in empathy but don't expect the Hollywood ending because this is real life.
During the American collapse Algren went to New Orleans and plied a hairdressing scam, extracting money from women equally poor. This book is based on the devastation of the 29 crash on the young growing up with literally no future carved out for them and how they twist and turn to survive. This period from 1930-1940 stretched as an infinity for the participants. Now the memory ducts have been backfilled with musicals and Roosevelts New Deal, as if the future was always bright and it just had to unfold as it did. For those who existed at the time there was no emotional lifebelt of a secure future just the endless capracity of existence. the 2nd world war had yet to unfold and save America from financial and social ruin through bleeding Europe of its possessions.
When Algren published, the plaudits were slow to emerge. Whilst the books shifted units, the literary establishment looked askance at why anyone would want to immerse themselves in the attributes of lower life forms. A sense of reading about working class life would inevitably taint one's culture and pollute the reader. The bourgeois performing similar animal functions and having venal jealousies and a will to power had been carefully disguised under the camouflage of manners. Its exposure marked a social and cultural distance.
Celine and Algren paraded their dirty underwear and rubbed the noses of the reader in the skidmarks and cesspit of life. Instead of sand and dust and dirt a new form of beauty emerged, a more realitic world than the watercolour pastellated world of the considered 19th C greats. It is only through confronting the void it can be transcended, the greatness of Algren, he journeyed to those places in the mind and did not flinch with hypocracy whilst a lesser writer may have rolled with the punches.
Instead he gave society a haymaker and paved the way for realism, banging down the doors for Bukowski and the beats. Before the Beats; Studs Terkel, Algren, D Beauvoir and Sartre were fathered by the bete noir of the 20th C Dr. Destouches. The midwife of the 20thC fathered many children and each of them added another dimension to existence and being.Algren pushes aside the velvet curtains of the Musical and brings you real life for those who have the stomach, steeped in empathy but don't expect the Hollywood ending because this is real life.
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Most Recent Customer Reviews
THis man is the poet of the underbelly of society
This was bought for a friend. It is one of my favorite books. This is life as a low life, transformed to poetry. PLease read it and consider this. Read more
Published 11 months ago by artonmove
Style Suffocates Substance
It's not often that a novel washes over you so completely that you cease to care about what's going on, but Nelson Algren pulls off this difficult anti-feat. Read more
Published on 8 Mar 2002
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