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Red the Fiend (American Literature (Dalkey Archive))
 
 
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Red the Fiend (American Literature (Dalkey Archive)) (Paperback)
by Gilbert Sorrentino (Author)
4.0 out of 5 stars  (1 customer review)
RRP: £7.99
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Product details

  • Paperback: 213 pages
  • Publisher: Dalkey Archive Press; First Paperback edition (15 Dec 2006)
  • Language English
  • ISBN-10: 1564784525
  • ISBN-13: 978-1564784520
  • Product Dimensions: 21.1 x 14 x 1.8 cm
  • Average Customer Review: 4.0 out of 5 stars  (1 customer review)
  • Amazon.co.uk Sales Rank: 1,104,130 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

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Product Description

Review
Red the Fiend is a discomfiting masterpiece, once read impossible to forget or shake off. --Gerald Howard, Bookforum

Gilbert Sorrentino has been writing some of our best fiction for close to thirty years, and Red the Fiend is no exception. . . . Elegantly cynical, beautifully comic, typical of this masterful writer, Red the Fiend is a brilliant achievement. --Toby Olson

Product Description
A recasting of Sorrentino's Aberration of Starlight, this is the story of how a child becomes a monster: of how Red the boy becomes Red the Fiend. With an absent father who turns up only to drunkenly berate his son, and a grandmother whose aggression crescendos to a daily beating, Red can only escape by turning his hatred outward, by being as cruel and bitter as his young life has been. Employing direct, elegant sentences, while retaining his characteristic formal inventiveness, Sorrentino evokes this unyieldingly grim Brooklyn boyhood, describing close, familial conflicts that deepen and widen to reflect the hardships of Depression-era life.

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4.0 out of 5 stars Sorrentino wallops The Waltons, 11 Aug 1998
By A Customer
This review is from: Red the Fiend (Hardcover)
This novel definitely destroys the sappy Waltons-style familial myths that dominate so many books and movies about the Depression. Sorrentino captures the self-destructiveness of his novel's unhappy, uneducated, unloved characters quite well, a self-destructiveness stemming from their quite brutal environment. I liked Sorrentino's use of two formal methods--via his omniscient third-person narrator--to report on his characters' grim mental states: his eschewal of direct quotes, instead using only paraphrases (e.g., "Grandma said that...") to capture the characters' loss of individuality; and his narrator's frequent reporting of the characters' thoughts stream-of-consciousness style. However, Sorrentino's vivid and masterful writing style doesn't quite conceal the novel's near-total lack of positive character development. Red, Grandma, and most of the other characters begin the novel screwed-up and merely become progressively worse, with no epiphanies. Of course, why should epiphanies occur to characters who have been too busy surviving day-to-day to develop even rudimentary senses of self-awareness?) In short, anyone who wants to know, in often graphic and brutal detail, how a dysfunctional childhood can actually damage a child should read this novel.
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