Candy by Terry Southern, Mason Hoffenberg Summary and Reviews
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Book Reviews of Candy
Book Review: Where's the movie
Summary: 5 Stars
I didn't read the book but I saw the movie and it's stayed with me all these years. I've been looking for a copy ever since. There is a rumour that it will be released in January/2001. Does anyone have any more information?Book Review: Wonderful Tongue-in-Cheek Piece of Work!
Summary: 5 Stars
I LOVED this book! I think the other reviewers may not have completely understood the jest of the book. Yes, it was definitely a shocker in it's day because of the sexual content, but I thought it was very humorous. These two writers definitely put a story together very wisely. Obviously, they were using tongue-in-cheek humor all through the book. Indeed, there were some dramatic points, but more than anything if one takes the view of the book in the context of, maybe, the style of Monty Python, one may look at it with a different perspective! Highly recommend!Book Review: candy
Summary: 2 Stars
Perhaps it was because I have yet to read Voltaire's Candide, but Southern's Candy was completely lost on me. There was enough perversity and bizarreness to keep me reading until the end but I was left feeling that it was a bit incomplete and a bit pointless. Nevertheless, I get the feeling that Southern is a talented writer, and perhaps this just wasn't one of his better works.Book Review: candy girl denies that they were inspiration for the book
Summary: 5 Stars
Candygirl just want you all to know that even though it is eerily accurate, the book about Kate and I by Terry Southern, entitled "Candy," is an UNAUTHORIZED biography.Book Review: hilarious at times
Summary: 3 Stars
When this book is funny, it's rolling on the floor funny. But, as seems to be typical with Southern's books, it's uneven. After the first chapter (the praying mantis in the eye thing), I was prepared for this to be the funniest book I had ever read. Alas! It only made me really laugh in about 4-5 places.
I had never heard of this book until I read Michael Dirda, in his "An Open Book," recount how he drooled over this as a sex-starved adolescent. Since then I've discovered that virtually everybody's heard of this but me. I hate when that happens. How did this escape my radar?
Anyhow, I read it. Southern is a masterful prose stylist, but it's unfortunate that this book is not unified by any coherent theme. At times his insight into female psychology is frightening, but at other times he doesn't seem to know what to do with it. Several characters (e.g., Aunt Livia) and events (the janitor mother in the service closet) should have suffered deletion, but they were kept in, resulting in a final product that seems a mismatch of tone, theme, and authorial intention. From what I read about this book, Southern was riffing on the devices of pornographic novels. But this genre is virtually extinct by now, so unless you are familiar with them from their heyday, the wit of many of his literary antics, I imagine, will be lost on you.
Sure made me laugh a couple of times, though.
I have heard it said, incidentally, that the book is a spin-off of Candide. Hmmmm. I think that's a bit of an overstatement. It's certainly not a re-doing of Candide. We have a good-hearted main character in the beginning who studies under a philosophizing and randy professor, and whose antics result in her expulsion from her beloved home, but the similarity pretty much ends there.