Geek Love: A Novel by Katherine Dunn Summary and Reviews
|
List Price: Our Price: $8.41 You Save: $7.54 (47%) Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days Buy Used: from $1.19 (click here) Category: Book See more book details and other editions |
|---|
Book Reviews of Geek Love: A Novel
Book Review: "Spiral Mirror"
Summary: 4 Stars
I'm going to admit that I actually had no idea what Geek Love was all about. I had heard the hype, and had a vague idea that it was chick lit for dot-commers. No interest. I was actually irritated when a friend gave the book to me as a gift.
Much to my bemusement, I discovered that Dunn was writing about literal geeks-- circus freaks-- live performers who made a living swallowing wild animals and bugs for an audience. That was much more interesting for me. I have had a long and lively interest in the culture of the circus and the role of freaks in the world.
Geek Love is very well written, in terms of general prose style. I found myself reading it compulsively. There is a lot of humor and warmth in the way that Dunn confounds our ideas of a loving approach to conception and child bearing. It can get pretty grotesque. It never, for me, crossed the line from grotesque into grotty. That kept it readable.
It wasn't a perfect novel. All the character traits and pyrotechnics nearly served to keep me from noticing that Dunn had trouble with the plot. The first half (two thirds?) are set up very well, but the story fizzled a bit in the last third. I had the feeling that she had painted herself into a corner and had to wind things up somehow so that we could get the resolution between Miranda and Olympia. There were several big shortcuts toward the end that I found disappointing-- particularly regarding Arty.
In any case, I enjoyed the book. I am likely to look out for more Dunn in the future. I liked what I read in the autobiographical afterward that was included in the 1990 edition. I would recommend Geek Love for someone who is looking for a pretty strange example of a feel-good novel. If you liked Geek Love, then I would actually recommend seeing if you could get a hold of a copy of Freaks: We Who Are Not As Others by Daniel P. Mannix. It should make an interesting counterpoint.
Book Review: .
Summary: 5 Stars
What's with everyone hating the editing? I thought the book had great editing.
I didn't find the characters too absurd or abstract to be unrealistic, but too absurd and abstract to be fictional. The transgressive themes of this book are all well and great and are attended to in other people's reviews, so I wont bother with one more attempt to praise it, but what I found most entertaining and refreshing are the characters in and of themselves. If you find them off-putting it's because you're one of them.
This is emotional porn; exploitative to the point where the federal government would need to regulate it if it were imitated.
Book Review: 95% fantastic
Summary: 4 Stars
I loved just about everything about this book until the end.
It had a very 'deux es machina' feel to it. The "fall" of the circus could have gone a different way. It left me feeling quite unsatisfied.
Book Review: A Book So Worthless
Summary: 1 Stars
I almost never stop reading a book, but I had to with this one. There was no redeeming value, just one horrible character and situation after another. When the body parts starting coming off to appease one repellant character, I decided there was no reason to continue reading. If it hadn't been the book group choice of the month, I would have quit it sooner. It is now famous as the only book (in the over ten years of books) that I couldn't stand enough to finish.Book Review: A Lot To Be Desired
Summary: 2 Stars
This book isn't as good as I expected it to be. Why the expectations? Well, a friend whose opinion I generally trust recommended it to me about 10 years ago. Yeah, a lot changes in 10 years. And it bears to reason that the kinds of books we were reading then aren't exactly the books we're reading now. At least for me this is true. For about 8 years this book sat in my bookcase, waiting patiently to be read. By chance, I picked it up after all this time. In the end, I guess that was the turning point. The story had been so promising until I started to actually read it.
Mired in a mundane story of a generic nuclear family, the only thing unique about this book is that the family is a family of freaks - literally. Each family member has some kind of genetic mutation which allows them to be an element in a traveling circus. These mutations were brought about due to experimentations by the parents. I'll leave the gory details to the book, if you so choose to pick it up, which I don't recommend.
When I initially finished the book I thought it was good enough, if not spectacular. In the grand scheme of things that's what you're going to get when you read random books - some good, some bad, but the vast majority in between. After some time to think about it, this lies more to the bad side that in between, a sentiment that an old coworker once remarked about when he said, "What happened to good literature? All the kids these days are reading crap like Geek Love." This was 8 years ago, which sparked a reply of, "I wonder what's wrong with Geek Love," to myself. Now I know.
If only I had known before. The book is short enough that it doesn't waste away too much of your time. So it's got that going for it, which is nice. And the pages turn fast enough, I suppose. But at best, it can be labeled as, "You could waste your time in worse ways." In the end, this book was ultimately a waste of time for me.
To get slightly more into the book, the story deals with a series of family squabbles that you might have seen at some point growing up watching 8 is Enough, or The Partridge Family or The Brady Bunch. The story doesn't end happily in 30 minutes, like those shows did. But the issues aren't really any different. Just more adult and, well, freakish in nature. You give a teenager with an insecurity complex webbed feet, and we're still talking about a teenager with an insecurity complex. I probably thought many of the people I went to high school with probably had webbed feet at the time anyway.
The ending of the story is, in my opinion, awful. What was a mildly entertaining and unremarkable book turned towards the dumb and unbelievable at the end. Such is the errant narrative of the text, I suppose, having been crafted by someone trying to take a generic story of family strife and sell more books by giving the people physical deformities and putting them in a carnival. As a literary element, the book as a whole leaves a lot to be desired in so, so many ways.
In any event, not much to see here.