Zeroville A Novel edition by Steve Erickson Literature Fiction eBooks
Download As PDF : Zeroville A Novel edition by Steve Erickson Literature Fiction eBooks 
The acclaimed author of Shadowbahn delivers a novel of Hollywood obsession “one of a kind . . . a funny, unnervingly surreal page turner” (Newsweek).
Hailed as one of Erickson’s finest and most daring novels, Zeroville is a unique love letter to film. It centers on the story of Vikar, a young architecture student so enthralled with the movies that his friends call him “cinéautistic.” With an intensely religious childhood behind him, and tattoos of Elizabeth Taylor and Montgomery Clift on his head, he arrives in Hollywood where he’s mistaken for a member of the Charles Manson “family” and eventually scores a job as a film editor. Vikar discovers the frames of a secret film within the reels of every movie ever made, and sets about splicing them together—an undertaking that takes on frightening theological dimensions. Electrifying and darkly comic, Zeroville dives into the renegade American cinema of the ’70s and ’80s and emerges into an era for which we have no name.
Zeroville A Novel edition by Steve Erickson Literature Fiction eBooks
In the hands of actors, writers, directors and producers, Hollywood is a dream factory, a place that cranks out wish fulfillment scenarios like assembly lines manufacture automobiles. In novelist Steve Erickson’s hands, Hollywood is a fever dream, a waking nightmare that elucidates the truth of the self that only movies can attempt to uncover. ZEROVILLE - by CalArts professor, Los Angeles Magazine contributor and literary cult figure Erickson – delves into the mystery and allure of celluloid, where a master shot gives the audience its bearing, but the close-up scrambles all perspective and engulfs the collective psyche in freeze-frame moments spanning whole lifetimes.At the novel’s start, Ike “Vikar” Jerome, a cipher-esque, idiot-savant film fanatic, arrives in Los Angeles during the summer of 1969 and quickly sheds a Philadelphian past to embrace his new home. With a huge tattoo emblazoned on his bald head – of Montgomery Clift and Elizabeth Taylor from a scene in “A Place in the Sun” – and anger coursing through his body without restraint, Vikar hits the local art houses and Grauman’s Chinese Theatre in an effort to discover his own destiny. He visits the famous Roosevelt Hotel, where he searches for the ghosts of D.W. Griffith and Monty Clift himself; gets hauled in by the cops while camping out in the canyons, a suspect in the Manson Family’s horrific Tate-LoBianco murders; talks film theory with a career burglar tied up in Vikar’s new Hollywood pad; and is swept into the drug-addled, free-love, film-obsessed Next Generation auteurs plotting their movie industry revolution from the sandy beaches of Zuma.
Vikar’s story spans a decade, with the very Chance the Gardner-like main character swept through Hollywood, Madrid and Cannes by outside forces who find themselves intrigued and spellbound by his presence. His bizarre physical appearance, his vexing, non-sequitur-heavy dialogue, and his earnest, “I like to watch” approach to the movies attracts figures great and small, famous and infamous. Verisimilitude mixes with literary license as Erickson’s fictional creation Vikar befriends thinly veiled Hollywood luminaries like John Milius, Margot Kidder, Brian DePalma, and even a pre-“Taxi Driver” Bobby DeNiro. The author is coy about some of the real life characters, discreet about others, and blatant as hell about the rest of the filmmaking crowd in his efforts to blur the lines between reality and fantasy, truth and conjecture.
While there is much satisfaction in the guessing game of “what’s that film?” or “who’s that actor/director?” which Erickson offers throughout the book, there is also an abundance of movie references that became tiresome even for me, a fanatical movie freakster. When everyone Vikar encounters knows the difference between a Howard Hawks and a John Ford picture, or identifies themselves as a cineaste with the ability to pontificate for hours on the slightest minutiae of a Bunuel film, the book becomes the literary equivalent of a Tarantino movie. There is storytelling skill, fantastic dialogue and compelling action within, but there is also unfortunately a level of showing off that the author indulges in which strips the novel of its fun and magic.
Those criticisms aside, ZEROVILLE is overall a remarkable novel that attempts to blur the lines between how reality shapes the movies and how the movies shape reality itself. The ideas are potent, the characters are engaging, and the ending manages to be mysterious, inconclusive and completely satisfying all at the same time. A Fade Out worthy of Fellini or Godard’s best.
Product details
|
Tags : Zeroville: A Novel - Kindle edition by Steve Erickson. Download it once and read it on your Kindle device, PC, phones or tablets. Use features like bookmarks, note taking and highlighting while reading Zeroville: A Novel.,ebook,Steve Erickson,Zeroville: A Novel,Open Road Media
People also read other books :
- MISADVENTURES OF THE RED HEADED KID CHERYL SCHILLINGS JERRY SCHILLINGS 9781612153803 Books
- Suitcase of Happyness A Roadmap to Achieve and Enjoy Your Happiest Life Mark Jaffe 9780997462005 Books
- Moonlight Moon Series Book 1 edition by Lisa Kessler Paranormal Romance eBooks
- General Hermann Balck An Interview January 1979 eBook Ray Merriam
- The Critical Element James Becker Suspense/Thriller Series Book 5 edition by John L Betcher Literature Fiction eBooks
Zeroville A Novel edition by Steve Erickson Literature Fiction eBooks Reviews
I'd read Days Between Stations, and I finished it in a day and was haunted for long after. Zeroville was the same. It still haunts me. Erickson is a master crafter and story teller and his characters are unlike any you've ever read. He writes with emotion, it sticks with you, it doesn't leave. He's not heavy, he's not going for the big punches at the end of the book to shock you into thinking something else. There are no dips in his novels, especially not in Zeroville. It is consistent from start to finish and it is a great time. I loved it so much I bought it for all my friends for Christmas. They have all confessed their dedication to Erickson as a voice and a genius. This book is the best.
So, is this a novel about how we are all narrowly focused on creating our own story from the things we accidently see? That we are all editors, creating our own language for what we select and reject. Is this a novel about how things mass produced still require personal interpretation? Is this a novel about how seeing is not the same as looking?
Fabulous deconstruction of the great American novel. Well written. Fresh. Unique. But I have to admit that I didn't get the ending. That he really had his finger on something there, that he had the reader right by the throat, that he was about to say something truly profound about time and love. And he lost me.
I just put the book down. My head is spinning. Haven't read anything like this in a while. If ever. The gentleman who gave it a one-star review and hates it and threw it away after only 50 pages is likely to find my fawning blather unfathomable. Whatever. I'm not even sure what to say about Zeroville, other than to warn you you could hate it, too. It's fractured. It's unusual. It's literate. It's impressionistic. It's pop-cultural. It's funny. It's intense. It could be mere mind candy. It could make you really, really angry. It could set your world back to zero. It could make you a believer in Steve Erickson. I say surreal homage to the movies by a man who probably has an unhealthy obsession with them and knows how to channel it for our reading pleasure. (For the record, I found it neither boring, nor nostalgic, and certainly not overly erudite--an evaluation that's kind of a head scratcher. Nor am I a "yupped out baby boomer." Far from it.)
Especially if you love movies and aren't afraid of literary pretensions that stray from convention, spool it up.
Very good book but not sure about the ending. It will require a second read. I do think it helps tremendously to know some of the movies and people that are referenced here otherwise you miss quite a lot. For instance the conversation toward the end with Vikar's idol is sprinkled with many of Clift's actual movie lines. "you got trust in your eyes, like you were just born" to Monroe in the Misfits or "just because you love something doesn't mean it loves you back" Prewitt in FHE. I loved that about this book. It makes it that much enjoyable.
Steve Erickson is a first-rate film critic and an ambitious novelist. Zeroville is his unqualified masterpiece. It is both a reworking of the Isaac and Abraham story from the Old Testament--and a great L. A. novel as seen through the lens of the film industry (and a vexing film editor/ex-divinity student) from 1968 to 1982. This is a very serious and funny novel about the burden of living in a monotheistic culture-and a highly entertaining foray into pop culture in an era when films were regarded as art, and a means to salvation.
In the hands of actors, writers, directors and producers, Hollywood is a dream factory, a place that cranks out wish fulfillment scenarios like assembly lines manufacture automobiles. In novelist Steve Erickson’s hands, Hollywood is a fever dream, a waking nightmare that elucidates the truth of the self that only movies can attempt to uncover. ZEROVILLE - by CalArts professor, Los Angeles Magazine contributor and literary cult figure Erickson – delves into the mystery and allure of celluloid, where a master shot gives the audience its bearing, but the close-up scrambles all perspective and engulfs the collective psyche in freeze-frame moments spanning whole lifetimes.
At the novel’s start, Ike “Vikar” Jerome, a cipher-esque, idiot-savant film fanatic, arrives in Los Angeles during the summer of 1969 and quickly sheds a Philadelphian past to embrace his new home. With a huge tattoo emblazoned on his bald head – of Montgomery Clift and Elizabeth Taylor from a scene in “A Place in the Sun” – and anger coursing through his body without restraint, Vikar hits the local art houses and Grauman’s Chinese Theatre in an effort to discover his own destiny. He visits the famous Roosevelt Hotel, where he searches for the ghosts of D.W. Griffith and Monty Clift himself; gets hauled in by the cops while camping out in the canyons, a suspect in the Manson Family’s horrific Tate-LoBianco murders; talks film theory with a career burglar tied up in Vikar’s new Hollywood pad; and is swept into the drug-addled, free-love, film-obsessed Next Generation auteurs plotting their movie industry revolution from the sandy beaches of Zuma.
Vikar’s story spans a decade, with the very Chance the Gardner-like main character swept through Hollywood, Madrid and Cannes by outside forces who find themselves intrigued and spellbound by his presence. His bizarre physical appearance, his vexing, non-sequitur-heavy dialogue, and his earnest, “I like to watch” approach to the movies attracts figures great and small, famous and infamous. Verisimilitude mixes with literary license as Erickson’s fictional creation Vikar befriends thinly veiled Hollywood luminaries like John Milius, Margot Kidder, Brian DePalma, and even a pre-“Taxi Driver” Bobby DeNiro. The author is coy about some of the real life characters, discreet about others, and blatant as hell about the rest of the filmmaking crowd in his efforts to blur the lines between reality and fantasy, truth and conjecture.
While there is much satisfaction in the guessing game of “what’s that film?” or “who’s that actor/director?” which Erickson offers throughout the book, there is also an abundance of movie references that became tiresome even for me, a fanatical movie freakster. When everyone Vikar encounters knows the difference between a Howard Hawks and a John Ford picture, or identifies themselves as a cineaste with the ability to pontificate for hours on the slightest minutiae of a Bunuel film, the book becomes the literary equivalent of a Tarantino movie. There is storytelling skill, fantastic dialogue and compelling action within, but there is also unfortunately a level of showing off that the author indulges in which strips the novel of its fun and magic.
Those criticisms aside, ZEROVILLE is overall a remarkable novel that attempts to blur the lines between how reality shapes the movies and how the movies shape reality itself. The ideas are potent, the characters are engaging, and the ending manages to be mysterious, inconclusive and completely satisfying all at the same time. A Fade Out worthy of Fellini or Godard’s best.
0 Response to "⋙ Read Gratis Zeroville A Novel edition by Steve Erickson Literature Fiction eBooks"
Post a Comment