Bret Easton Ellis was born in 1964 in Los Angeles. It was framed in an artificial group called Generation X elected, named after the novel by Douglas Coupland, who by the way I read at the time and I only left the memory of some very young actors working in Japan in the field advertising. Certainly not that I disliked reading.
With a first-person protagonist narrator, Bret Easton Ellis poses a direct history. Fact after fact. Act after act. Events unfold without a break. The language is direct, short phrases and dialogues with brisk, disorganized in his replies and sometimes nonsensical apparent even defining the type of people who stars in the novel. These dialogues are the most lethal ammunition that Ellis used to criticize the elite of that time, the late eighties, in which the money had a unprecedented appeal on an entire generation of young people who wanted to be millionaires before the age of thirty. They were admired and respected. In fact, I would wager that if we come back to that kind of young, would also be highly respected and admired. Money and men do not change.
of it all, something remains. As something of the violation is by Elvis in the fifties, the hippie movement of the sixties or even the romantic tradition nineteenth century. We character product remains constant accumulation of our culture. Ellis
makes the novel a continuous display of intelligence. The importance of the title is perhaps the best example.
American Psycho:
Only the title the reader has the basic information: the protagonist is a murderer. Even before killing anyone, any mention made of a human limb or organ stored in your refrigerator, do not cause surprise in the reader.
The author tells a story begun long ago. The reader joins her in full swing. Maniac
fashion and expensive clothes, Patrick Bateman recognize the brand of clothing for all those around him or cross him. In fact, a novel feature is the meticulous detail that continually makes the protagonist of the costumes of the characters.
Body worship is also carried to the extreme. Several hours of gym and the care and skin cleanliness, manicure, lightning "UVA", hairdresser ... Paradise appearance: I'm young, I have money and I'm handsome, who than me?
to almost half the book, Easton Ellis manages to capture the madness contained the protagonist and gradually introduces its most sinister and sadistic. The detail in which the protagonist has his moods, combined with their physical reactions, physiological makes the reader make a clear idea of \u200b\u200bthe protagonist's mental state.
American Psycho was published in 1991. The right time. Its success was deafening.
The story is frightening in some passages. Always explicit, in the sex scenes as in the narrative of the crimes. Violence narrated so expressed, not only to transgress is the aesthetic and narrative of the moment. Today, that debate is more than overcome, just because then, at the date of publication of the novel, remained bitter and violent confrontations. These passages in the final section of the novel are so hard, that reading is difficult.
For example: a few pages later to recount the torture, humiliation and murder of two girls, are twenty pages of agile but frivolous trialogue on which restaurant to choose to make a reservation for dinner. That is, the reader has not yet recovered from the traumatic scenes when it is returned to the more superficial and harmless hedonism. Ellis it into the skin of the psychopath. It is not pleasant, but it is admirable skill with which the author succeeds.
protagonist's mental chaos reaches its zenith in full swing of that stretch. Here something very interesting: the first-person protagonist narrator becomes, without interruption, narrator third-person omniscient.
the adrenaline rush ... it makes me gasp and move them only a few blocks of houses, partly due to panic over me, but mainly because of the blood, brain, head pieces that cover the windshield and just get around the collision with another cab on the corner of Franklin - is Franklin? - in Greenwich, bending sharply to the right and grazed the side of a parked limousine, then I stir back, I walk down the street squealing, connect the wiper , realizing then that the blood of the crystal is inside, so I try to clean it with a gloved hand and moved quickly and almost blind by the Greenwich until I lose control completely and the taxi is deflected and reaches a Korean store, near a karaoke restaurant called Lotus Blosoon where he had been with a Japanese customers as the taxi breaks down the shelves of fruit, through a glass wall, the body of the cashier hits the hood, Patrick is reverse gear, but does not fit, get off the taxi, is based on it, followed by a silence that is imposed nervousness.
-have you done, Bateman murmurs, while limping out of the store, while the bonnet body complains, dying, Patrick has no idea where it came from the police that he comes running from the other side of the street and yells something about a portable transmitter, believing that Patrick is stunned, but Patrick was surprised by drawing up before the police can draw the weapon and the two fall together on the sidewalk ...
A pair of pages later becomes the protagonist in the first person narrator, as he disappeared.
... nodding to Gus, "our night watchman", signed and addressed to the lift on the upper floors into the darkness of his apartment, recovered at last quiet, safe in the anonymity of my new office, able, despite the shaking of hands, catching the wireless phone, look at my Rolex, exhausted, and eyes fall on the number of Harold Carnes, slowly under the seven figures ...
In American Psycho, the characters do not recognize anyone. The entire novel is the wrong move names and wondering if anyone who walks into the restaurant's signature Mengano This & That or if the bar is so-and-Which & Which.
in the jungle nobody knows anybody. Disappear and be forgotten. Only remember the cards.
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