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Glamorama (Vintage Contemporaries) Rezensionen: Glamorama is a satirical mass-murder opus more ambitious than Ellis's 1990 American Psycho. It starts as a spritz-of-consciousness romp about kid-club entrepreneur Victor Ward, "the It boy of the moment," an actor/model up for Flatliners II. Ellis has perfect pitch for glam-speak, and he gives nightlife the fizz, pace, and shimmer it lacks in drab reality. Anyone could cite the right celeb names and tunes; but like a rock-polishing machine, his prose gives literary sheen to fame-chasing air-kissers. He's coldly funny: when Victor's girl tries to argue him out of a break up, she angrily snorts six bumps of coke, stops, mutters, "Wrong vial," snorts four corrective doses from whatever she has in her other fist, then objects to a rival at the party wearing the same dress she's wearing.
You had to be there; Ellis makes you feel you are. But such satire is a very smart bomb targeting a very large barn. Models' status anxiety doesn't merit Ellis's Tom Wolfe-esque expertise. Glamorama gets better when Victor gets drafted into a mysterious group of model/terrorists who bomb 747s and the Ritz in Paris, wearing Kevlar-lined Armani suits. Oh, they still behave like shallow snobs, pronouncing "cool" as if it had 12 "o"s, but now when somebody swills Cristal, it's apt to be poisoned, to horrific effect, which Ellis expertly describes. His enfant-terrible debut Less Than Zero aped Joan Didion. Now Ellis has grown into a lesser Don DeLillo--and that's high praise. --Tim Appelo
You spin me right round, baby, right round... Glamorama is a really remarkable novel in more than one way, and I enjoyed reading the other reviews, because they add to my understanding and perspective, still.
Whether you see it as a "deep study about shallowness" or find it shallow in dealing with serious problems, you might be right, depending on what you personally expect from literature.
For me, it was fun to read, it was irritating and the use of language intrigued me.
I like the the irritation of perception, and I cannot see any use in criticising the author for a book that is not written to morally "better" its readers. Thankfully this attitude has changed somewhat from the time when e.g. American Psycho was released; it must have been a horrible thing to be called a psycho killer, just because you wrote about one in 1rst person narrative.
Victor -as a representative of the "modern" lost man/boy- is basically an "immoral" ,- I am not saying that he is *bad*- character in a corresponding environment. He reacts to moral dilemmas in a reflex-kind of way: he doesn't really FEEL it. As a consequence, everything he does, he does half-heartedly.
Someone said the book starts where American Psycho ended. I don't know if it is true, but it is an interesting point of view: Patrick Bateman is actively "evil", he kills people because he can. Victor Ward is totally passive, he is portrayed to be dumb, naïve, hostage to his superficial needs.
Things happen to him, he only adds to "the plot" through going along, being indecisive, cowardish, on drugs, etc. Both, Bateman and Ward, show a complete lack of morals, but Victor seems to vaguely miss them. Victor is totally (he'd probably say) "gamma-ish" in his emotional development, like everybody in his world. Criteria have switched from inside to outside, and wether it is brains -like in Brave New World- or looks ("The better you look the more you see"), it is just as bad. And the people who have both are the most dangerous - an army of Batemans?
Everything is so strange, unstoppable, out of Victor's reach and comprehension, the rules are without meaning. What Victor craves besides drugs, sex and music -the only way to experience anything remotely emotional- has nothing to do with reality, either: he wants to be famous.
Victor is in a constant "who-cares, I am a looser, baby, so why don't you kill me"-mode, yet very frightened. That's where the drugs come in again. And that is also where he never gets the chance to deal with anything.
It is interesting to see him develop at a rate of something close to turtlespeed, whereas the world around seems to be turning faster and faster. And makes him spin "like a record, baby - round, round, round round..." By the way, I loved this, his only skill - quoting from songs instead of answering questions- so much that I could never really "abandon" him.
May anything have helped ? The person "Victor", does it exist?
Victor is outside a world and a time where Right and Wrong still were valuable - accepted and internalized. Has the "individual" ceased to exist, not only in modern philosophy? Do people like Victor exist?
- The point may be: do we care.
Use your brain Well I am actually more a "mainstream reader" but this is a real masterpiece which makes you think about your own existence and its purpose.
Follow the anti-hero Victor an almost celebrity into a crazy world of models, drugs, sex and crime and discover the real values of mankind after a long and hard struggle. But don't expect a happy end.
I first thought it strange but then I got hooked and suffered with Victor. I highly recommend this book even if you are not so much into modern literature. It's worth a try.
Must it really be that overdone? The last thing I expected after the first pages was an ex-supermodel world conspiracy with its moles, deceptions and killings. I liked those bits a lot because they kept the suspense up so that I kept on reading. There were, however, those lenghty bits where Victor goes to parties, openings and the like, and there the narrative lies dead in the water. What is all this name-dropping and high-powered beauty pageant stuff about? Could it be any shorter? I grew tired of yet another glam event, and the book lost a lot of focus that way. Or was I supposed to grow restless? Did I have to feel the almost physical boredom of standing around and look nice without anything to say? Is it really a Semtex attack on our superficialities? The truth is, I am not sure. Maybe there is a crucial scene I didn't get, and the whole text does not make sense. Maybe there is no sense, and maybe the point is to think about the lack of sense of the novel. But that, for me, is the case with American Psycho: how far are you prepared to go? And what's your reason for doing so? I am not sure Glamorama does this, too. I think the text gradually invites you to be read on different levels that can change very rapidly. I liked the book on the conspiracy level, but the celeb party bits were just fillers for me.
more ambitious After reading some of the reviews on this page I very much doubt this book has found the audience it deserves. It is indeed a lot more ambitious than American Psycho was, and if you only liked Psycho because of the sex and the gore you're wrong here. While American Psycho consisted more of intertwined episodes, Glamorama has an ongoing multi-reality plot that reminded me not only of Don DeLillo but also of Philip K. Dick, who is also mentioned in the book. My advice is: if you didn't like or didn't understand the ending to "American Psycho" stay way clear of this, otherwise buy this book NOW, because it more or less starts where Psycho ends.
kein American Psycho, aber dennoch kurzweilig nach american psycho, das mich einige urlaubstage lang wirklich gefesselt hat, war ich dann doch gespannt auch das nächste B.E.Ellis- Buch. glamorama ist auf jeden fall nett zu lesen, wird aber nie ein klassiker, da meiner meinung nach die gewisse intensität fehlt, die sich durch american psycho zieht. trotzdem hat es mir auch diesmal spass gemacht mir ein bild von der Model-society in New York zu machen. die Spitzen auf im Buch genannte "Berühmtheiten" haben mir auch gut gefallen. alles in allem: oberes mittelfeld
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