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Zeroville
by Steve Erickson
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About This Book
ISBN13: 9781933372396 |
Review-a-Day (What is Review-a-Day?)
"In Zeroville Steve Erickson weaves a gripping, yet free-floating and dizzyingly surreal narrative that is frequently punctuated with Hollywood greats named and unnamed, real and imagined. Half of the fun is trying to connect the less obvious incidents and characters with their real-life analogues." Gerry Donaghy, Powells.com (read the entire Powells.com review)
"Since 1985, with his first novel, Days Between Stations, and now with Zeroville, his eighth — and best — novel, Erickson has been a singular voice in American fiction, for my money our most imaginative native novelist....There's no denying the hallucinatory nature of Erickson's novels. But even when they spiral off into the strangest territory, they always make emotional sense..." Charles Taylor, The Nation (read the entire review from The Nation)
Synopses & Reviews
Publisher Comments:
On the same August day in 1969 that a crazed hippie "family" led by Charles Manson commits five savage murders in the canyons above Los Angeles, a young ex-communicated seminarian arrives with the images of Elizabeth Taylor and Montgomery Clift — "the two most beautiful people in the history of the movies" — tattooed on his head. At once childlike and violent, Vikar is not a cinéaste but "cineautistic," sleeping at night in the Roosevelt Hotel where he's haunted by the ghost of D. W. Griffith, and behind the screen of the Chinese Theatre where "images from the movie fly over him as though he's lying at the end of a runway, below an endless stream of jetliners landing." Vikar has stepped into the vortex of a culture in upheaval: strange drugs that frighten him, a strange sexuality that consumes him, a strange music he doesn't understand. Over the course of the Seventies and into the Eighties, as the old studios crumble before the onslaught of a new, renegade generation, Vikar pursues his obsession with film from one screening to the next and through a series of cinema-besotted conversations and encounters with starlets, burglars, guerrillas, escorts, teenage punks and veteran film editors, only to discover a secret whose clues lie in every film ever made, and only to find that we don't dream the Movies but rather they dream us.
Review:
"Set primarily in Los Angeles from the late 1960s through 1980s, this darkly funny, wise but flawed novel from Erickson (Arc d'X) focuses on our collective fascination with movies. Vikar Jerome, whose almost deranged film fixation manifests itself in the images of Elizabeth Taylor and Montgomery Clift tattooed on his bald head, wanders around Hollywood, where he gets mistaken for a perp in the Charles Manson murders and is robbed by a man who turns out to be a fellow film buff. After Vikar becomes a film editor, he's kidnapped by revolutionaries in Spain who want him to edit their propaganda film. Later, he wins a Cannes Film Festival award in France and receives an Oscar nomination, with strange consequences. Vikar repeatedly crosses paths with actress Soledad Palladin and her daughter, Zazi, though ambiguities in his relationship with this enigmatic pair, along with a recurring dream of his, derail this black comedy toward the end. The sudden point-of-view shift and possible supernatural element jar in an otherwise brilliant, often hilarious love song to film." Publishers Weekly (Copyright Reed Business Information, Inc.)
Review:
"My first encounter with Steve Erickson was 'Arc d'X,' which I devoured in 1993 while fatigued and feverish and bedridden. In that context, it became one of the great reading experiences of my life, virtually phantasmagoric. But I don't know if 'Arc d'X' would have seemed any less hallucinogenic under normal conditions. Over his entire career Erickson has challenged readers with a fiercely intelligent..." Washington Post Book Review (read the entire Washington Post review)
Review:
"Although cineasts are the obvious audience for this atmospheric novel (it contains literally hundreds of references to obscure and classic films), others may find themselves falling under its spell, for its effect is much like that of a strange but very beautiful art film." Booklist
Review:
"[Vikar's] adventures read like a fable inspired by the French New Wave. Steve Erickson's Zeroville inhabits a sweet spot where fiction and film criticism merge, wryly imagining a world in which house burglars parse John Ford Westerns. (Grade: B+)" Entertainment Weekly
Review:
"A novel that will especially appeal to cinephiles, for Erickson makes more allusions to film, starting with his Godard-like title, than perhaps any novelist you've read." Kirkus Reviews
Review:
"Erickson is as unique and vital and pure a voice as American fiction has produced." Jonathan Lethem
Review:
"That Zeroville...accomplishes such gait in 352 pages of mostly short, numbered vignettes, is yet another facet of its unmistakable, so sleek brilliance....Zeroville is addictive. It is a puzzle that lives inside your head." Blake Butler, Bookslut.com
Review:
"Erickson...manages to wipe clean the presumptions typically guiding the Hollywood Novel, which suggest either that Hollywood is irredeemably corrupt or that moviemaking is a tainted beauty requiring the ministrations of a pure artistic vision to recover its virtue. He embeds in his story a deeply thoughtful look at the art of filmmaking, not the pathology of the film industry." Los Angeles Times
Review:
"Terse, fanciful, dreamlike and sometimes nightmarish, this remarkable novel will test you and tease you and leave you desperate to line up at Film Forum (or hunt down Erickson's top 150 on DVD) so you can submit yourself to the celluloid bonds that hold Vikar and his creator such willing captives." New York Times
Review:
"Just when you thought that the Hollywood novel had fizzled out with all the eclat of an inebriated Mickey Rourke driving through Miami on a Vespa, another writer has come along with high-octane fuel for the form." Philadelphia Inquirer
Review:
"[Erickson's] eighth — and best — novel....What Erickson is celebrating here isn't any sort of pantheon (Vikar finds his dream frame in both great films and dreck) but the ability of movies to plug right into our deepest fears and raptures." Charles Taylor, The Nation
Synopsis:
A film-obsessed ex-seminarian with images of Elizabeth Taylor and Montgomery Clift tattooed on his head arrives on Hollywood Boulevard in 1969. Vikar Jerome enters the vortex of a cultural transformation: rock and roll, sex, drugs, and — most important to him — the decline of the movie studios and the rise of independent directors. Jerome becomes a film editor of astonishing vision. Through encounters with former starlets, burglars, political guerillas, punk musicians, and veteran filmmakers, he discovers the secret that lies in every movie ever made.
About the Author
Los Angeles writer Steve Erickson was born in Santa Monica in 1950, and has published seven novels and two books of non-fiction. Currently a teacher in the CalArts MFA writing program, a film critic for Los Angeles magazine, and the editor of Black Clock, he received a fellowship from the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation in 2007.
What Our Readers Are Saying
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Average customer rating based on 1 comment:
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moldenke, April 16, 2008 (view all comments by moldenke)
It's like siting at Pershing Square at sunrise, peaking on an unimaginable new designer mescaline and suddenly Cary Grant sits beside you frantic, sweating, wiping his face with a clean handkerchief and with a moment collects his manhood and charisma and asks, " Have you seen her? Have you seen the beautiful woman who is trying to kill me?"
Product Details
- ISBN:
- 9781933372396
- Author:
- Publisher:
- Europa Editions
- Subject:
- General
- Subject:
- General Fiction
- Subject:
- Motion pictures
- Subject:
- California
- Subject:
- Literary
- Copyright:
- 2007
- Publication Date:
- November 2007
- Binding:
- Paperback
- Grade Level:
- General/trade
- Language:
- English
- Pages:
- 329
- Dimensions:
- 8.12x5.30x1.08 in. .94 lbs.
