This book represents a writer's, and a man's braveness in telling about his "dark places" publicly. James Ellroy's masterpiece is a personal trip inside his own life, starting with the trauma and obsession for the "Black Dahlia" which will accompany him throughout his whole life.
Ellroy's mother, Jean Ellroy, was killed in El Monte in 1958 when he was 10, and her death still remains one of the unsolved homicides in the United States. From then we follow the mind of a child, a teenager, a young man, who by going through the harsh hell of life develops an extreme hunger for books, knowledge, investigation, and the rest is history.
The history of one of the most celebrated crime writers of the 20th century. Only a few quotations this time, because I think, the 'poem' dedicated to his mother at the beginning of the book is already enough to understand the richness of it.
Favourite quotes:
"A cheap Saturday night took you down. You died stupidly and harshly and without the means to hold your own life dear.
Your run to safety was a brief reprieve. You brought me into hiding as your good-luck charm.
I failed you as a talisman - so I stand now as your witness.
Your death defines my life. I want to find the love
we never had and explicate it in your name.
I want to take your secrets public. I want to burn
down the distance between us.
I want to give you breath."
“Dead people belong to the live people who claim them most obsessively.”
“She quoted a dead playwright and called me a bullet with nothing but a future. She understood my lack of self-pity. She knew why I despised everything that might restrict my forward momentum. She knew that bullets have no conscience. They speed past things and miss their marks as often as they hit them.”
Invisible Monsters, Chuck Palahniuk (1999)
First of all a very simple one: it helped me decide the topic of my final exam last year, the story of the grotesque in literature and films. Secondly, I could not read it without crying, without being aware of its being extreme and at the edge of reality, but because of this reason, its characters seem more true than any other living person.
In a society of repression, and prejudices, being yourself is not always easy, so you prefer wearing masks, transform yourself to become the one you have always wanted to be. You cannot read it if you don't like to be schocked and to be questioned about what life really is.
It was supposed to be Chuck Palahniuk's first novel to be published, but the editor stopped it because it was too disturbing. After Fight Club's success, though, they published it, but not in the way Palahniuk wanted. For the book's layout he had taken inspiration from women's magazines, fashion catalogues, etc. in which you are constantly asked to read the rest of an article in another page, so you find yourself jumping from page to page to finish a story. It was considered too confusing and complicated, but I just think it's brilliant.
It soon became one of his most celebrated books. In 2012, though, after this huge success he had the right to publish it as he wanted, this new version is called Invisible Monsters Remix. Nothing more to add, I'll let Chuck speak...
Favourite quotes:
“The one you love and the one who loves you are never, ever the same person.”
“All God does is watch us and kill us when we get boring. We must never, ever be boring.”
“Nothing of me is original. I am the combined effort of everyone I've ever known.”
“If death meant just leaving the stage long enough to change costume and come back as a new character...Would you slow down? Or speed up?”
“When did the future switch from being a promise to being a threat?”
“Don't do what you want. Do what you don't want. Do what you're trained not to want. Do the things that scare you the most.”
“We'll be remembered more for what we destroy than what we create.”
"You can only hold a smile for so long, after that it's just teeth.”
“The only reason why we ask other people how their weekend was is so we can tell them about our own weekend.”
"Almost all the time, you tell yourself you're loving somebody when you're just using them. This only looks like love.”
“Beauty is power the same way money is power the same way a gun is power.”
“Find good in what the world says is evil.”
“I'm not sure what we're running from. Nobody. Or the future. Fate. Growing up. Getting old. Picking up the pieces. As if running we won't have to get on with our lives.”
“The murderer the victim the witness each of us thinks our role is the lead.”
“I'm not straight, and I'm not gay. I'm not bisexual. I want out of the labels. I don't want my whole life crammed into a single word. A story. I want to find something else, unknowable, some place to be that's not on the map. A real adventure.”
“All these thousands of miles later, all these different people I've been, and it's still the same story. Why is it you feel like a dope if you laugh alone, but that's usually how you end up crying? How is it you can keep mutating and still be the same deadly virus?”
“Did you ever think about life as a metaphor for television?”
Next "What shall I read today?":
Choke (Chuck Palahniuk) and The Elegance of the Hedgehog (Muriel Barbery).
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