Money: A Suicide Note

Yes! Loved the narrator's voice. It was perfect for the content

Life by Keith Richards because it's the story of a very bad boy living a very high life in the 1980's Joe Hurley who is one of the narrators of Keith Richard's book has a similar gravely voice with an English accent. Sexy

No, I haven't seen any other books narrated by Graeme Malcom, however, I sent for a film he appeared in

Yes, I laughed out loud to several things in the book and it isn't a comedy by any means.

Martin Amis has written a tale that is witty, clever and also disturbing about a man lost in a haze of drugs, porn and money in the 1980's. Absolutely brilliant portrait of the high life world of Hollywood, New York and London through the eyes of a very damaged film director.

This is a hard book to review. 'Money'. I'll probably have to let the whole thing soak. It was brilliant, nimble, sharp, hard, completely balls-out-nuts and pornographic (not really in the PORNporn way, but in the MONEYporn way--yeah, folks, listen to the book you won't understand till you listen to it).

If you put 'Money' together with Gaddis' 'JR' and Wolfe's 'Bonfire of the Vanities' and then sprinkle it all with the vibe and intensity and amorality of Pynchon's 'Gravity's Rainbow' you begin to get the literary footprint of the financial crisis of 2008 AND a peepshow into how reading/listening to 'Money' feels. You gotta listen to 'Money'. Feel 'Money'. Anyway, this is a novel I will need to chew on for a few weeks, months or decades before I've fully digested how I feel about it. Was it Bad Money or Good Money? Or just Money?

For me it wasn't as good as 'JR' and a day and plane ride from Manhattan later, I still feel a tad beat up by it (and my feet are still swollen from the City, the plane, or Martin Amis, or all three), so 4 stars, but absolutely brilliant still.

So, this Martin Amis can really turn a phrase. It's almost too bad I didn't read this in hardcopy, because I'd have been dogearing corners and grabbing a pencil every ten minutes to underline another gorgeous, gaudy, squalid sentence. The story is of a rich drunk scumbag (John Self!) on a downward spiral, and Amis is supreme at creating the seedy atmosphere with his outrageous similes and startling word choices, every paragraph dripping with flavor.

The tale is sordid, but not terribly dark; the protagonist is vile, yet I never found myself hating him. Perhaps this is because he meets the evidence of his most despicable deeds (most having been committed while blackout-drunk, careening wildly around the city) with a sheepish bafflement mixed with shame, as if he can't imagine how he got written into such a story. The book's wry, constant humor tempers his pathetic downslide and keeps it free of despair, as does its rather good-hearted ending.

The reader was perfectly chosen for this rapid-fire, stylish book; it's narrated in the first person, and he sounds like a very credible John Self, and fun to listen to. I highly recommend this audiobook, as it was a surprise find for me and a huge pleasure.

I loved it. Laugh out loud funny. Biting. Cruel. Sincere. A little too close to home sometimes.

Don't miss this one.

Nothing. It is tedious, has dreadful characters and is simply not worth one's time. The great reviews on audible.com must have come from relatives.

My last was

I do not know. In this book he sounds pompous and quite unpleasant. With better material, he might be terrific.

None