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Gun, with Occasional Music
- Narrated by: Nick Sullivan
- Length: 8 hrs and 40 mins
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Editorial reviews
Narrator Nick Sullivan serves this dialogue well, and has great fun with the accumulation of wisecracks. Lines like "The Bay View was a vacation spot for people vacating from their husbands and wives" are delivered with perfect timing, fitting for the kind of deadpan one-liners that are stock in trade of gumshoe narratives. If he perhaps emphasises the comic and cartoon at the expense of the story's darker undertones, then it is compensated by his well-drawn cast of characters, including a lugubrious villain and a tough-guy kangaroo hoodlum.
Although not as substantial as Lethem's two masterpieces, Motherless Brooklyn and The Fortress of Solitude, Gun with Occasional Music clearly sets forth the author's predilection for genre-bending, being somewhere between Raymond Chandler and Philip K. Dick perhaps with a touch of Who Framed Roger Rabbit thrown in. Dafydd Phillips
Publisher's summary
In this brave new world, Metcalf has been shadowing the wife of an affluent doctor, perhaps falling a little in love with her at the same time. But when the doctor turns up dead, our amiable investigator finds himself caught in the crossfire in a futuristic world that is both funny - and not so funny.
Critic reviews
"[A] sparkling pastiche of Chandleresque detective fiction displaced to an almost comical postmodern landscape." ( Booklist)
"Marries Chandler's style and Philip K. Dick's vision...an audaciously assured first novel." ( Newsweek)
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Performance
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From America's most inventive novelist, Jonathan Lethem, comes this compelling and compulsive riff on the classic detective novel. Lionel Essrog is Brooklyn's very own Human Freakshow, an orphan whose Tourettic impulses drive him to bark, count, and rip apart language in startling and original ways. Together with three veterans of the St. Vincent's Home for Boys, he works for small-time mobster Frank Minna's limo service cum detective agency. Life without Frank, the charismatic King of Brooklyn, would be unimaginable.
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You're Not the Only Freak Show in Town!
- By Dave on 05-01-14
By: Jonathan Lethem
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Vurt
- By: Jeff Noon
- Narrated by: Dean Williamson
- Length: 9 hrs and 21 mins
- Unabridged
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Vurt is a feather - a drug, a dimension, a dream state, a virtual reality. It comes in many colours: legal Blues for lullaby dreams. Blacks, filled with tenderness and pain, just beyond the law. Pink Pornovurts, doorways to bliss. Silver feathers for techies who know how to remix colors and open new dimensions. And Yellows - the feathers from which there is no escape. The beautiful young Desdemona is trapped in Curious Yellow, the ultimate Metavurt, a feather few have ever seen and fewer still have dared ingest. Her brother Scribble will risk everything to rescue his beloved sister.
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top 10 all time fiction
- By Doing-fine-in-FLA on 02-27-21
By: Jeff Noon
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The Space Merchants
- By: Frederik Pohl, C. M. Kornbluth
- Narrated by: Dan Bittner
- Length: 6 hrs and 1 min
- Unabridged
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In a vastly overpopulated near-future world, businesses have taken the place of governments and now hold all political power. States exist merely to ensure the survival of huge transnational corporations. Advertising has become hugely aggressive and boasts some of the world’s most powerful executives. Through advertising, the public is constantly deluded into thinking that all the products on the market improve the quality of life.
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You a New Crumb?
- By Jim "The Impatient" on 07-20-13
By: Frederik Pohl, and others
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When Gravity Fails
- Marid Audran Trilogy, Book 1
- By: George Alec Effinger
- Narrated by: Jonathan Davis
- Length: 11 hrs and 51 mins
- Unabridged
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For a new kind of killer roams the streets of the Arab ghetto, a madman whose bootlegged personality cartridges range from a sinister James Bond to a sadistic disemboweler named Khan. And Marid Audrian has been made an offer he can't refuse.The 200-year-old godfather of the Budayeen's underworld has enlisted Marid as his instrument of vengeance. But first Marid must undergo the most sophisticated of surgical implants before he dares to confront a killer who carries the power of every psychopath since the beginning of time.
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Neuromancer in the Middle East
- By David on 07-28-13
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The Fortress of Solitude
- By: Jonathan Lethem
- Narrated by: David Aaron Baker
- Length: 18 hrs and 34 mins
- Unabridged
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This is the story of two boys, Dylan Ebdus and Mingus Rude. They are friends and neighbors, but because Dylan is white and Mingus is black, their friendship is not simple. This is the story of their Brooklyn neighborhood, which is almost exclusively black despite the first whispers of something that will become known as "gentrification."
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A smorgasbord of language
- By Jonathan on 10-21-03
By: Jonathan Lethem
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Brooklyn Crime Novel
- A Novel
- By: Jonathan Lethem
- Narrated by: Geoffrey Cantor
- Length: 13 hrs
- Unabridged
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On the streets of 1970s Brooklyn, a daily ritual goes down: the dance. Money is exchanged, belongings surrendered, power asserted. The promise of violence lies everywhere, a currency itself. For these children, Black, brown, and white, the street is a stage in shadow. And in the wings hide the other players: parents; cops; renovators; landlords; those who write the headlines, the histories, and laws; those who award this neighborhood its name. The rules appear obvious at first. But in memory’s prism, criminals and victims may seem to trade places.
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Not Lethem’s Best
- By Dr. Flower on 01-20-24
By: Jonathan Lethem
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Motherless Brooklyn
- By: Jonathan Lethem
- Narrated by: Geoffrey Cantor
- Length: 10 hrs and 9 mins
- Unabridged
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From America's most inventive novelist, Jonathan Lethem, comes this compelling and compulsive riff on the classic detective novel. Lionel Essrog is Brooklyn's very own Human Freakshow, an orphan whose Tourettic impulses drive him to bark, count, and rip apart language in startling and original ways. Together with three veterans of the St. Vincent's Home for Boys, he works for small-time mobster Frank Minna's limo service cum detective agency. Life without Frank, the charismatic King of Brooklyn, would be unimaginable.
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You're Not the Only Freak Show in Town!
- By Dave on 05-01-14
By: Jonathan Lethem
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Vurt
- By: Jeff Noon
- Narrated by: Dean Williamson
- Length: 9 hrs and 21 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Story
Vurt is a feather - a drug, a dimension, a dream state, a virtual reality. It comes in many colours: legal Blues for lullaby dreams. Blacks, filled with tenderness and pain, just beyond the law. Pink Pornovurts, doorways to bliss. Silver feathers for techies who know how to remix colors and open new dimensions. And Yellows - the feathers from which there is no escape. The beautiful young Desdemona is trapped in Curious Yellow, the ultimate Metavurt, a feather few have ever seen and fewer still have dared ingest. Her brother Scribble will risk everything to rescue his beloved sister.
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top 10 all time fiction
- By Doing-fine-in-FLA on 02-27-21
By: Jeff Noon
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The Space Merchants
- By: Frederik Pohl, C. M. Kornbluth
- Narrated by: Dan Bittner
- Length: 6 hrs and 1 min
- Unabridged
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In a vastly overpopulated near-future world, businesses have taken the place of governments and now hold all political power. States exist merely to ensure the survival of huge transnational corporations. Advertising has become hugely aggressive and boasts some of the world’s most powerful executives. Through advertising, the public is constantly deluded into thinking that all the products on the market improve the quality of life.
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You a New Crumb?
- By Jim "The Impatient" on 07-20-13
By: Frederik Pohl, and others
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When Gravity Fails
- Marid Audran Trilogy, Book 1
- By: George Alec Effinger
- Narrated by: Jonathan Davis
- Length: 11 hrs and 51 mins
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Performance
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Story
For a new kind of killer roams the streets of the Arab ghetto, a madman whose bootlegged personality cartridges range from a sinister James Bond to a sadistic disemboweler named Khan. And Marid Audrian has been made an offer he can't refuse.The 200-year-old godfather of the Budayeen's underworld has enlisted Marid as his instrument of vengeance. But first Marid must undergo the most sophisticated of surgical implants before he dares to confront a killer who carries the power of every psychopath since the beginning of time.
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Neuromancer in the Middle East
- By David on 07-28-13
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The Fortress of Solitude
- By: Jonathan Lethem
- Narrated by: David Aaron Baker
- Length: 18 hrs and 34 mins
- Unabridged
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This is the story of two boys, Dylan Ebdus and Mingus Rude. They are friends and neighbors, but because Dylan is white and Mingus is black, their friendship is not simple. This is the story of their Brooklyn neighborhood, which is almost exclusively black despite the first whispers of something that will become known as "gentrification."
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A smorgasbord of language
- By Jonathan on 10-21-03
By: Jonathan Lethem
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Brooklyn Crime Novel
- A Novel
- By: Jonathan Lethem
- Narrated by: Geoffrey Cantor
- Length: 13 hrs
- Unabridged
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Overall
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Story
On the streets of 1970s Brooklyn, a daily ritual goes down: the dance. Money is exchanged, belongings surrendered, power asserted. The promise of violence lies everywhere, a currency itself. For these children, Black, brown, and white, the street is a stage in shadow. And in the wings hide the other players: parents; cops; renovators; landlords; those who write the headlines, the histories, and laws; those who award this neighborhood its name. The rules appear obvious at first. But in memory’s prism, criminals and victims may seem to trade places.
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Not Lethem’s Best
- By Dr. Flower on 01-20-24
By: Jonathan Lethem
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Doomsday Book
- By: Connie Willis
- Narrated by: Jenny Sterlin
- Length: 26 hrs and 20 mins
- Unabridged
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For Oxford student Kivrin, traveling back to the 14th century is more than the culmination of her studies - it's the chance for a wonderful adventure. For Dunworthy, her mentor, it is cause for intense worry about the thousands of things that could go wrong.
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Timely, beautiful, terrible and haunting
- By mudcelt on 11-02-09
By: Connie Willis
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Dissident Gardens
- A Novel
- By: Jonathan Lethem
- Narrated by: Mark Bramhall
- Length: 16 hrs and 28 mins
- Unabridged
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At the center of Jonathan Lethem’s superb new novel stand two extraordinary women. Rose Zimmer, the aptly nicknamed Red Queen of Sunnyside, Queens, is an unreconstructed Communist and mercurial tyrant who terrorizes her neighborhood and her family with the ferocity of her personality and the absolutism of her beliefs. Her brilliant and willful daughter, Miriam, is equally passionate in her activism, but flees Rose’s suffocating influence and embraces the Age of Aquarius counterculture of Greenwich Village. Both women cast spells that entrance or enchain the men in their lives....
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Not for me
- By JV on 09-19-13
By: Jonathan Lethem
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Destroying Angel
- The Carlucci Series, Book 1
- By: Richard Paul Russo
- Narrated by: Kristoffer Tabori
- Length: 9 hrs and 2 mins
- Unabridged
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In the mid twenty-first century San Francisco, a group of corpses is found chained together on the bottom of the bay. Retired police officer Louis Tanner must find the killer among a city full of serial murderers, cyborgs, and street-wise kids. This first book in the Carlucci series introduces famed police lieutenant Frank Carlucci.
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Good Noir Story
- By Anonymous User on 01-29-21
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Chronic City
- A Novel
- By: Jonathan Lethem
- Narrated by: Mark Deakins
- Length: 14 hrs and 59 mins
- Unabridged
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Chase Insteadman, a handsome, inoffensive fixture on Manhattan's social scene, lives off residuals earned as a child star on a beloved sitcom called Martyr & Pesty. Chase owes his current social cachet to an ongoing tragedy much covered in the tabloids: His teenage sweetheart and fiancée, Janice Trumbull, is trapped by a layer of low-orbit mines on the International Space Station, from which she sends him rapturous and heartbreaking love letters. Like Janice, Chase is adrift, she in Earth's stratosphere, he in a vague routine punctuated by Upper East Side dinner parties.
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When in doubt, don't.
- By Susan C. S. on 10-31-09
By: Jonathan Lethem
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The Demolished Man
- By: Alfred Bester
- Narrated by: Gerard Doyle
- Length: 7 hrs and 36 mins
- Unabridged
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In a world policed by telepaths, Ben Reich plans to commit a crime that hasn't been heard of in 70 years: murder. That's the only option left for Reich, whose company is losing a 10-year death struggle with rival D'Courtney Enterprises.Terrorized in his dreams by The Man with No Face and driven to the edge after D'Courtney refuses a merger offer, Reich murders his rival and bribes a high-ranking telepath to help him cover his tracks. But while police prefect Lincoln Powell knows Reich is guilty, his telepath's knowledge is a far cry from admissible evidence.
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It needed the visuals of the paper book.
- By Traci L. Brennan on 05-15-18
By: Alfred Bester
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The Feral Detective
- A Novel
- By: Jonathan Lethem
- Narrated by: Zosia Mamet
- Length: 8 hrs and 53 mins
- Unabridged
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Phoebe Siegler first meets Charles Heist in a shabby trailer on the eastern edge of Los Angeles. She’s looking for her friend’s missing daughter, Arabella, and hires Heist to help. A laconic loner who keeps his pet opossum in a desk drawer, Heist intrigues the sarcastic and garrulous Phoebe. Reluctantly, he agrees to help. The unlikely pair navigates the enclaves of desert-dwelling vagabonds and finds Arabella is in serious trouble - caught in the middle of a violent standoff that only Heist, mysteriously, can end.
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Ugh
- By Mike in Dallas on 11-17-18
By: Jonathan Lethem
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The Last Policeman
- The Last Policeman, Book 1
- By: Ben H. Winters
- Narrated by: Peter Berkrot
- Length: 8 hrs and 20 mins
- Unabridged
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What’s the point in solving murders if we’re all going to die soon, anyway? Detective Hank Palace has faced this question ever since asteroid 2011GV1 hovered into view. There’s no chance left. No hope. Just six precious months until impact. The economy spirals downward while crops rot in the fields. Churches and synagogues are packed. People all over the world are walking off the job—but not Hank Palace. He’s investigating a death by hanging in a city that sees a dozen suicides every week—except this one feels suspicious, and Palace is the only cop who cares.
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Not your regular mystery
- By Victor @ theAudiobookBlog dot com on 09-20-16
By: Ben H. Winters
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Girl in Landscape
- By: Jonathan Lethem
- Narrated by: David Aaron Baker
- Length: 6 hrs and 43 mins
- Unabridged
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At the age of 13, Pella Marsh emigrates with her family to the Planet of the Archbuilders. These enigmatic aborigines have names like Lonely Dumptruck and Hiding Kneel, and a civilization that baffles and frightens their human visitors. As the spikily independent Pella becomes an uneasy envoy between two species, Girl in Landscape deftly interweaves themes of exploration and otherness, loss, and sexual awakening.
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Wonderful novel, horrendous audio book
- By Grant Hayslip on 03-13-18
By: Jonathan Lethem
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The Automatic Detective
- By: A. Lee Martinez
- Narrated by: Marc Vietor
- Length: 8 hrs and 57 mins
- Unabridged
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Even in Empire City, a town where weird science is the hope for tomorrow, it's hard for a robot to make his way. It's even harder for a robot named Mack Megaton, a hulking machine designed to bring mankind to its knees. But Mack's not interested in world domination. He's just a bot trying to get by, trying to demonstrate that he isn't just an automated smashing machine, and to earn his citizenship in the process. It should be as easy as crushing a tank for Mack, but some bots just cant catch a break.
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SOME DAYS, I WISH I HAD BEEN MADE A TOASTER
- By Jim "The Impatient" on 02-11-18
By: A. Lee Martinez
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The Arrest
- By: Jonathan Lethem
- Narrated by: Robert Fass
- Length: 7 hrs and 32 mins
- Unabridged
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The Arrest isn't post-apocalypse. It isn't a dystopia. It isn't a utopia. It's just what happens when much of what we take for granted - cars, guns, computers and airplanes, for starters - stops working.... Before the Arrest, Sandy Duplessis had a reasonably good life as a screenwriter in LA. An old college friend and writing partner, the charismatic and malicious Peter Todbaum, had become one of the most powerful men in Hollywood. That didn't hurt.
By: Jonathan Lethem
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Burning Chrome
- By: William Gibson
- Narrated by: Jonathan Davis, Dennis Holland, Kevin Pariseau, and others
- Length: 7 hrs and 7 mins
- Unabridged
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William Gibson's dark visions of computer cowboys, bio-enhanced soldiers of fortune, and hi-tech lowlifes have won unprecedented praise. Included here are some of the most famous short fiction and novellas by the author of Count Zero and Neuromancer.
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abstract art
- By Jim "The Impatient" on 04-05-14
By: William Gibson
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The City & The City
- By: China Mieville
- Narrated by: John Lee
- Length: 10 hrs and 16 mins
- Unabridged
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When a murdered woman is found in the city of Beszel, somewhere at the edge of Europe, it looks to be a routine case for Inspector Tyador Borl ú of the Extreme Crime Squad. But as he investigates, the evidence points to conspiracies far stranger and more deadly than anything he could have imagined. Borl must travel from the decaying Beszel to the only metropolis on Earth as strange as his own.
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Reviews, Dishonesty and The Emperor's New Clothes
- By Robert on 01-27-13
By: China Mieville
What listeners say about Gun, with Occasional Music
Average customer ratingsReviews - Please select the tabs below to change the source of reviews.
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- Darwin8u
- 04-18-12
SF SLAMS into a hard-boiled, noir pulp!
Science fiction slams into a hard-boiled, noir pulp (imagine 'Who Framed Roger Rabbit' written by Chandler and directed by David Lynch'). Fun, quick and in parts even close to brilliant.
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14 people found this helpful
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- crazybatcow
- 11-11-13
Noir detective novel meets alternative future...
This book was in my library for a very long time... I think I thought it was a different kind of book than it actually was. It is billed as a noir-detective type novel, but I would have to say that it is equally an alternative future/sci-fi type novel.
It does have the Chandler-esque tone to it: making it on the dark side, and the action is short and succinct. It is not particularly violent or graphic, but has an over-arching depression about it. (i.e. you won't find a feel-good sensation at the end).
There is significant drug use - in fact, this is the component that sets the novel out as alternative future-ish... drug use has been legalized, and, even more disturbingly, made customizable for users. In fact, it changes society completely at the end - and it adds a layer of bleakness to the story, while still remaining believable. If you look at it quickly, you might think the drug use was just this detectives' booze (after all, don't all noir detectives have addictions?), but I think it was actually the component that carved out this world: the very world became the way it is in the novel because of this drug 'reality'. And the ending of the novel wouldn't have worked without it.
I have read elsewhere that the novel was a commentary on the state of individual detachment from/in the world, and I suppose that could be an accurate description. Except that I didn't read it for social insights or moral issues; I read it for simple enjoyment. Fortunately it delivered. Sure, you can read all sorts of stuff into it, but you don't have to, and I think the book stands well as a futuristic noir.
The narration is good. There is violence, but it is not graphic. There is no sex. I will be looking for more books by this author.
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5 people found this helpful
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- Darryl
- 07-27-13
quirky SF detective story
this is very much a Chandler "Big Sleep" type story but channeled through Pynchon and PK Dick. very good, and though the narrator could have been a bit more world weary noirish, or a bit more comic like Michael Kramer's narration for Westlake, (you really need to get Kramer's Dortmunder recordings on Audible) he does a good job. interested in Lethem's Chronocity now.
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4 people found this helpful
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- Rhett
- 03-18-13
Gun, with Occasional Music
Any additional comments?
What happens if you take the classic noir detective story and put it into an American future characterized by perverse pleasure? You get this novel.
First the positive. If you like a traditional tough-guy detective story told in the first person, this has got that. It’s even set in the Bay Area and incorporates all of the necessary elements, damsels in distress, a seductress, tough guys jawing at one another, a morally flawed main character, etc. In fact, early on in the book I thought that I would rate it fairly high simply because Jonathan Lethem had done such a tremendous job of matching the trope. I was particularly taken with his deft touch on the snappy tough-guy repartee, if this were a movie there would be many quotable lines.
That said, I found it a little lacking at points. Frankly there were a few points where the book just lost my attention. These points seemed to be primarily where he left the main detective plot line and immersed the reader in world building. More importantly, I could never quite figure out how the world Lethem created served the story. For instance, you can expect the main character in this type of novel to hit the bottle or have an addiction, but everyone had an addiction and I’m still wondering how, other than occasionally making some people harder to question, that served the story. Another example of this was a series of genetically mutated animals. They were an interesting set of characters to play with and read about, but I can’t say that I felt like they added depth to the plot in anyway, which I see as a strong negative in a murder mystery. There was also a backdrop of Karma Points, which when it was first introduced I thought was an interesting concept, but it just never seemed to go anywhere intriguing.
As I think this through, it seems to me that the writer must have wanted to write a noir detective story, which is cool. Then he decided to place the story in a really funky world and the problem is that the world doesn’t end up facilitating the story, it came off to me as simply arbitrary.
Don’t get me wrong because of the strong first-person narration and appropriate incorporation of the genre’s tropes, it is an entertaining read. It just falls a little flat in the end. My official rating for this is 3.5 stars, but since most sites won’t let you do half a star I’ll click the three star button because I simply do not feel strongly enough about it to make it four stars.
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- danni
- 06-20-10
all about style
As with all Lethem's books, it's not the story that entertains, it's the writing. His books are all an interesting turn of phrase.
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- Diane
- 03-01-10
Entertaining
I wrote this review because I thought the other review was a little harsh. Entertaining book in the Sc-Fi genre. Didn't think the reader did as bad a job as in the previous review.
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- Zachary
- 03-02-20
Utterly bonkers and not in a good way
Full disclosure: I couldn't stand even the first quarter of this book - I was dumped into an absurd, grim world with a bunch of characters I couldn't care less about and a murder mystery that meant nothing to me. I tried to hang in there, but the book was too much of a chore. I think a big problem was the huge gap between their world and ours - very little of it seemed like a world that could grow naturally, so there was nothing to believe in and no investment. Also, the main character has nothing to gain and everything to lose by taking the case, and he just didn't strike me as the kind of boy scout you need to be to do that; also, he was so laconic about everything that there was zero sense of stakes. It's too bad, because the world had several interesting ideas that, if presented alone against an otherwise normal backdrop, could have made for an intriguing story. The big mistake, IMO was the murder - the victim and the fall-guy are nobody to us, so the mystery means nothing. Again, it's too bad, because I read a plot summary, and the solution is kinda interesting and ironic; if I'd only had to sit through a short story to get there, it might have been a lot of fun.
Also, a personal peeve: "swapped nerve endings" is just jabbering nonsense. That's not how anything works. If they'd just physically swapped genitals, it'd have made more sense, though it still would have added zilch to the story. That kind of woolie thinking gets right up my nose.
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- Barrelman
- 04-20-19
It’s quirky
But it’s a keeper. Not just a spoof, or that horror, the sci fi comedy. More like an exploration of the Marlowe mythos. It has humor but doesn’t beat you over the head with it. It’s read well, too.
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- sherri
- 12-13-12
Such a clever idea but that's all
There's no denying the quality of Lethem's writing. His mimicry of the hard-boiled, Raymond Chandler type, simile-swinging detective is spot on. The novel's concept is clever and engaging--at first. After the first surprise of discovering the old-fashioned PI juxtaposed with a dystopian society, I found the story gets old, the characters are trite and undeveloped, and I got bored.
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- Andrea Munro
- 04-04-10
A film noir set in "1984"
I really enjoyed this book, although it's definitely not for everyone. It's a detective story (very Bogart) set in a world with much like Orwell's "1984". I loved it. The narrator is great!
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