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20 February 2014
Title
|
American Psycho
|
Author
| Bret Easton Ellis |
Publisher
| Vintage Books New York |
Publication Date
|
1991
|
Pages
| 481 |
Genre
| novel, transgressional fiction |
From Goodreads:
In American Psycho, Bret Easton Ellis imaginatively explores the incomprehensible depths of madness and captures the insanity of violence in our time or any other. Patrick Bateman moves among the young and trendy in 1980s Manhattan. Young, handsome, and well educated, Bateman earns his fortune on Wall Street by day while spending his nights in ways we cannot begin to fathom. Expressing his true self through torture and murder, Bateman prefigures an apocalyptic horror that no society could bear to confront.
A dark satire on 1980's Yuppie Culture. Meet Patrick Bateman. The book doesn't tell us much about him in regards of background and what he actually does, but that he is a Yuppie, associating with his Yuppie friends and only defines himself via consumer goods: expensive clothing, watches, pens etc. The book spends a lot of pages where Bateman explains to us the brands and how important it is to him.
Bateman is also a serial killer and kills and mutilates particularly women. Simple as that. No one seems to notice amongst his friends or business associates.Nothing else much happens and no explanation is every given for the killings, in fact, it is left up to your imagination whether the killings are actually real or even just exist in Bateman's imagination? Warning: Scenes of extreme violence, rape, detailed descriptions of killings and mutilations. Not an easy read and as a woman reader, I did find it hard to read it sometimes, especially as the violence is neither condemned nor explained, but is just simple there.
One of the few books where I thought that the film is as good or even better than the book, maybe because of the excellent Christian Bale in the title role. Unusually, here I had seen the movie first before reading the book, and the whole time when reading, of course, I saw Bale. Not necessarily a bad thing.
About the author (from Amazon)
Biography
