edazreads's review against another edition
3.0
3.5 stars. It took some time (I would say about 50 pages) to get used to the writing style. The whole time I could feel my heart clench. Selby does not hold back when he writes. I would have loved this if it were a bit shorter - especially the novella Strike.
naokamiya's review against another edition
5.0
CW:
You'd think that being as old as this is the modern penchant for violent media would have aged this a bit, maybe inflated its reputation in the mind of a younger reader - but no, this really is as gutting, punishing, and unstoppable as its reputation suggests. "Last Exit to Brooklyn" moves along with the force of a literary tornado of violence with zero layers of fictional separation; while the stories told here are fictional, there is so little separating these stories from reality, specifically reality as it was to Selby Jr. in New York in the fifties, that it completely forced me to confront every instance of its brutality with complete attention and humbling myself before its maniacal power, a rare kind that exerts itself upon the reader with force equivalent to some kind of natural disaster. Probably the most effective compendium of human atrocity and grotesquerie I have read alongside "Blood Meridian", for every death, beating, overdose, scream of abuse, sexual assault, etc. added ribbon after ribbon of cuts to my body until I was bled dry and had no choice but to submit myself. At the same time, Selby is somehow so delicate, so sensitively attuned to the lives of his screwed up protagonists that the novel can in no way be misconstrued as nothing but subversive shock fiction; there's an empathy here that burns on until the last page, as muted as it may be, one that understands the humanity behind people who suffer and the conditions which lead to their suffering. This something really special, here.
This novel's strength lies in no small part thanks to Selby Jr's prose; I already had a pretty good idea of it from "Requiem for a Dream", but here its power really opened up to me. His writing purposefully obliterates all notion of syntax - so no apostrophes, quotation marks, and even paragraph breaks are infrequent - to further immerse me in its whirling hurricane of text. Thoughts will turn into actions into speech, into thoughts, action, speech again and all over the place in any which pattern, making it hard to get a grasp on its rambling paragraphs and walls of pummeling prose; SOME CHARACTERS SCREAM and the intensity and momentum of everything going on only makes it hit hard rather than being hokey. During scenes of its most harrowing extremities the writing becomes absolutely frenzied, its stream-of-consciousness approaching fever pitch to match the brutality of its events [see the ending of "Tralala" for maybe the most gutwrenching example]. I'd say each of these long short stories unfolds like a nightmare, but that suggests some kind of underlying unconscious drive behind these stories, and the events here are far too logical for that. These characters are still bound by their humanity and waking minds, and the stream of words always the products of relatable human thinking - our brains all kind of work in this stream, hopping from thought to action and here and back in a way that's subconscious yet not dreamlike. It only serves as yet another way this novel makes it impossible to detach, to be unable to look away from the train wrecks occurring on the page. Selby Jr. wants the reader to look - it's the only way we can understand, or get as close to understanding as an outsider possibly can to the lives of the forgotten, the beaten, the assaulted, the dead, the proles left behind in the wake of a grinding machine that feeds its industrious jaws with human life [see "Strike"].
And once again, it's Selby's attention to character detail that elevates this material, that puts it up there with the likes of Bataille or Burroughs in its unflinching looks toward casual violence and brutal lifestyles, in this case of the proletariat of 1950's Brooklyn. There's just too much empathy here to wave its shocking depictions of underclass hell aside - there are constantly moments of unbelievable tenderness and compassion brewing beneath the surface of these characters' bleak existences, too many moments of warmth to suggest Selby Jr. was looking at these characters with contempt or even indifference but with a raw and unmistakable compassion. Georgette's reading of "The Raven" and her manic drug-induced thoughts of love and something better in her life in "The Queen is Dead" stopped me in my tracks [that story as a whole is a phenomenal; possibly my favorite tied with the frenzied intertwined-vignette chaos of "Landsend"] or even Harry in "Strike", who is a monstrous person but still is given moments of tenderness and the idea that he really could have been a warmer person if his whole life had not been molded by toxic models of aggressive masculinity, with that hope torn away by the story's sickening, disturbing ending; every single one of these characters in every story is illustrated beautifully and even when they are completely without redemption or atoning factors they are never without their humanity. Selby Jr. is at once capable of writing non-sympathetic characters yet communicating that these lives are informed by systems of power and environments informed by that neoliberal superstructure.
The fact this was as banned as it was doesn't surprise me - bourgeoisie society will never be ready for a novel with this kind of strange dark power, especially one such as "Last Exit to Brooklyn" which goes straight for the status quo's jugular in the sheer gravity of the lives it depicts. The overall course of transgressive fiction since '64 probably owes a lot to this novel and in hindsight in books I have read over the past few years, its blueprint is still alive in many works of fiction in the 21st century. This damn near ripped me apart at the molecular level and it will be a long time before I come back to it, but I definitely will, and I am very glad I read it. If you can stomach this sort of thing, you should too. This is an important reminder of what life is like on the fringes, the forgotten fringes the privileged would prefer not to talk about, and how it is not an option but a requirement to see how people live, how the system grinds away the billions of innocent and non-innocent alike to keep its profits running. This is the world this system creates, and the world we all contribute to consciously or not. So what are we gonna do to make it better?
"In the winter everyones hate was bare if you looked. She saw hate in the icicles that hung from her window; she saw it in the dirty slush on the streets; she heard it in the hail that scratched her window and bit her face; she could see it in the lowered heads hurrying to warm homes...yes their heads were lowered away from Ada and Ada beat her breast and pulled her hair yelling to the Lord God Jehovah to have pity and be merciful and she scratched her face until her fingernails filled with flesh and blood dribbled down her cheeks, beating her head against her window until her head was bruised and small droplets of thin blood smeared the moisture on her wailing wall, her arms still raised in supplication to Jehovah asking why she was being punished, begging mercy, asking why the people turned against her, beating her breast and begging mercy from her God who delivered the Tablets unto Moses and guided his children across the burning desert; the wrathful God who parted the Red Sea for the chosen people and drowned the pursuing armies in its turbulent waters; pleasing with the revengeful God who delivered a pestilence unto the Pharaoh and the children of Israel when they turned their backs to him...O god have mercy..."
Spoiler
physical violence, sexual assault, homophobia/queer-directed violence, domestic abuse, violence against women/children, slurs, basically just everything for this oneYou'd think that being as old as this is the modern penchant for violent media would have aged this a bit, maybe inflated its reputation in the mind of a younger reader - but no, this really is as gutting, punishing, and unstoppable as its reputation suggests. "Last Exit to Brooklyn" moves along with the force of a literary tornado of violence with zero layers of fictional separation; while the stories told here are fictional, there is so little separating these stories from reality, specifically reality as it was to Selby Jr. in New York in the fifties, that it completely forced me to confront every instance of its brutality with complete attention and humbling myself before its maniacal power, a rare kind that exerts itself upon the reader with force equivalent to some kind of natural disaster. Probably the most effective compendium of human atrocity and grotesquerie I have read alongside "Blood Meridian", for every death, beating, overdose, scream of abuse, sexual assault, etc. added ribbon after ribbon of cuts to my body until I was bled dry and had no choice but to submit myself. At the same time, Selby is somehow so delicate, so sensitively attuned to the lives of his screwed up protagonists that the novel can in no way be misconstrued as nothing but subversive shock fiction; there's an empathy here that burns on until the last page, as muted as it may be, one that understands the humanity behind people who suffer and the conditions which lead to their suffering. This something really special, here.
This novel's strength lies in no small part thanks to Selby Jr's prose; I already had a pretty good idea of it from "Requiem for a Dream", but here its power really opened up to me. His writing purposefully obliterates all notion of syntax - so no apostrophes, quotation marks, and even paragraph breaks are infrequent - to further immerse me in its whirling hurricane of text. Thoughts will turn into actions into speech, into thoughts, action, speech again and all over the place in any which pattern, making it hard to get a grasp on its rambling paragraphs and walls of pummeling prose; SOME CHARACTERS SCREAM and the intensity and momentum of everything going on only makes it hit hard rather than being hokey. During scenes of its most harrowing extremities the writing becomes absolutely frenzied, its stream-of-consciousness approaching fever pitch to match the brutality of its events [see the ending of "Tralala" for maybe the most gutwrenching example]. I'd say each of these long short stories unfolds like a nightmare, but that suggests some kind of underlying unconscious drive behind these stories, and the events here are far too logical for that. These characters are still bound by their humanity and waking minds, and the stream of words always the products of relatable human thinking - our brains all kind of work in this stream, hopping from thought to action and here and back in a way that's subconscious yet not dreamlike. It only serves as yet another way this novel makes it impossible to detach, to be unable to look away from the train wrecks occurring on the page. Selby Jr. wants the reader to look - it's the only way we can understand, or get as close to understanding as an outsider possibly can to the lives of the forgotten, the beaten, the assaulted, the dead, the proles left behind in the wake of a grinding machine that feeds its industrious jaws with human life [see "Strike"].
And once again, it's Selby's attention to character detail that elevates this material, that puts it up there with the likes of Bataille or Burroughs in its unflinching looks toward casual violence and brutal lifestyles, in this case of the proletariat of 1950's Brooklyn. There's just too much empathy here to wave its shocking depictions of underclass hell aside - there are constantly moments of unbelievable tenderness and compassion brewing beneath the surface of these characters' bleak existences, too many moments of warmth to suggest Selby Jr. was looking at these characters with contempt or even indifference but with a raw and unmistakable compassion. Georgette's reading of "The Raven" and her manic drug-induced thoughts of love and something better in her life in "The Queen is Dead" stopped me in my tracks [that story as a whole is a phenomenal; possibly my favorite tied with the frenzied intertwined-vignette chaos of "Landsend"] or even Harry in "Strike", who is a monstrous person but still is given moments of tenderness and the idea that he really could have been a warmer person if his whole life had not been molded by toxic models of aggressive masculinity, with that hope torn away by the story's sickening, disturbing ending; every single one of these characters in every story is illustrated beautifully and even when they are completely without redemption or atoning factors they are never without their humanity. Selby Jr. is at once capable of writing non-sympathetic characters yet communicating that these lives are informed by systems of power and environments informed by that neoliberal superstructure.
The fact this was as banned as it was doesn't surprise me - bourgeoisie society will never be ready for a novel with this kind of strange dark power, especially one such as "Last Exit to Brooklyn" which goes straight for the status quo's jugular in the sheer gravity of the lives it depicts. The overall course of transgressive fiction since '64 probably owes a lot to this novel and in hindsight in books I have read over the past few years, its blueprint is still alive in many works of fiction in the 21st century. This damn near ripped me apart at the molecular level and it will be a long time before I come back to it, but I definitely will, and I am very glad I read it. If you can stomach this sort of thing, you should too. This is an important reminder of what life is like on the fringes, the forgotten fringes the privileged would prefer not to talk about, and how it is not an option but a requirement to see how people live, how the system grinds away the billions of innocent and non-innocent alike to keep its profits running. This is the world this system creates, and the world we all contribute to consciously or not. So what are we gonna do to make it better?
"In the winter everyones hate was bare if you looked. She saw hate in the icicles that hung from her window; she saw it in the dirty slush on the streets; she heard it in the hail that scratched her window and bit her face; she could see it in the lowered heads hurrying to warm homes...yes their heads were lowered away from Ada and Ada beat her breast and pulled her hair yelling to the Lord God Jehovah to have pity and be merciful and she scratched her face until her fingernails filled with flesh and blood dribbled down her cheeks, beating her head against her window until her head was bruised and small droplets of thin blood smeared the moisture on her wailing wall, her arms still raised in supplication to Jehovah asking why she was being punished, begging mercy, asking why the people turned against her, beating her breast and begging mercy from her God who delivered the Tablets unto Moses and guided his children across the burning desert; the wrathful God who parted the Red Sea for the chosen people and drowned the pursuing armies in its turbulent waters; pleasing with the revengeful God who delivered a pestilence unto the Pharaoh and the children of Israel when they turned their backs to him...O god have mercy..."
clare_richh's review against another edition
challenging
dark
reflective
sad
slow-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? Character
- Strong character development? It's complicated
- Loveable characters? No
- Diverse cast of characters? Yes
- Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes
4.75
miles_'s review against another edition
dark
reflective
tense
medium-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? Character
- Strong character development? No
- Loveable characters? No
- Diverse cast of characters? Yes
- Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes
4.25
Content Warnings
Graphic: Domestic abuse, Rape, and Toxic relationship
Moderate: Racism
bookynooknook's review against another edition
adventurous
challenging
dark
emotional
sad
slow-paced
3.5
rebus's review against another edition
2.0
It should have been right up my alley, but I found it discursive and almost unreadable.
anuwolf's review against another edition
4.0
This book was incredibly powerful and brutal, as the chaotic writing style puts you right in the middle of the hellish existence of all the characters. It was emotionally draining to read, sometimes unbearable, especially knowing that none of their lives would ever improve. I enjoyed the vivid portrayal of the characters, all human and often despicable and pitiable.
rhiandroid_'s review against another edition
challenging
emotional
tense
fast-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? Character
- Strong character development? No
- Loveable characters? No
- Diverse cast of characters? Yes
- Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes
2.75
fictionfan's review against another edition
1.0
A bunch of sad losers hang around getting drunk, drugged and beating each other up, with added sexual depravity.
Well, I stuck it out for 17%. It is disgusting, violent, depraved, designed to shock – all as advertised. But what no-one told me is that it’s also immensely dull. I’ve always found being sober in the company of drunks or the drug-addled tedious, both in reality and fiction. There are lots of good people in the world and plenty of interesting bad people, so why would I want to spend time with moronic, foul-mouthed losers? Who cares if they all kill each other? Not me. I couldn’t care less what consenting adults might get up to in private, but I do demand a certain level of public decency, in life and in fiction. Reading this is like swimming in raw sewage.
Recommended as a great gift idea for someone you really hate...
Well, I stuck it out for 17%. It is disgusting, violent, depraved, designed to shock – all as advertised. But what no-one told me is that it’s also immensely dull. I’ve always found being sober in the company of drunks or the drug-addled tedious, both in reality and fiction. There are lots of good people in the world and plenty of interesting bad people, so why would I want to spend time with moronic, foul-mouthed losers? Who cares if they all kill each other? Not me. I couldn’t care less what consenting adults might get up to in private, but I do demand a certain level of public decency, in life and in fiction. Reading this is like swimming in raw sewage.
Recommended as a great gift idea for someone you really hate...