shane_marble's review against another edition
PART ONE
I read like ten pages of this and Kraus only stopped bragging about her real estate prowess long enough to use 'Aspergers' and 'whore' disparagingly. Maybe I will come back to this and find out it gets better but basically fuck this book.
PART TWO
I needed to take a paper book on a camping trip in case my kindle batteries died, and a friend had convinced me to give this another go so I took it. This book is so fucking bad, dumb, and politically fucked. It's ostensibly about cycles of poverty and criminalisation, how being poor is expensive and a trap. Kraus illustrates this with the story of a good convict, the one smart guy who's poor who wants to get a BA. Meanwhile, the background of the novel is casually littered with poor people for whom Kraus has nothing but contempt, especially those who rent the apartments which generate the income she blithely describes as an abstraction.
Beyond that it is pretty badly written, the tenses are disjointed and annoying and it's like Kraus can't commit to the realist narrative she's trying to tell. Also, what was with all that shit about 'her killer' in the first chapter? She goes on about it at such length and it goes nowhere.
I read like ten pages of this and Kraus only stopped bragging about her real estate prowess long enough to use 'Aspergers' and 'whore' disparagingly. Maybe I will come back to this and find out it gets better but basically fuck this book.
PART TWO
I needed to take a paper book on a camping trip in case my kindle batteries died, and a friend had convinced me to give this another go so I took it. This book is so fucking bad, dumb, and politically fucked. It's ostensibly about cycles of poverty and criminalisation, how being poor is expensive and a trap. Kraus illustrates this with the story of a good convict, the one smart guy who's poor who wants to get a BA. Meanwhile, the background of the novel is casually littered with poor people for whom Kraus has nothing but contempt, especially those who rent the apartments which generate the income she blithely describes as an abstraction.
Beyond that it is pretty badly written, the tenses are disjointed and annoying and it's like Kraus can't commit to the realist narrative she's trying to tell. Also, what was with all that shit about 'her killer' in the first chapter? She goes on about it at such length and it goes nowhere.
lectriceinsoumise's review against another edition
5.0
Summer of hate is just a fantastic book, critical of our society and wondefully written. Chris Kraus is my favorite writer. I’m speechless.
wnordlund's review against another edition
4.0
En mycket bra bok, seg i början men hämtade sig sedan. Var så välskriven och smart, en positiv överraskning!!!
jacob_wren's review against another edition
5.0
For me Chris Kraus is something like the perfect writer (whose books are made even greater by the honesty of their many imperfections.) She is the writer my generation needs to jump start English-speaking literature again in these hopelessly depleted, heart-sick and mediocre times, to re-invent directness in a world of spin and televisual lies. Every novel she writes, for me, reinvents the game (though Aliens & Anorexia remains my favorite, perhaps only because it was the first one I read.) She is a writer who is always driving towards the content, towards a more personal and accurate understanding of the world we live in today, alongside theory but also away from theory's hypocrisies and excesses, towards what is concrete and significant in what she is saying and how she is saying it. When I meet someone who also reads and admires the novels of Chris Kraus, I know I have met someone I'm happy to talk with for awhile. (And yet it always makes me nervous when I start to overload the praise.) Just read all of her books.
wtb_michael's review against another edition
2.0
This is an entertaining novel that tries to tackle the big issues of the Bush-era USA - class, race, nationalism, the prison-industrial complex, crumbling lives in crumbling cities and ways that people get by. The central plot thread is the romance between Catt, cultural commentator cum real estate entrepreneur and Paul, the ex-con with a heart of gold. This flickers along without ever fully convincing, and there's a sense throughout that the characters are pawns in Kraus' bigger political game. The disappointment then is that the political points lack nuance or bite - the targets are obvious and the delivery straightforward. The writing is clear and readable throughout, but not particularly memorable and the whole experience of reading this book is engaging without being particularly stimulating.
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