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ridgewaygirl's review against another edition
3.0
Stephen Florida is a college senior, a wrestler who has one last shot of winning the championship. He's focused on that one aim, to the exclusion of pretty much everything else. He has one friend, another dedicated wrestler, but it's an odd relationship. He meets a girl and there's another connection to tether him to the world for a time, but the isolation takes a toll and Stephen Florida is losing it.
So I'm not generally a fan of novels about angry white dudes, or of sports novels, or of novels that put a lot of emphasis on bodily fluids, or, frankly, books that are so unabashedly male in their outlook. I would not have read this at all had it not made the Tournament of Books longlist, and while I often wondered why I was reading this, it did capture my interest in the end. Stephen's not a nice guy, but he's also not a bad guy, for all the petty gross stuff he does. He's just a not entirely stable guy who lacks anyone who could ground him and he's utterly committed to winning at wrestling. There's only a single sketchily-drawn female character, and she remains largely an idea that Stephen holds on to, but a story told from inside Stephen's head was never going to be balanced.
I'm glad to have read this book, even though I was not always happy while I was reading it. I really, really dislike snot and there was a lot of it in this book. But Gabe Habash shows promise and I'll be interested in at least see what he does next.
So I'm not generally a fan of novels about angry white dudes, or of sports novels, or of novels that put a lot of emphasis on bodily fluids, or, frankly, books that are so unabashedly male in their outlook. I would not have read this at all had it not made the Tournament of Books longlist, and while I often wondered why I was reading this, it did capture my interest in the end. Stephen's not a nice guy, but he's also not a bad guy, for all the petty gross stuff he does. He's just a not entirely stable guy who lacks anyone who could ground him and he's utterly committed to winning at wrestling. There's only a single sketchily-drawn female character, and she remains largely an idea that Stephen holds on to, but a story told from inside Stephen's head was never going to be balanced.
I'm glad to have read this book, even though I was not always happy while I was reading it. I really, really dislike snot and there was a lot of it in this book. But Gabe Habash shows promise and I'll be interested in at least see what he does next.
schray32's review against another edition
4.0
This is unlike anything else I have read and for some reason I really liked this book about wrestling. Unreliable narrator makes you really not know what is going on and I am still not 100% on what happened but I love that it is so unique. Oddball Tournament of Books pick that I certainly would have never picked up on my own.
jempz's review against another edition
4.0
Surreal, intriguing, confusing. This book delivered on what I was looking for — someone obsessed with achieving greatness at the cost of everything else. His insanity/madness seems to come and go in waves. It made me wonder about the cause. Was it trauma-induced — emotional or physical? Is it neurological? There were hints sprinkled around in the book, but nothing obvious. Many times I wondered what is real and what is just the skewed perspective of the narrator?
Anyway, it kept me hooked and there were points of genuine humor. Overall, I enjoyed it.
Anyway, it kept me hooked and there were points of genuine humor. Overall, I enjoyed it.
meghan111's review against another edition
5.0
If you like novels with a single strong character voice, check out Stephen Florida. Stephen is a college student in North Dakota singularly focused on his wrestling career. As a senior, it's his last chance to win the 133 championship, and his drive is enormous and all-encompassing. He's also isolated and suffering from mental health problems. Reminded me of the novels of Teddy Wayne and [b: The Silver Linings Playbook.] Great writing: haunting passages about the hallucinatory frogman and the isolated North Dakota landscape, and also crystal clear blow-by-blow descriptions of wrestling from Stephen's perspective, using insider terms without much explanation but also keeping the reader aware of what's going on, a real feat.
adam_armstrong_yu's review against another edition
5.0
An unsettling book that feels like an organ in your hands, with an insidious pulse beating through its pages, rippling between the covers, shooting up the spine that sutures the pages together. What starts out as one character's descent into winning at all costs morphs into a terrifying meditation on grief and the manners in which we attempt to heal or destroy ourselves. A story about harnessing the will to live, learning to move forward with a life you don't feel in control of, ending one chapter and starting another, yet knowing there are things that we'll never be rid of, not fully. This unnerving book throttled me and did not let up until the end.
kybrz's review against another edition
4.0
Everyone's favorite weirdo. Gabe Habash deserves all the credit one can muster, this book should have been deeply, deeply unpleasant, but our pal Stephen/Steven is so damn compelling that its merely unpleasant, and riveting.
kteddycurr's review against another edition
4.0
Why did Habash have to go and spell out the book's main message in the second-to-last paragraph?!
pearloz's review against another edition
5.0
Oh, Stephen Florida, Stephen Florida, what is happening to your mind? I lived inside this mind for 300ish pages and even I don't know. This was frankly fascinating, a case study, a character study of a vaguely insane, determined and single-minded college wrestler.
He must be lost, right? Like, he's been a wrestler since high school, junior high maybe? And these are the last matches of his life--he can't make a professional career out of it--his studies are clearly a distraction to him--
"There are textbooks for these classes. I couldn’t believe it! Can I be expected to buy all of them, let alone read all of them? Class is a hobby. They cut you all this slack, they keep cutting it year after year. This walking back and forth to buildings, remembering facts and opinions temporarily just to spit them back out and forget forever, it’s what passes for occupation until a match."
This is the kind of mentality you expect from a football, basketball, hockey, even golf or soccer players--someone who could make a profession from this. I think Stephen knows he can't, knows he's at the end of the line, and he hasn't planned for anything else.
So, there's that. He displays a lot of weird, aggressive behavior (pees on other people, on their stuff, buying the gun then throwing it in the lake, his indecision with the journal, stalking the Jazz professor), all without a genuine or even explicit purpose. He is all over the place. I wonder if the sport itself has a role in this: you're training your mind and body every free moment to be aggressive, pin the other person or to escape from their grasp. But these matches are condensed to a few minutes at a time, every week or every other week, what do you do with that energy, with that aggression when you're not actively engaged with the sport?
Plus, his parents are dead, his grandmother is dead. He's not using his real name. This poor kid.
Then there are his...visions? Hallucinations? What are they? The darkness that consumes the gym at the end, the Frogman, was his aunt real?
Also, his forced, to-the-brink celibacy is weird.
I'm curious what he's going to do after this. And, was that Mary Beth at the end?
Also, is he the criminal? I mean, the rapist apparently committed suicide. What about the girl that was shot? Does he have a split personality...the first two sentences of the book, "My mother had two placentas and I was living off both of them. I was supposed to be a twin." Maybe he still is. In his...MIIIIIIINDDDD: https://media3.giphy.com/media/xT0xeJpnrWC4XWblEk/giphy.gif
He must be lost, right? Like, he's been a wrestler since high school, junior high maybe? And these are the last matches of his life--he can't make a professional career out of it--his studies are clearly a distraction to him--
"There are textbooks for these classes. I couldn’t believe it! Can I be expected to buy all of them, let alone read all of them? Class is a hobby. They cut you all this slack, they keep cutting it year after year. This walking back and forth to buildings, remembering facts and opinions temporarily just to spit them back out and forget forever, it’s what passes for occupation until a match."
This is the kind of mentality you expect from a football, basketball, hockey, even golf or soccer players--someone who could make a profession from this. I think Stephen knows he can't, knows he's at the end of the line, and he hasn't planned for anything else.
So, there's that. He displays a lot of weird, aggressive behavior (pees on other people, on their stuff, buying the gun then throwing it in the lake, his indecision with the journal, stalking the Jazz professor), all without a genuine or even explicit purpose. He is all over the place. I wonder if the sport itself has a role in this: you're training your mind and body every free moment to be aggressive, pin the other person or to escape from their grasp. But these matches are condensed to a few minutes at a time, every week or every other week, what do you do with that energy, with that aggression when you're not actively engaged with the sport?
Plus, his parents are dead, his grandmother is dead. He's not using his real name. This poor kid.
Then there are his...visions? Hallucinations? What are they? The darkness that consumes the gym at the end, the Frogman, was his aunt real?
Also, his forced, to-the-brink celibacy is weird.
I'm curious what he's going to do after this. And, was that Mary Beth at the end?
Also, is he the criminal? I mean, the rapist apparently committed suicide. What about the girl that was shot? Does he have a split personality...the first two sentences of the book, "My mother had two placentas and I was living off both of them. I was supposed to be a twin." Maybe he still is. In his...MIIIIIIINDDDD: https://media3.giphy.com/media/xT0xeJpnrWC4XWblEk/giphy.gif
bennyandthejets420's review against another edition
5.0
Just gonna make a few quick points here:
1) Habash lists Roberto Bolaño as a big influence in the back of the book (appearing once in an answer to "What Are Your Favorite Authors?" and again in Habah recommending 2666). I think the influence of Bolaño is important here because it shows how Habash learned to make the first person voice of Stephen Florida so personable, creepy, and varied in organization (long chunks of narration, quick one sentence paragraphs, long breathless sentences). It's wonderful and feels like Habash is drawing from Bolaño without aping him. Habash also takes a trick from Bolaño's book by listing information only the narrator finds interesting. (In Bolaño's The Third Reich its moves for a game the character is obsessed with and the reader knows nothing about and here its anything from the names of all the wrestlers he's lost to weird loops of nonsense text that feel like Florida's mind unspooling in way that distantly recalls some of Samuel Beckett. Come to think of it The Third Reich seems like a closer fit to this book than 2666. Both books deal with narrators losing grip on reality through singular obsession and competition in a closed environment. For The Third Reich its somebody who plays war games on vacation in a tiny hotel).
2) The horror/weirdness in this book works best when the reader gets to imagine what they think is about to happen, which leaves the reader constantly on the edge of their seat. Its a great trick I think to keep us on the tightrope between disgust and attraction and I think Habash walks the line here with Florida here so I never feel entirely lost at some of the genuinely repellent things he does in the pursuit of winning. In the end, you're still pulling for Florida even though we could easily write the character off.
3) For some reason, my favorite part was at the oil rig where I think Habash pulls a trick out of Cormac McCarthy where Florida's isolation/loneliness matches the exterior natural landscape outside his head and into the surrounding area. It's a great trick where a character's POV is suggested to be All There Is: outside, in the Real World: it's turtles all the way down, etc. The cold houses in the cold landscape outside the rig, the giant of the rig where faceless people work. . . all of it comes across with the kind of chill of Florida realizing what that kind of life would be like. It's the kind of chill in writing I love to get. Habash isn't from North Dakota and while he runs the risk of fetishizing the kind of landscape/people of the Midwest (the great Flyover) I think this passage rings true to the book's themes of loneliness and mental isolation.
4) Finally, the wrestling. Wow! I wrestled for one year in high school (went 3-3 but 2 of those were draws haha) and I think the loneliness and personal quest for glory/greatness/achievement were captured very well here. Also the great beauty of wrestling as a one-on-one sport where people develop singular ways of moving themselves around the mat. And the thrill of competition.
Ultimately, I think this is an excellent sports book which uses some of the techniques of modern narrative writing to excellent poetic and artistic effect. Not to be missed.
1) Habash lists Roberto Bolaño as a big influence in the back of the book (appearing once in an answer to "What Are Your Favorite Authors?" and again in Habah recommending 2666). I think the influence of Bolaño is important here because it shows how Habash learned to make the first person voice of Stephen Florida so personable, creepy, and varied in organization (long chunks of narration, quick one sentence paragraphs, long breathless sentences). It's wonderful and feels like Habash is drawing from Bolaño without aping him. Habash also takes a trick from Bolaño's book by listing information only the narrator finds interesting. (In Bolaño's The Third Reich its moves for a game the character is obsessed with and the reader knows nothing about and here its anything from the names of all the wrestlers he's lost to weird loops of nonsense text that feel like Florida's mind unspooling in way that distantly recalls some of Samuel Beckett. Come to think of it The Third Reich seems like a closer fit to this book than 2666. Both books deal with narrators losing grip on reality through singular obsession and competition in a closed environment. For The Third Reich its somebody who plays war games on vacation in a tiny hotel).
2) The horror/weirdness in this book works best when the reader gets to imagine what they think is about to happen, which leaves the reader constantly on the edge of their seat. Its a great trick I think to keep us on the tightrope between disgust and attraction and I think Habash walks the line here with Florida here so I never feel entirely lost at some of the genuinely repellent things he does in the pursuit of winning. In the end, you're still pulling for Florida even though we could easily write the character off.
3) For some reason, my favorite part was at the oil rig where I think Habash pulls a trick out of Cormac McCarthy where Florida's isolation/loneliness matches the exterior natural landscape outside his head and into the surrounding area. It's a great trick where a character's POV is suggested to be All There Is: outside, in the Real World: it's turtles all the way down, etc. The cold houses in the cold landscape outside the rig, the giant of the rig where faceless people work. . . all of it comes across with the kind of chill of Florida realizing what that kind of life would be like. It's the kind of chill in writing I love to get. Habash isn't from North Dakota and while he runs the risk of fetishizing the kind of landscape/people of the Midwest (the great Flyover) I think this passage rings true to the book's themes of loneliness and mental isolation.
4) Finally, the wrestling. Wow! I wrestled for one year in high school (went 3-3 but 2 of those were draws haha) and I think the loneliness and personal quest for glory/greatness/achievement were captured very well here. Also the great beauty of wrestling as a one-on-one sport where people develop singular ways of moving themselves around the mat. And the thrill of competition.
Ultimately, I think this is an excellent sports book which uses some of the techniques of modern narrative writing to excellent poetic and artistic effect. Not to be missed.