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Requiem for a Dream: A Novel |  | Author: Hubert Selby Jr.
Publisher: Da Capo Press
Category: Book
List Price: $15.95
Buy Used: $3.49
as of 9/8/2010 03:56 PDT details
You Save: $12.46 (78%)
Seller: Just in Time Books
Rating:  89 reviews
Sales Rank: 30040
Media: Paperback
Edition: Later printing
Pages: 288
Number Of Items: 1
Shipping Weight (lbs): 0.6
Dimensions (in): 8.2 x 5.5 x 0.8
ISBN: 1560252480
Dewey Decimal Number: 813.54
EAN: 9781560252481
ASIN: 1560252480
Publication Date: August 15, 2000
Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days
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| Features:
| • | ISBN13: 9781560252481 | | • | Condition: New | | • | Notes: BUY WITH CONFIDENCE, Over one million books sold! 98% Positive feedback. Compare our books, prices and service to the competition. 100% Satisfaction Guaranteed |
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| Editorial Reviews:
Product Description
In this searing novel first published in 1978, two young hoods, Harry and Tyrone, and a girlfriend fantasize about scoring a pound of heroin and getting rich. But their heroin habit gets the better of them, and Harry's mother's addiction to diet pills lands her in a state mental hospital.
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| Customer Reviews:
Showing reviews 1-5 of 89
love this book July 16, 2010
Liz S
I loved this book. Last exit to brooklynn wasn't my favorite (it was a bit too violent) but I really loved this book. Hubert selby has the most interesting writing style. I also recommend to movie.
A MUST READ FOR FANS OF THE FILM March 22, 2010
Hello (New York)
Being a Fan of the film I decided to buy the book. I loved it and could not put it down. Overall I know the book came out first but if you seen the film you will have the images of the actors in your head while reading and for me that was a good thing. They left a few things out of the film from the book but you can tell why they did that. It was like having a directors cut of the movie. A+ all the way.
my requiem January 1, 2010
MATTHEW (New Providence, NJ USA)
What a fantastic book. I must have read it 5 times by now. It just flows. The narrative is dead on. It has feelings. You can feel what the characters are feeling by reading this. I have never been this excited about a book. It got me into reading again.
Interesting book, different than the movie. October 15, 2009
Jamie (Maryland)
0 out of 1 found this review helpful
I watched the movie before reading the book and found that they left some scenes out of the book that I found entertaining in the movie. But nonetheless the book was great. The language used can be hard to follow but after the first few pages I got the hang of it. It was a fun read.
Deeply compassionate but horrifyingly bleak September 1, 2009
Emera (-)
Requiem for a Dream charts a few, terrible months in the lives of a small circle of friends and family in New York in the 1970's, all of whom are led into addiction by their own hopes for fulfillment and wholeness. Harry Goldfarb, his friend Tyrone C. Love, and his intelligent, artistic girlfriend Marion dream of making it big by selling heroin, only to become paralyzed by apathy, self-loathing, and dependence on the drugs that once seemed to be their ticket to success. Meanwhile, Harry's lonely, widowed mother Sara comforts herself with chocolate and endless television. When a chance phone call seems to promise her an appearance on one of her beloved television shows, she becomes reinvigorated by the conviction that she must lose weight, precipitating an obsessive cycle of dependence on diet pills.
Requiem for a Dream is one of the most grueling, brutal films I've seen, and for this reason I found myself reluctant to break into the novel. Once you begin, however, you feel a sense of commitment to the characters, an obligation to hear their stories out and follow them to the end, despite the impending sense of doom that pervades the novel from the very beginning.
Selby writes no quotation marks or apostrophes, few commas, and fewer paragraph breaks, so that different characters' perspectives rush together in a margin-to-margin stream of thoughts and conversation. It took me a while to accustom myself to this packed flow, but once I did, I found it easy to plug myself into the characters' perspectives each time I picked the book up again. I really appreciated how effectively Selby was able to distinguish characters' voices by their speech patterns and accents, and how his style communicated their rapid-fire, desperate dialogue.
I like that the narration is perceptive and unsparing in its observation, but does not judge. The psychology of addiction is conveyed frighteningly well; you can see how easy it can become to substitute chemical satisfaction when real happiness and wholeness seem ungraspable. I was a little warier of how Selby treats Mrs. Goldfarb's eventual fate, because I don't know how realistic it is, but it is an effectively dramatic representation of how the elderly, in particular, can become victims of the medical system and societal neglect.
I did have one minor complaint about the book, in that I was troubled that the young female characters (Marion, Tyrone's girlfriend Alice) often seemed to exist in order to be beautiful and provide sex for their boyfriends. However, because Marion and Sara were otherwise fully-developed voices and characters, I was satisfied overall by Selby's treatment of the female characters.
As some have noted, Harry, Marion, and Tyrone's story is a more conventional narrative of drug dependence, but the inclusion of Sara's story broadens the book's focus. The book at its most basic level is not about drug addiction, but about the danger of devoting oneself entirely to false dreams. Sara is herself aware of this, but cannot escape the trap that she creates for herself in her desperation. As she tells Harry in one of the book's most heartbreaking scenes, she knows that it's not really about her appearing on television in a red dress and gold shoes, but about the promise of renewed youth and hopes, the fulfillment of her need to feel special and loved again. For this reason, I think it would be really interesting to read Requiem in tandem with The Great Gatsby: both are books about the failure and innate falsity of the American Dream. Overall, Requiem is tightly constructed and brilliantly and compassionately observed. It also horrifying and bleak and definitely not for everyone, and I would hesitate to even call it rewarding, except in one major respect: the human compassion that it displays and inspires.
Showing reviews 1-5 of 89
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