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4.5/5Longer review to come, but I must say I really enjoyed this book. More than most, judging by the ratings here on GoodReads. It's moving and funny and odd and exquisitely written. Hell....I may even love this book.First Part of Longer Review 2/10/15Jed Richards seems earnest and forthright and overall a good guy. That's what makes part 2 of this book so devastating as it tracks the mission to Mars, and ultimately the descent into madness by our narrator Col. Richards. Moody, writing as Montr...
AUTHOR WRITES ENTIRE NEW BOOK OVERNIGHT, SAYS HE DOESN'T NEED EDITORSAuthor Rick Moody wrote more than 725 pages last night, completing his novel one hour before his last deadline this morning. Moody heralded the work as a victory for procrastinators everywhere.“This has been a really long time coming,” said Moody. “I’m so glad I could eventually get around to meeting my publisher’s deadline. I totally forgot that was supposed to hit the presses today, so I paused Rock Band, just knocked back ab...
I’ve seen in negative reviews for this book that there are complaints of pointless dialogs and tangents. But I realized early on in Book Two that the author is treating each character and aspect of the story as it’s own little novel. So from the homeless guy who you know is going to be dead in mere seconds because he just disrupted the arm’s resting place, to the retarded boy who will laughingly witness his loving brother’s brutal death, to the history of the founding of a strange and seemingly
In 1955, eight years before Thomas Pynchon's V., and two years after Bellow's The Adventures of Augie March, a young writer by the name of William Gaddis unleashed a nine-hundred and fifty-six page novel upon the scene of mid-twentieth century literature entitled The Recognitions. The novel itself dealt with the curious theme of artistic forgery, and concerned a young artist by the name of Wyatt Gwyon and his Mephistophelean contract with an American art dealer by the name of Recktall Brown. Als...
Wow. What can I say?A novelist who boasts of an ability to distill the entirety of his novels into a sentence of six or seven words who writes an introduction the the size of a novella. An astronaut on a mission to Mars copes with the disintegrating morale and sanity of fellow crew members by writing blog posts with utter candor and something approaching a sort of naivete. A Korean scientist who stores his French wife in a refrigerator whose relationship with his son is strained. The son has dre...
Probably better in concept than in execution, at 700+ pages, there's a lot of room for annoyance in the sometimes precious prose. That said, I found the idea of this novel irresistible, adapting one of the worst SF films ever made (THE CRAWLING HAND) into a rambling postmodern novel set in a (sometimes) comically dystopian near future. Moody dedicates the book to Kurt Vonnegut but the SF here is a little harder wired than Vonnegut's playful speculations. Without giving too much away, the core of...
Rick Moody wrote the book, but he wrote it as Montese Crandall writing a novelization of a remake of a campy 1960’s horror movie. And actually, it’s not one book, but two plus a rather substantial pro-slash-epi logue. If you were to read in the inside jacket of the book, you’d get a description of a murderous, severed arm; a mission to Mars gone horribly awry; and probably something about wit and/ or humor.When I heard about this book about a year ago on the internet, it sounded right up my alle...
Over-indulged and over-written, not as funny as it wants to be, nor as profound as it strives to be. Which is too bad, because nobody writes a book this looooong unless it's in earnest, and Rick Moody, if nothing else, clearly earnestly means it. Was it that no editors were available, or did Moody make a deal with somebody that precluded the ignominy of being edited? By the time something like the 5th character is shocked (shocked, I tell you) to discover that the (not mad enough) scientist is k...
I wasn't too keen on the last third or so of this book. But I loved the story about the dismembered hand so much I'm giving it 5 stars anyway.
You are not prepared for this book. With its multilayered structure, page-long paragraphs and fevered prose, Rick Moody seems to be channeling the late David Foster Wallace, Tom Wolfe and Philip K. Dick, all at the same time. The result is a disquieting novel-within-a-novel that goes there... unafraid to trawl the depths of lunacy and depravity, at least on the printed page. If there isn't at least one scene in The Four Fingers of Death that gets your back up, that's more than a little bit hard
As the spread of stars associated with this book's reviews might indicate, readers seem to be polarized by this farcical, absurdist romp through the near-future--this is a book that either fits the reader like a four-fingered glove, or else one would like to poke out her eyeballs with the missing digit rather than read one more page. I liked it, but that doesn't necessarily mean it's any good.This is a book that's difficult to summarize, and even if one tries, it probably would only diminish any...
I read this in part because of the upcoming conversation I'm moderating with Rick Moody, in part because it sounded interesting, and in part because it fits the "contemporary writers doing dystopia" bender I was on not too long ago. (Although that bender is *so* 2010.) This is a strange, enjoyable book. It's actually more like 3 (or 4) books: there's Montese Crandall's story of how he came to write the novelization of The Four Fingers of Death; there's Book I, which chronicles all the Mars-based...
Rick Moody admits, in his afterword, that he was raised on a steady diet of grade-B sci-fi/horror movies and the novels of Kurt Vonnegut as a young man. This is quite evident in his epic satirical sci-fi novel "The Four Fingers of Death", a surprisingly superb science fiction/horror thriller with some scathingly funny social commentary.The structure of the novel is basically a novel-within-a-novel, a novelization of a 2024 movie entitled "The Four Fingers of Death", which is itself a remake of a...
EDIT: No, you know what? I was wrong. I woke up this morning thinking about this book and realized I missed the fuckin' point. I hope you'll permit this reexamination, as the faults and failings in my initial approach toward the book are those of a certain self-guardedness and this problem is alone mine, and the reconsideration of this book is important to exactly: me, but in the super-wide-set view of all things I would prefer that my tiny little not-even-a-blip is an accurate tiny little not-e...
THE FOUR FINGERS OF DEATH will remind you that storytelling is supposed to be fun. It's supposed to stretch the imagination. It's supposed to make you laugh and cringe and cry and smirk and push yourself forward to find out what happens next.Put simply, I have not had this much fun reading a book -- on nearly every page -- in a long, long time. The second half, especially, feels like a farcical look at contemporary America while the first half has the more gritty suggestion of life during wartim...
I finished Rick Moody's "The Four Fingers of Death" last night, and thank God, because I'm not sure I've ever been so impatient with a book. Look, I love long books. I generally prefer to read long books. I read quickly, and I love to read, so the more time I get to spend with a book, the better. And the description of this book is totally up my alley - a postmodern literary sci-fi novelization of a schlocky monster movie from the 50s? YES PLEASE. And yet it was beyond tedious. He does this thin...
(Reprinted from the Chicago Center for Literature and Photography [cclapcenter.com]. I am the original author of this essay, as well as the owner of CCLaP; it is not being reprinted illegally.)So to understand why I found Rick Moody's newest novel so f-cking deplorable, it's important to understand that buried right in the middle of it is a really great, non-ironic science-fiction novel -- set in 2025, it's about a fully downfalling America trying for one last grab at greatness, by finally launc...
A tale of two books. The story of the Mars mission is the best part of the novel. The rest is too distant and we can't find a character to help us navigate the cavalcade of words and images from Moody. Line by line it's great. As a whole it cannot hold its center.
there’s something uniquely frustrating about reading a book that has so many small moments of beauty and gorgeous empathy only to find them wedged in between monstrous sections of utterly self-indulgent and boring prose that made reading this feel like a chore. I couldn’t bring myself to care about the rest enough not to skim my way through the second half. if it was maybe 500 pages shorter I probably would have hated it way lesstl;dr it starts with “in memory of kurt vonnegut” and does not get
I really wanted to like Four Fingers of Death a lot more than I did. There were stretches of the book that I found myself really enjoying (book one, surprisingly - the most straightforward of the sections), but most of the book had me pressing forward, reading at the edge of the speed at which I can comprehend. I'm actually a big fan of well-executed wordiness. My problem with this book comes in the way the wordiness is carried out. While Pynchon or DeLillo might exhaustively describe an object