Entered another time in a place close to home

books:


	• Last Exit to Brooklyn (An Evergreen Book) Hubert Selby Grove Press, 1994 - 320 pages average customer review:based on 61 reviews view larger image
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highly recommended

Hubert Selby is Bukowski with talent...

Selby is a talented fiction writer. Even in the lackluster stuff, that talent shines through. Unfortunately, the lackluster stuff is the majority of the book, viz., "The Strike", "The Queen is Dead", "Another Day, Another Dollar", and "And Baby Makes Three." There is one good story--actually a series of interweaving character vignettes--called "Landsend", and one story that I'll probably never forget: "Tralala." The latter is remarkable: Selby creates a completely unsympathetic character, who suffers the apotheosis of human degradation...and becomes sympathetic in a transcendent way. There is no volte-face, there is no redemption, but there is the underlying humanity--good, bad, evil, whatever--that is undeserving of such a fate.

I recommend the book on the basis of this one story--only about twenty pages. Skip the rest and you won't be missing much--a lot of faggotry and proletarian filler.

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RAW

This thing is relentless. You think you can't possibly empathize with these people. You can't possibly feel for them. These aren't your 'Titanic' poor; people who don't have any money, but gosh, they truly know how to live life. These aren't those cliche 1-dimensional cut-outs that move like props along an obvious arc. These people are the gutter.

And you start reading and from the beginning you think these people are disgusting and depraved and unredeemable. But as you read on, Selby reveals their humanity and vulnerability. Somehow you start to relate and see how their lives - though so entirely disconnected and different from yours - are driven by the same needs and forces that yours is. To look down upon these people is to trivialize life itself.

Overall, this is a raw, yet very beautiful, glimpse of life. Selby's gift is compassion. This is one of the best things I've ever read.

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First Time Hubert Selby Jr. reader here

I can only imagine how shocking this book looked when it was first written. It still appears to be shocking to me now, 50-some years after its creation. Yet, when you take away all the filth, gang rapes and knife fights descriptions, there's little left. That's not to say that there's no talent on display here, its just that its buried under descriptions of filth and degradation. While its not a complete throwaway/garbage, its not a claimed masterpiece either, at least in my opinion.
Still, a lot can forgiven when you know that this was his debut novel. One can only hope that his subsequent works were more focused than "Last Exit".

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Entered another time in a place close to home

I had always heard people speak of Selby's, "Last Exit to Brooklyn", yet it was not until recently that I picked it up. This novel takes you to another time, although not another world. The places Selby speaks of are real and the people could be the guy next to you on the subway. Perhaps it is the language used that makes this novel have the ability to transform the world around you. You are taken into the everyday lives of working-class individuals, and are shown a side of people that most of us will never see. A side that people like to keep hidden to themselves, for if anyone knew what they were really like, the consequences could be fatal. It makes you wonder what you do alone, that would scare others. What you hide as a human being, from all the rest of us...

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the second-best Selby

Hubert Selby wrote what many readers consider to
be some of the most lyrical prose in twentieth
century America. More coherent than Burroughs,
he sweeps the reader along in a stream of the
urban colloquial language of the 1950's.
He is also a far more pessimistic writer than
Burroughs. His characters spin in a tight downward
spiral to their own destruction. Considerations
of empathy with the characters are beside the
point-the relentless urge to self-destruction
is the center of all these stories.

This combination of a single theme and beautiful
writing could make for a book that's hard to
put down. In fact, the effect is often the opposite.
The constant ugliness makes it hard for a reader
to see a bit of herself in these characters and
in spite of the beauty, the ultimate feeling is
one of repulsion.

It's easy to see why this book attracted so much
attention when first published and it's worth readng
today as a milestone. But to get a better sense of
Selby's power, Requiem for a Dream is the book to read.

--Lynn Hoffman, author of THE NEW SHORT COURSE IN WINE and
the forthcoming novel bang BANG from Kunati Books.ISBN
9781601640005

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reviews: page 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10

The first novel to articulate the rage and pain of life in "the other America," Last Exit to Brooklyn is a classic of postwar American writing. Selby's searing portrait of the powerless, the homeless, the dispossessed, is a fiercely and frighteningly apposite today as when it was first published twenty-five years ago.

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