7 of 7 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Wonderful to have this in print, July 8, 2000
By A Customer
This review is from: The Abysmal Brute (Paperback)
If you're reading this, you must, like me be a Jack London fan who is able to enjoy some of his less well known and somewhat flawed work. If so, you'll enjoy _The Abysmal Brute_. It's great to have this in print.
If you're interested in Jack London, you may want to ask your ISP to carry the newsgroup alt.books.jack-london, where we discuss his life, works, and ideas.
Anyone who has read Malamud's _The Natural_ (or seen the movie based on it) has to wonder whether Malamud was thinking of _The Abysmal Brute_. The theme is the same; only the sport is different.
This is one of London's boxing stories (the others are his fine short stories "The Mexican" and "A Piece of Steak," and his novel _The Game_)
I loved the first half of the book. Even though it's silly and unbelievable, Pat Glendon is a memorable character. He's one of Jack London's superheros, a boxer who totally outclasses every other living boxer while reads Browning in his spare time.
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2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Not your average boxing story, October 13, 2006
This review is from: The Abysmal Brute (Paperback)
I'm always happy to see one of Jack London's lesser-known works get plucked from obscurity and brought back into print. Originally published in book form in 1913, this short novel tells the story of Young Pat Glendon, a proverbial "babe in the woods" who is brought out of the wilderness to embark on a big-city prizefighting career. London has written boxing tales before, most notably the excellent short story "A Piece of Steak" and the novel "The Game". His style of gritty realism is well-suited to the sport. The detailed, naturalistic descriptions of boxing matches, the people who fight them, and the combat strategy involved really makes you feel like you're there in the ring with the contenders. In this book, the vivid realism is somewhat counteracted by the fact that London makes his hero into such a superman that his perfection defies believability. On the other hand, with a little updating this book could easily be turned into a Hollywood movie (where defying believability is commonplace). It's not just another typical underdog-overcomes-adversity-to-win-the-championship type of boxing story. There are some unexpected turns in the plot which are a pleasant surprise. The introductory essay by Michael Oriard puts the book into historical context, and gives the reader a good picture of the boxing world of a hundred years ago. Oriard also addresses the issue of whether or not London was a racist, and the role of race in boxing at the turn of the century.
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1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Just A Little Too Good, January 27, 2011
I am very grateful to the publisher, Kaitlin Press, for the re-release of this nearly forgotten but impressive story. As an older man, reading the first two-thirds of this work was every bit as exciting as reading Jack London's "Call of the Wild" when I was a 12-year-old boy. Here, the reader will find Jack London the storyteller, pure, vital and riveting, not Jack London the literary artist, as demonstrated in his melancholic novel, "Martin Eden." This is the story of an Irish prize-fighter and his millionairess lover. The writing is so clear, so graphic, it should have been made into a movie.
There's a wonderful kind of revenge plot, too, which occurs towards the end, that in a distant way is reminiscent of "The Count of Monte Cristo." Pat Glendon, the "abysmal brute" prize fighter, gives a speech in the ring at the near-end of the story that reminded this reader of Galt's speech in "Atlas Shrugged" by Ayn Rand. But it was with this speech, ironically, that I found Pat Glendon to be just a little too good to be believable. Not only is he a healthy specimen of male strength, a naturalist, a hunter and fisher, and a lover of poetry, to say nothing of his instinctive skill at fighting, he simply happens to be a natural statesman as well, a leader, too. I wish that I could have felt like the crowd that he sways at the conclusion of this story, but, alas, I felt Jack London adding just a touch too much of the fairy-tale in his characterization. of this magnificent god of a man.
There were also a couple of infelicitous phrasings I found strange. Several times London refers to "the machine," sometimes meaning the human body as in "..the crowd caught and held his machine," but on page 104, when he and his lover make eye contact and experience the magnetism of opposite sexual attraction, London writes, "He saw into her machine, and gave her another thrill...." Later, in Pat Glendon's speech in the ring to the crowd, London has his main character say at one point, "Tom, Dick, and Harry are three fighters. Dick is the best man. Dick licks Tom.... Harry licks Dick... Tom licks Dick."
These flaws are as nothing compared to the whole story, however.
I would love it, if Jack London, could he be alive today, should write this same story but told from the perspective of a patriotic American and taxpayer who manages to get involved with the members of the Copenhagen Treaty and the G20 Summits such that our hero does to the managers and governors participating in these meetings as well as in the Agenda 21 Agreement what he accomplishes inside and outside the boxing ring at the end of this particular story. That would be a story where Atlas -- or Hercules (whom London compares the boxer to) -- doesn't shrug. It would be a story where payback comes to all those who make huge piles of graft behind the ropes or screen.
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