Customer Reviews

The Apprentice: A Novel

5 star:		(12)
4 star:		(8)
3 star:		(3)
2 star:		(4)
1 star:		(22)

 

 

Well, it had potential. (And great cover art.) But, all in all,I'm really sorry I read this book. The writing was very elegant insome places and full of eloquence and all, but at times it just seemedawkward and too blunt. It made me uncomfortable. Heck, the whole bookmade me uncomfortable. I mean, it started out great with all thesepeople stranded at a snow-bound inn and the innkeeper away with onlyhis apprentice in charge. And then there was that great chase throughthe snow and the murder and all... But after that... ugh. Sometimes itwas just painful, physically painful, to read. It all started with theextremely bizarre sexual situations. I still shudder to think aboutsome of the stuff described in that book... And as if that wasn't badenough, the author strings you along, drowning you in suspense,throughout the entire book, making you wonder who killed the man thefirst night and why, and then the end doesn't even explain it! Don'tget me wrong, the ending tries to explain it, real hard, but itdoesn't make sense. You find yourself sitting there, scratching yourhead, and going, "Wha?" I don't think the author even gave areason for some of the stuff. And his explanation of what happened tothe girl? It was weak. The only way I knew what was going on wasbecause I came here and read some of the reviews! None of it madesense. I still have unanswered questions about this book. The lovescenes are another thing. They were ok, I guess, better than some ofthe other scenes, but they were always so awkward anduncomfortable. One particular scene between the Apprentice and thegirl was especially unpleasant. (That's sad, too, because I think theauthor was shooting for passionate there...) I feel sorry for anyonewho paid full price for this book. It has a great plot with some greatcharacters. It's got some wonderfully suspenseful moments and thosemidnight chases through the snow are fabulous, but in the end you findyourself confused, repulsed, and decensitised to any and all acts ofrape. Get it at the library if you must. And don't say I didn't warnyou.

Perhaps I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby thought that by setting his novel in a snowbound inn in northern Honshu, a century ago, his readers would swear that the lavish dollops of voyeurism, bestiality, paedophilia, and corpse-robbery advance the plot. Well, there is no plot. There's a blizzard blanketing a Japanese country inn, a young man called only "the apprentice" who's helping run the joint in the absence of the proprietor, and an overflow of stranded travelers bunking down in tight quarters. The natural hot spring located within the inn means that the nubile and pre-nubile girls can shuck their matted furs so that The Apprentice has something more interesting to look at than fat middle-aged ladies and itinerant "lacquer tappers" with brownish teeth. Libby's writing would be pleasingly spare if it said anything, but the descriptions of the inn, the snow, the dead bodies, and so forth provide meager padding between the sex scenes.

The hair-raisingly prurient parts of this book have been excerpted extensively elsewhere, so I'll not repeat them. However, Libby appears more than approving of the explicit education that the very young girls in "The Apprentice" receive. Not in typical school subjects, no, but from instructors whose teaching tools include caged bears (yes, bears, trained to couple with children), wooden dildos, and incestuous relatives who painstakingly instruct little girls to "satisfy many men in a night."

The fictional output of such Republican luminaries as Bill O'Reilly, Newt Gingrich, and I. Lewis Libby underscore the truth of the proverb, "Those who really have it ["it" meaning sexual prowess] don't talk about it." Some men, such as Libby and Neil Bush, have labored under the delusion that any sexual peccadilloes taking place in Asia will stay in Asia. "The Apprentice" neatly lays that myth to rest. Unless you really go for this kind of stuff, I wouldn't recommend wasting hundreds of dollars on one of the few copies available.

I paid $4 plus surface-mail shipping, but the price has skyrocketed since Libby was indicted on five counts by special prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald, and resigned from Vice President Cheney's office. Gee, lucky me.

Thank god this book is out of print. I lived in Northern Japan. I took the time to learn the language and the culture. The mystery of this book was not the murder that took place in the middle of a snow storm it was that it was published despite a weak plot and even weaker characterization. Stick with what you know, Mr. Lewis. Writing novels and Japan are not it!

I couldn't even get through this whole book, it was just... so... bad...
Really it was just Lewis Libby writing his own masturbation material, no joke. I stopped reading when he talked, among other things, about bears having sex with ten year old girls.
Beyond being constantly creepy, it's just really poorly written and completely pointless. Don't waste your time, money, etc.

The chief of staff decided to write a book. He wanted to make it mysterious. He decided a good way to do that would be to have lots of characters but only give names to very few of them. He thought that if the reader knew very little about any of them, and had no understanding of their motives, that it would add to the mystery. He felt the best way to tell his story would be in stilted, wooden sentences. And to top it all off, to really set a mysterious mood, he threw in snow. Lots and lots and lots of snow.

My copy is 239 pages long. By page 200 I had finally reached a point where I was somewhat interested in what would happen to the main characters. At page 225 the reader starts getting some information that manages to make a little sense of the amorphous mess that precedes it. But the final conclusion between the two main characters is still very ambiguous.

If Scooter is very fortunate, when President Bush pardons him for the crimes for which he has been indicted, he will also pardon him for his crimes against literature. If we are very fortunate, Scooter will then be hired by a lobbying firm and he will be too busy to write any more novels.

You already know that this guy is a criminal who has tried to get American foreign service officers killed, but did you know how sick this guy is? Read this from the Washington Post:


In literary style, Libby's guilt is an open-&-smut case

...A few days later, Vice President Cheney's chief of staff sent me an inscribed copy of "The Apprentice," his 1996 novel of early 20th-century Japan. I never got past the second page.

Luckily, in the latest New Yorker, Lauren Collins summarizes the novel's sex scenes.

"The main female character, Yukiko, draws hair on the 'mound' of a little girl," Collins reports. "The brothers of a dead samurai have sex with his daughter."

Meanwhile, "certain passages can better be described as reminiscent of Penthouse Forum," Collins writes. "Other sex scenes are less conventional."

Collins quotes from the indicted aide's novel: "At age 10 the madam put the child in a cage with a bear trained to couple with young girls so the girls would be frigid and not fall in love with their patrons. They fed her through the bars and aroused the bear with a stick when it seemed to lose interest."

British Literary Review editor Nancy Sladek, who oversees a Bad Sex fiction writing contest, tells Collins: "That's a bit depraved, isn't it, this kind of thing about bears and young girls?" Never mind the passage concerning sex with a deer.


Children and animals as sex objects? Unless you want your money to go to a perverted traitor to our country, DO NOT BUY THIS BOOK.

Scooter, we will miss you behind the big granite walls, but hopefully now that you have given up your government job for a future career as a - well, let's not go into that just now. Just keep in mind that the important thing now is that you can focus on your best skill: developing ground-breaking, tawdry fiction.

Admittedly, there is not much new under the sun. We've seen and heard so much in this informational age. The first atomic bomb -yes, that was plowing new ground, as indeed man's first steps on the moon. But in "The Apprentice," Scooter has moved on toward new horizons and, thanks to his vivid mind, given us something truly new - lascivious bears with a yin for young girls, thus rendering them frigid. Now, admit it, you will not find that plot line in any other volume you have crossed. My hat's off to you Scooter. You have taken the written word to a new low point. Gutenberg would be proud.

Bears and little girls. Yes, you will find prison fun. Do write!

This reminded me of those romance novels where a computer program takes conventional plotting and the "author" applies it to an exotic setting and characters and spits out a story. For more complex, interesting characters read Snow Falling on Cedars or Amy Tan.

I didn't realize it was the politician Lewis Libby at first, I just knew I recognized the name, and so I borrowed this book. Even though my friend warned me she thought it was stupid. I started reading it then, because I was interested in seeing how he writes. He's a politician, he's educated, what sort of book will he come out with?
Oh, this is so bad, though! Real crap! I couldn't get through the entire book and that almost never happens. I didn't find the "prose" and the "almost poetic" that has been described in another comment. It was just garbage. I've taken numerous English and writing classes, but anyone can see it's just bad writing.
Also, not to bring politics into this, but I can't help but wonder what some of the religious people who support Republicans because of "moral values" would think of this book. Some of it is pretty bizarre. The next time the topic of censorship or gratuitous porn that degrades women comes up, I will definitely be bringing up some of the more "interesting" scenes in this book.

Wow, who would have thought that clean living, family values man Scooter Libby was capable of writing such filth...included in this peice of absolute crapola is a ten year old girl being caged with a bear...inorder for her to be the animal's sexual plaything. Depraved...and terrible writing to boot.