Customer Reviews

The Beggars' Shore

5 star:		(4)
4 star:		(0)
3 star:		(3)
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1 star:		(0)

 

 

I stumbled across this book at a friends house and just started leafing through it but pretty soon had to stop everything and read it cover to cover. It's the story of a runaway kid escaped from religious cult. He falls in with Uptown Chicago disenfranchised types; hookers, con men, and other lost souls and unblinkingly sees the underbelly of the world. The writing is clean and cuts right through, like a surgical knife. This is the kind of book that becomes part of your personal emotional repertoire.

Zak Mucha fills a gap in American (and even moreso, Chicago)literature. His starkly poetic realism forces the reader is feel the dismal urban world of his characters through their skin. We smell what they smell, plot what they plot, and recoil from the pain they feel. All this, and not a drop of sentimentality. It's the kind of approach one usually only is exposed to through certain foreign films, directed by mavericks not yet corrupted by the mandatory safeness of contemporary art. An excellent book, written by an exciting new author.

BEGGAR'S SHORE is not just a remarkable first novel it's a remarkable novel period. Reminescent of James T. Farrell and Nelson Algren, Mr. Mucha has captured the emotional vacancy and the desperation of Chicago's lesser known environs and their inhabitants. A very special achievment. Buy it. Read it. You won't be dissapointed.

I read this book the first time a couple of years back because it was published by Andrew Vachss and I thought that must make it good but what a tough time they're going to have. But the book was good, is good, is very good. A great, earth scorching, street level romp through Uptown Chicago. I picked this book up again recently, it's still great. I can't think of any book I've ever read quite like it.

I know this place. Mucha's evocation of Chicago's Uptown is as well drawn as the neighborhoods of Sinclair and Dreiser, but more powerful due to the contemporary setting. This novel is all grey and olive drab. The only other color I saw as I was reading was the dirty auburn of unwashed, matted hair. Nonetheless, Mucha exploits a limited palette with Rembrandtian glory, painting a full and yet curiously stark picture of a whole community on the edge, and one lost adolescent's struggle not to fall off. A controlled, evenly paced brood for this first-time novelist.

I loved the backdrop of the novel, Chicago's tough Uptown neighborhood, and a lot of the hard-nosed adventures of the protagonist, but ultimately this book strays too far from the focus too often. The end of the book didn't have anything to do with the plight of the main character, hmmmm...Another annoying thing is that the author seems to be unintentionally preaching or being constantly moralistic throughout the book, somehow even the descriptions of objects seem to be invested with this preachiness.

You'll like the writing style and storytelling if you like Nelson Algren or other hard-nosed novelists (that's what I like). As for this book, it's good but it doesn't DELIVER the goods.

...or Zak Mucha's words that make this book.There is something coming through heart,soul,blood,guts whatever.It makes the well tread plot and 3 chord delivery seem new and different.Either Zak Mucha is a good writer or this is a good book but I don't think it is both.