Customer Reviews

Belmondo Style

5 star:		(10)
4 star:		(3)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(0)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

A friend of mine recommended this book, after the Publishing Triangle Award finalists were announced. I could not put this book down. While there is a gay theme that runs through this engrossing novel, it is most poignantly a coming of age story and the very delicate relationship between a father and son. Berlin doesn't seem to feel the need to make his characters likable so the effect is that they are more realistic, and their love for each other that much more real. I would never typically say this, but this book would make a great movie! I will definitely be reading this writer's other books.

From the first page, I found Belmondo completely engrossing and disturbing. It was fascinating to see the depth of the father character. Although he made his living illegally and was in that sense immoral, he demonstrated a strong sense of responsibility as a parent. He played by his own highly romanticized version of the rules.

The disturbing aspect came from the knowledge that their lives were clearly on a steep decline. This made me unable to stop turning the page and at the same time wanting to stop turning the page. Berlin has a knack for this. I was afraid to find out what was going to happen to the characters in Headlock as well.

BELMONDO STYLE is an accomplished novel of a young teen grappling with family issues and the fact that he thinks he's gay. Like many modern novels the characters are more cartoon-y than anything in real life and few readers will actually believe the "reveal" about what Jared Chiziver does for a living, for it was invented solely to make a movie out of it. I say that "few readers will care" because Adam Berlin, despite himself, is a poet of New York, like a modern day Lorca, and can make you read about and care about people far distant from oneself. "The World Trade center had once broken the view, holding solid, looking like two steel pillars thrust into Manhattan to keep it from floating away, but they were gone. The horizon became both more open and less open and my father continued to meet women."

He is a wonderful writer. The scene where the boy, Ben, meets another teen boy and has sex with him on the street is extremely powerful and one of the sexiest scenes of its kind ever written. But like the old days, their moment of ardor is punished by a terribly brutal beating and from this point on, the book becomes a sort of male version of the old rape revenge plot of 70s horror movies. Reading what happens to poor Ben, and then reading what Jared does to Ben's attacker, leaves the reader feeling sick in an almost physical way. No male reader can read those scenes without feeling that he's been punched in the balls. And still we read on, hypnotized, like cats somnolent in the heat of Adam Berlin's wonderful prose style.

Adam Berlin's second novel expands on themes explored so well in Headlock, his debut: the lengths and depths to which family members will go for one another; the boundaries they will cross; the sometimes devastating results of going too far. Sixteen-year-old Ben Chiziver and his father, Jared, form the close-knit family unit here: the son a good student, a promising track star, and the book's all-too-wise-narrator; the devoted dad a ladies' man and pickpocket who pays the bills by "plowing fields of pedestrians, separating wheat from chaff, money from man."
Jared is an aficionado of foreign films, especially of Breathless, from which he's shaped an image of himself in homage to Jean Paul Belmondo. Jared has "learned his moves from the movies," liking "simple movies the best, movies based on character and not plot." Berlin plays on this preference for character development in the early chapters of the book, writing nuanced dialogue and introspective interior monologues for Ben, and introducing Anna Partager, the one woman who will change the father/son dynamic. But when the threesome is forced to flee Manhattan after Jared avenges a vicious attack on his son, Berlin shifts into cinematic overdrive. The technique works equally well to elicit sympathy for Jared, who just can't operate in any "style" other than Belmondo's, and for Ben, who imagines the events that change his life until they become "as vivid as real memory, as vivid as a movie scene seen over and over again."
Berlin uses his considerable talents to understate rather than overemphasize, to write about violence in brilliantly executed spare prose, and with that to convey both emotional depth and high-stakes drama.

This book is a movie. It is written with the wit of a screenplay and the pace of a well constructed scenario. But this book is also a real book and Berlin style is one of the finest. Adam Berlin manages to create highly fictional characters who as you read on become family to you as they are family to each others. As in Headlock, Berlin's first novel, the characters are sliding towards a point of no return that readers can only imagine will be violent but will keep them reading. Berlin excels particularly in his description of the relationships between characters: Jared and Ben, father and son; Ben and Michael, teen-age lovers; Jared and Anna, the player and the 'one'. Berlin explores the father son relationship over several chapters and makes us wonder about the immorality of this dedicated parent; but he chooses to immortalize Ben and Michael encounter in a steaming scene by the Hudson River on a snowy night that will leave readers, males and females, wanting for more. Jared and Anna come to life as a couple in the 'orange dance' but never let go of Ben:"My father tossed me the orange they'd won with. It had been squeezed soft. I lifted the orange to my nose to breathe in the sweet scent. The grove from where it had been picked was still inside. That connection remained."

Belmondo Style and Headlock are two must read. I cannot wait for Berlin's 3rd novel to be published!

I was happy to see that Belmondo Style is a finalist for The Publishing Triangle's 2005 Fiction Award. I read Adam Berlin's novel last summer and thought it a powerful book, one that has stayed in my head long after I finished it. An anti-gay hate crime is the catalyst for this moving novel between a live-for-the-moment father and his thoughtful sixteen-year-old son. These are fascinating characters with a bond that breaks easy father/son cliches. I hope the award nomination renews interest in this beautiful, layered novel.

This book reads like a screenplay. It's beautifully written, moves quickly and ends with a bang. The characters are well developed, and you're able to suspend reality just enough to believe the plot lines. While not critical, I recommend watching "Breathless" before reading the book; you will be able to fully appreciate the depth of Berlin's imagery and intensity of the plot. This book stayed in my head for weeks, and I hope some smart Hollywood type makes it into a blockbuster so I can enjoy it in another medium.

This book was a dream to read. I loved it from the very beginning. The father is one sexy man and you want to get to know him better. His son is absolutely lovely and the kiss, oh my lord his first kiss is sweet and was the first time an author made a kiss between gay lovers excited me the same way a kiss between heterosexual characters makes me feel. The trauma and tragedy made me zoom through this book. I loved every minute. The trip to Miami was wonderful and the ending was definitely Belmondo Style! Nice work Adam Berlin!

I enjoyed this second book by Adam Berlin. Many thoughts come to mind as I recall my experience reading this 275-page novel. The writing is always terse, strong, and uncompromising. There is no mincing of words or watered-down descriptions. It is all hard boiled and authentic. The characters are firmly hewn and salt-of-the-earth. And like his first novel, Headlock, there is at least one character that is larger-than-life, whose basic nature is sadly flawed and propelling him inexorably towards a destiny that will either redeem him or destroy him. Yet, until the end, the outcome is unknown, and the path is peppered with the full range of human emotions.

While Belmondo Style has a strong and compelling plot, its central feature is its feeling and attitude. Marginal characters on the fringes of society forced into dangerous situations. "All or nothing" attitudes that result in big wins and big losses. A son torn between love for his father, and realizing that his father is a "Belmondo Style" character, living life to the fullest in spite of the consequences. In some senses true freedom means being free to break the law, breach the trust, and disregard the consequences. Here, a father's need for freedom ultimately conflicts with his love and loyalty to his son.

Powerful descriptions abound in this book. Running at full sprint along the Hudson River, brown and gray tree branches blending into the Manhattan cityscape. The father and his girlfriend entering the "orange" dance competition and swirling to the music. The plot's violent episodes, so riveting and idelibly etched. Finally, in the climactic scene along Duval Street, fiction imitating cinema, yet not imitating it.

This is an excellent book by a masterful writer. I highly recommend it.

I highly recommend this thought provoking book that explores a myriad of complex issues through a simple yet gripping tale of a father and son who face life together. A fast read, rich in vivid descriptions of emotions and actions, the story is one of conflict, confusion and confrontation. Love and indifference, passion and hatred, fear and loyalty, reality and fantasy, right and wrong, revenge and retribution are woven throughout the plot in such a way that the emotions evoked remain long after the final page is read.