Customer Reviews

The Condemned

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This is the best book I've read this year so far. Different from any other book I've ever read. I grew up poor in Blackwell, Oklahoma and the characters in this book remind me of the people I grew up with. The book is written in a minimalist style. The author calls them sentegraphs. He is the only person who writes in this style other than Tao Lin who recently used the technique in his novel EEEEE EEE EEEEE, which hasn't been released yet but which I know about from reading an interview today. The first part of The Condemned, The Warrior, is probably my favorite. But the poem on p. 205 is really good too. There are a lot of typos in the last section of the book but that is okay with me because I make a lot of typos myself. The last few pages of the book, from 294 to 319 are completely blank. But that is good also because I am using those pages for something. It's a secret. The Condemned is a fantastic book. You should buy it.

I read Noah Cicero's The Condemned and I think it's pretty good. It's a fun read. It's beautiful, ugly, inspiring, funny, interesting and at times quite brilliant. I also think that it's not for everybody, but I do believe that a lot of people will like it if they read it. If you like Hubert Selby Jr., Irvine Welsh, and Chuch Palahniuk you should like Noah Cicero's The Condemned. I will also dare to compare The Condemned to Dubliners. It reminded me somewhat of that book;specially the first story The Warrior which is about a crazy stripper. It's a beautiful portrait of a life gone sour. I think if you like crazy things, you will like The Condemned and not because it's crazy, but because it's so honest with itself. I predict Noah Cicero will someday write the new Moby Dick. I guarantee it.

It took me less time to read Cicero's book than it takes to watch a Blockbuster movie. About an hour. It was way cheaper too, since I found it on my friend's bookshelf, placed there by another reader/writer's recommendation. I took the book to the park down the street in Brooklyn and read it sitting alone listening to traffic, and Puerto Rican children playing, waiting for the ice cream man.

The first 100 pages are about the days in a life of a pregnant stripper and the people who interact with her. Her life of drugs and misery is a pornographic train wreck, but a compelling one nonetheless. It gives a glimpse of reality that most people try hard not to acknowledge in, what seems like, the avoidance of some chaotic feeling of dread in the face of disparity.

For people who have not experienced poverty, first or second hand, or a look into the life of 'the real working class' (aside from being serviced by them or not exchanging eye contact on the subway) this book will probably make them feel uncomfortable and maybe even read as vulgar, misogynistic, or asinine in some parts.

To others, like me, coming from a small town, witnessing first hand and learning to respect ways where people survive with tools like drugs, sex, and/or hard work amidst the confusion of Christian conditioning, there's a sad familiarity in identifying with the characters; it chips away defense mechanisms, tempting to make life easier with renderings of denial. (It's good to know who we are in order to become better people as a whole, or individually, which also leads to a better whole.)


The rest of Cicero's novel was just as interesting, but not recommended for people who are only into pop radio, or men who spend too much time comparing the girls they date to their mothers.

This is where people can normailly write words like 'Zeitgeist' and the one that starts with M and is sometimes precluded by one that starts with P. This book avoids having those words written at it. That's one thing about it that makes it good.

With the pace of Celine and incisiveness of Richard Wright, Cicero tears the rusting panels from the human machine and exposes its gristling, oily insides. Wholly without polemic, the swift prose of The Condemned shapes an acute (even brutal) examination of a population shoved to the fringes of history. These stories provide a wide entrance into the living rooms and workspaces of the humans who face the daily assault of life, and as we come to know them through Cicero's pounding sentences, we understand why American writing can no longer be the same.

I would rather read a book by Noah Cicero than a book by Philip Roth, John Updike, Benjamin Kunkel, Zadie Smith, John Banville, Salman Rushdie, Saul Bellow, Nabokov, Martin Amis, Julian Barnes, Peter Carey, Jonathan Safran Foer, Mark Yakich, or by a lot of other people whose names I can't think of right now.