Customer Reviews

Eleven Karens: A Novel

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4 star:		(2)
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1 star:		(2)

 

 

The book takes us through the life of a man who always seems to end up in the arms of a woman named Karen. They are eccentric Italian beauties, upper east side lolitas, nudists, you name it and there's a karen that fits the bill in this wonderfully light and truely well written piece.

Peter Lefcourt has this amazing ability to tell these stories that you couldn't imagine yourself buying someone told you about them but he writes so well that not only do you buy it but it sticks with you and you find yourself laughing out loud months after you've put it down.

If you enjoyed 'Di and I', 'The Woody' or 'The Deal', Amazon.com 'Eleven Karens' today, you'll love it!

Lefcourt has such talent. His previous work has been witty, intelligent, and hysterically funny.

Unfortunately, Eleven Karens reads as nothing more than Lefcourt's personal ... fantasies, with each Karen possessing a perfect and willing body. Lefcourt's fantasized boundless appeal to any woman he desires had me shaking my head in disbelief. This ... drivel reaches a new low by tossing in [physical] scene featuring not one, but two Karens at a time. If an explicitly described threesome is not what you had in mind, skip this book. Softcore porn is not what I was expecting from Lefcourt.

Eleven Karens has a brilliant structure for a memoir: a sexual life told through 11 encounters with women all named Karen. Beautifully told, funny as hell and deeply profound, 11K is a globe-trotting rollicking tale of fleeting love and wistful memories. If you love Lefcourt's other works, seek this out. If you never read him before, you cannot go wrong here. Tragicly, Simon and Schuster dumped this on the market with no publicity. But if you find it, you will treasure Eleven Karens.

Lefcourt is a fun writer. He is not really profound, but the 11 Karens is a sweet (at times) book. He remembers the women with a bit of nostalgia and warmth. The stories are funny and and sweet. I'm not sure what people are complaining about by calling this soft porn. Instead, it is a quirky, yet ultimately warm novel about a man, his loves, and his search for happiness.

I purchased this book because the premise intrigued me. You can imagine my letdown as I got a few chapters into it. Eleven Karens is as much a "story" as Busty Cops 3 is a "movie;" the book reads like a late night cinemax movie: not enough story to Each chapter tells of the author's sexual encounter with yet another beautiful woman, one of whom lives in the middle of Africa (yet, inexplicably is still named "karen," which I can't imagine is a very popular name for Africans in a country where the official language is french). The differeng girls (karens) all are described as being very attractive, yet none have anything of interest to say or do, their looks are their sole purpose for being in the story.
keep you interested, and not enough sex to qualify it as a porn either.
Most disappointingly, perhaps, is the book's lack of purpose. I can live with the pretentious footnotes inserted onto every other page (yes, footnotes, the purpose of which is to show the reader how cultured the narrator is, as he loves making obscure reverences for little or no reason), and the abbreviated sense of reality, however I can not put up with the lack of meaning to the relationshps.
Eleven Karens reads like the product of an overactive imagination of a sixth grader who happens to be locked up in a room with only a globe and a barbie doll, this is the story of a globe trotting man-whore who sleeps with boring women, and just so happens to be a boring guy himself.
I bought an autographed copy of this book for $2.99, and I still got ripped off.

I really enjoyed this book. It took NO time to read and was very funny. Only 11 chapters long (one for each Karen) it will fly by!