Customer Reviews

The Fan Man: The Novel (Illustrated Edition)

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I like this book, which I've read more than once, because it gets us into the (pot) head of the faux first person narrator, Horse Badorties, and plucks us accurately down into the loosey-goosey East Village I recall well, back in the day. I've recommended it a few times, and will recommend it again. It would deserve five stars if not for the regrettable rape scene, which I like to believe the young Kotzwinkle would have redone as an older, wiser head. Not everything is funny.I Think, Therefore Who Am I?

"This is Horse Badorties, man, tape recording a message for the great time capsule to be buried in concrete and dug up tomorrow. I'm in Chinatown, man, and I am receiving brain flashes from previous lifetimes as a Chinaman, man. Used to play the Chinese flute, man, a thousand years ago, under a doorstep. Yes, man, I used to be in the court of the Paper Dragon, and speaking of dragging, man, my right arm is scraping the ground from all the satchel, fan, and heavy umbrella I'm carrying around.

"And dig, man, here comes a fifteen-year-old Chinese chick, man, with beautiful eyes and long black hair. Man, how I would love to bowl in her pagoda."

Horse Badorties is a unique creation in America fiction. Even his roaches have roaches. This illustrated edition contains every mind-blowing word of the original novel and brings to life in vivid black-and-white the man "The Seattle Times" described as: "a kind of Ginger man, Lucky Jim, Huck Finn, and Easy Rider all mixed up in one...the marvelous creation of a truly witty and extremely perceptive mind... a delightfully, often devastatingly funny novel." - from book's back cover