Customer Reviews

For Fucks Sake

5 star:		(12)
4 star:		(9)
3 star:		(2)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(5)

 

 

If you like the narrator's sense of humor and can identify with some of these characters, you'll really enjoy this book.

If you don't, you'll most likely be horrified ... For about 150 pages I thought this was the worst writing I'd ever read. However, there was a consistent voice, albeit one that seemed to make the wrong rhetorical choices every time.

Specifically, he makes judgments about things that he hasn't explained fully, so you're supposed to take his word for a lot of things [and you don't], and he says a lot of things not because they mean anything but because he likes how they sound. This is usually called babbling and children/immature adults do it. His thoughts were also loaded with cliches about Kerouac and Hunter Thompson. There were no characters ... just impulses. I began to anything this relentlessly out of touch with how it would be perceived had to be a big gag.

So I kept reading. And there was a reward for the effort: About half way through, the narrator changes. He goes from being a collection of cliches/desires/impulses to an actual human being. Not a nice person at first, but hey, you can tell he's trying to become a man. The immature jokiness slowed, the cliched descriptions and inflated language eased up ... he became a more straightforward teller of his story and clearly he'd begun to absorb the lessons of his suffering. There were some moments of delicious irony in the later sections and some outstanding sentences. (I thought the ending was a bit of a cop-out -- the narrator was progressing ... he just didn't quite know it yet.)

The book itself turned out not to be a long gag, but a bildingsroman. It is to some extent a necessary novel, too...there are people like this, and this book helps render them understandable.

Also check out Knut Hamsun's Hunger, Christopher Isherwood's Goodbye to Berlin, Nelson Algren's Somebody in Boots and Charles Jackson's The Lost Weekend for this kind of material handled by masterful writers.

As part of a book club, I have read many books and am always on the look out for intelligent well written stories of fiction. This was not one. I found all the characters extremely unlikable, underdeveloped and higly offensive. The "humor" was sophomoric at best with the added interludes unwelcome and juvenile. I have read better thought out plot lines in the childrens literature I've read to my five year old. I will say it did give our book club quite a lively discussion, as we each took a turn reading the passages we felt most offensive. I will cafefully scrutinize any further recommendations I find on the Amazon site. The back cover states it to be " the Moby Dick of the 21st century". The only correlation is the literal one as the author finds possibly every colorful description of his own.

I picked this book up when I was visiting NYC, intrigued by the title. And despite the "catchy" title, this is a serious work of fiction. The book starts off on a fun note in New Orleans, and Lasner really gets the Mardi-Gras atmosphere right. However, as the book moves into the second and third sections, the main character's despair and longing become the focus of the story, and that is where the novel really shines, describing in intricate and forecful detail one man's descent into a hell of his own making, which he feels powerful to stop, though he is aware of what he is doing at every turn (There is a powerful scene at the end of section 2, when he walks through the streets of Philadelphia, in a state of extreme agitation, waiting for a simple phone call). Lasner has a catchy and hypnotic style of writing, which is alternately funny and intense, often at the same time. A surprising find!

This book gives a glimpse into the mind of an obsessed guy's search for a relationship that doesn't drive him crazy. He doesn't fare very well, but it's really interesting to go on the journey with him. The book is funny, touching, and maddening. You really get inside the author's head, so when he's on the verge of going insane while waiting for a simple phone call, you feel the same crazed, frustrating frenzy. It's good all the way through, but the best part is the portrayal of Mardi Gras chaos in New Orleans.

Couldn't disagree more with Aaron from Chicago. I found this book to be a knock your socks off stunner. This book exposes a side of "maleness" that most men wouldn't dare show. Think of a man who is desperate to be in love, cannot function without a relationship and is in a constant state of anxiety. Sounds like the stereotype that is put forth about women, right? That is what makes this such a one of a kind read--you see feelings expressed by a man that most men would deny they even have--and certainly wouldn't show if they did.
I found Lasner's descriptions of his emotions and vulnerabilities deeply affeting. And yes, I loved the references to Joyce that are snuck into the book.

I think that the problem some people have with this book is that it is offensive, and thus they criticize it in order to deal with their own feelings of being offended. Yes, the book does have a hard edge, and the "confessional" tone does make for many uncomfortable moments for both writer and reader. But overall, I think that this novel is an all too rare example in today's publishing marketplace of a book with a heart, albeit a broken one.

I admit that it took some effort to get into this book-Lasner's fast and furious style of writing is not what I am used to, and the first forty pages were a slog through a miasma of time, place and action that felt like a malaria fever dream. As I read on I finally got into the ups and downs of Lasner's love life. Actually, it's a fun read if you're into laughing over the emotional pain of others; the only problem I had with the novel is the fact that Lasner (who narrates) doesn't find his stride until Part 3, when he starts seeing "Mona", who at the time is married to his friend from childhood. You can imagine how this relationship ends (awfully, like the previous two) but the fun in reading came about from knowing that of the three, this is still the most conventional, the most normal, possibly the most beneficial relationship he has. The descriptions of driving from New York City to Mona's home in "Winnesota" and back cement the sense that something is horribly wrong here without being sure of what. That being said, this book is certainly a valuable addition to today's literary market.

A rambling, pointless, waste of my time. The protagonist was extremely shallow, ..., and unlikable. (If this is autobiographical -- get some help, dude!) The writing style, while amusing at first, became intolerable by mid-book. I finished the thing only to justify the [$$] I spent on it (what an unbelievably disappointing "ending," by the way) and then promptly threw it in the trash. And to the author...please, for the love of God don't write any more books!

Let's skip the spelling errors, poor editing and proofreading. Let's skip the run-on sentences with kindergarten-esque wordplay (New Hoeleans, Blue Whorleans, etc. - I don't recall either of those being from the book, but that's the level of sophistication we're talking about). Let's just talk about the narrator, an I who is also called Robert Lasner (but is presumably separate from the author). He runs from car wreck of relationship to car wreck of relationship with little to no explanation of why he's doing it, nor why the reader should care. There is no convincing motivation, no compelling character exploration or explanation (all of them are effectively cast as cardboard standups in a movie theater lobby) and, all things considered, no reason to read this book. When I hit the last page, I tossed this book into the box destined for the used bookstore immediately. I'll trade it in on some Steinbeck or Stegner or something else which may actually improve my life. I squandered about two hours of my life on this book and I can never get that time back. I am a worse person for it.

A very funny and sad tale about a man looking for love in all the wrong places. Join the author as he searches across America for the right woman, but having come across three nightmare relationships that seem sane in the beginning, but turn to lunacy in the end. The book reads like a John Donne sonnet. Funny and humorous in the beginning and tragic in the end. One of the better books I've read in a while.

I'm glad i read this for free in the bookstore. Though i can sympathize with a lot of the author's sentiments, he doesn't tell me anything i don't already know or even do anything interesting with the writing aside from a few (VERY few) moments of decent description. But even in these sections he's a hack, and there are plenty of better ones out there. He is NOT a new-age poet or an amazing writer like some other reviewers have said- stylistically, this guy doesn't deserve to be mentioned in the same breath as Kerouac, or even Henry Miller, and his allusions to Joyce unintentionally get the biggest laughs in the book. At one point he rips off the last paragraph of "The Dead" (poorly) and then tries to metaphorically connect the snowfall to his own tears. And half the book is taken up with throwaway repetitions like "why did I love her? Why was she being like this? I loved her. I didn't. I did." If you think this guy's good, or if you think that he's pioneering some kind of new "conversational/confessional" approach to literature, you need to read more. If you like this book for its witty harshness and misanthropy, read Hunter S. Thompson and then find your way back to Miller. If you like the soul-baring confessional aspect, you can read Dave Eggers, but should eventually find your way back to any number of superior writers. This book isn't innovation; it's not even good imitation.