Memos from Purgatory [Unknown Binding]

Product Details

• Unknown Binding
• Publisher: Jove (1977)
• ASIN: B001JPQ0IQ
• Average Customer Review: 4.4 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (5 customer reviews)

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6 of 6 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars "A man should never write what he doesn't know." - Hemingway, July 23, 1997

By 

R. Byrd "byrdie" (Seattle, WA United States) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Memos From Purgatory (Paperback)

This book is an ordeal.

It's the nearly complete account of Harlan Ellison's attempt to be a genuine writer. He wanted to write about gangs in the mid-fifties. So he joined one.

This story is about how this one stupid mistake managed to haunt him for years afterward. It's not a happy book, but it's important. It's an historical account and it effects Ellison to this very day. There's a lot of ranting about the system and of children thrown away -- a lot of anger. And it seems justified.

I don't have the personal experience to say whether or not this book is accurate, but it's certainly gripping and convincing.

It's an ordeal.

3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Sad, vivid and unforgettable book about Fifties street gangs, February 26, 2008

By 

Michael L. Raymond "movie history guy" (Durham,NC) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Memos From Purgatory (Paperback)

Memos from Purgatory may be unique in the literature of street gangs. Its author was only twenty-one when he adopted the name and persona of a young tough, and persuaded a Brooklyn youth gang to accept him as a member, for ten weeks in 1954. The incredibly personal tone of the book makes it clear that Ellison was deeply affected by the experience, even writing years later. You feel as if he is sitting next to you, telling you face to face about his experiences with the gang.

The writing is so vivid that you feel the mixed terror and exhilaration of a gang rumble at night in a city park, his awkward but tender liaison with a very young girl gang member, and the viciousness of a knife fight with another gang member resentful of him as the new guy. The backgrounds of the slum neighborhood, the young hoodlums he got to know well, the feeling of being right there in the midst of the action, are conveyed so directly and powerfully that the book is truly unforgettable. It's no wonder that it took Ellison a long time to be able to write about the experience. By the time you get to the end of the apocalyptic rumble, you wonder that he was able to survive to write about it.

The second half of the book, describing his arrest and brief detention in a New York jail some years later, is gripping, but not as compelling as the first part.

The honesty and emotion with which he describes his time in the gang make this book a sad and tremendously moving memoir.

2 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Classic Ellison from 1961, April 21, 2005

By 

F. Orion Pozo "Orion Pozo" (Raleigh, NC USA) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Memos from Purgatory (Paperback)

Memos From Purgatory is two books in one - both of them memoirs rather than fiction. The Gang is the first book and goes back to 1954 when the 20 year old Ellison went "undercover" in a Brooklyn street gang for ten weeks. His depiction of gang life is very well done, but the writing is a bit dated by the constraints of the censorship of the time. It is all here, from his initiation, through his relationships with the gang members, up to the rumble with a rival gang that drove him off the project for good.

The second half of the book called The Tombs is from a time seven years later. Ellison was an established writer living in New York when he gets arrested and spends a day in the New York prison system before he makes bail. This seems to have been a harder experience for him than the ten weeks in the gang. He fears that he is going to lose his mind because of the panic reaction to being incarcerated. Since one night in jail doesn't seem to be so tragic, his whining can make this section of the book difficult to read. My personal guess is that Ellison was a control freak and being in jail was more than he could take. Yet his descriptions of the people he meets there is richly rewarding. His criminals, winos, derelicts, and guards are well portrayed and typical of the style of writing that has made him famous.

What makes this book a classic is the visceral and emotional writing style that Ellison employs. Even when I disagree with him most, in his diatribe against two gay black men in The Tombs, I am still taken with the power of his writing.