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25 of 28 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars
Paradise Found. Paradise Lost., October 28, 2004
A wealthy media mogul with too much money and little time left to live hatches an unusual scheme: to bring true creativity back in all art forms, writing, music, etc. Under the aegis of New renaissance, the company posits that a group of young creative geniuses can be isolated during their formative years and carefully educated in the arts, at the same time undergoing systematic deprivation of the happiness most people enjoy, resulting in a surplus of angst-generated creativity such as the world has never seen.
Enter six-year old Vincent, one of 457 children chosen for the New Renaissance Academy. Each child is assigned a handler, a reverse "guardian angel"; Vincent's handler is Harlan Eiffler, a 28-year old cynic whose job is to thwart every opportunity for happiness and direct Vincent's creative flow. Vincent dances to the music of his puppeteer, churning out plays, screenplays, musical arrangements and novels, all well-received by the public. New Renaissance is making a fortune. Vincent's work is brilliant, even though his personal life is in a shambles, eventually reaching critical mass.
But humanity is what it is and this is essentially an experiment fraught with pitfalls and doomed to fail. One day Vincent and Harlan find themselves staring across an abyss, face to face with revelations that change their relationship forever, bitter truths colliding after years of subterfuge and dishonesty. Paradise Lost.
Torture the Artist is a difficult novel to describe. The closest I can come is a combination of incendiary superhero comics with subtle shades of pornography, along with the naiveté of childhood, the images as bold as the strokes of the cartoon artist's pen. Goebel attacks his theme with fervor and enthusiasm, daring the reader to ignore his radical ideas. Stuck in a jaded and sophisticated world, this young author strikes a blow for his own voice, load and clear, a cross between Boogie Nights, Animal House and Quentin Tarantino's limbic brain. Luan Gaines/2004.
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9 of 10 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
A Deeply Thought Provoking Novel, May 12, 2005
Torture The Artist is a deeply entertaining and engaging novel that reads like a manifesto without crossing the boundaries of elitism. It is the Surrealist Manifesto for the Internet Generation, as written by Harmony Korine.
Goebel manages to create full and fascinating characters and throws them in situations that he neither apologizes for nor takes too lightly. Vincent and Harlan are deeply sympathetic, fully realized characters whose greatest ambitions seem to always be just of reach, be it love, ambition, dreams, etc. This is a novel about a society beaten down and suffocated by corporations bent on eliminating art from entertainment, and the petty, often fruitless, attempts by artists to put the dreaded A word back into the mainstream.
The story is well paced and always engaging. And we grow to truly care about these characters whenever the world takes a crap on them-especially Vincent, whose parade, if I may use this dreaded cliché, is constantly being rained on.
As a writer, Goebel has matured to shocking heights. His previous outing, The Anomalies, is as well written and in your face, but this novel reads as though it was his third or even fourth book. He took a quantum leap from The Anomalies to Torture the Artist, and I can't wait to read his next book.
If you have any sense of longing for the days in which entertainment brightened the mind instead of dimming it, then this book is definitely for you.
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5.0 out of 5 stars
Intriguing!, November 29, 2011
I have never read anything quite like this book! I almost quit after 20 pages, but decided to pursue it, anyway. Two of my favorite passages are on pages 79 and 129. If for no other reason, the precision of these two passages make the book an A list reader. To have a 24 year old author write this book, blows me away! If only all 24 year olds could write like this, I would feel we were a nation to be dealt with! Fascination on a whole new level!
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