Customer Reviews

Torture the Artist

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

 

 

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.

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.

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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The book is well written. It has so many deep and thought provoking moments in it, quotes you find yourself writing down. If you love music, and are finding it very hard to find anything worth listening to on the radio, watching anything on tv, then this is the one for you. It's not a light read, it's depressing and it's tearfully awful at times, but it's meant to be. And I appreciate it.

From the first page of this book, it pulled me in and I forget the rest of the world, in turn getting sucked into the world of Harlan Eiffler and Vincent Spinetti, the two main characters! I have to say, Joey Goebel is now my favorite author. It is great to read a book that has originality. I have also received "The Anomolies" and "Commonwealth." I cannot wait to read them too!

A truly great concept novel in that it explores the implication of a societal trend by pushing it to the extreme. In this case, a boy is tortured for the sake of producing art. No real drawbacks other than the language use is fairly straightforward; the book could have used more beauty to reflect what beauty the tortured boy is meant to create.

I loved this book. The writing is funny, and it's a good-sized read - not too long, not too short. I especially enjoyed the author's main expose: our popular culture is getting less intelligent every year. Not that this is a sudden revelation; we all know it. But, the author presents the argument in a way we can all relate to (unless you like all the reality TV out there today).

Firstly this book is not about 'art' in the specific sense, but 'the arts' - moreover writing and music.

This author for some reason had been compared with Chuck Palahniuk - which is about as good a comparison as Daniel Steel is to Kurt Vonnegut.

Joey Goebel, instead of speaking of the phenomena and stereotype of the 'tortured artist' rather speaks from his heart of hearts about how hard it is to get into the music industry and of the sorry state that pop music is in.

He also makes the BOLD statement that the continuing trends of Television as of late fail to satisfy one's higher faculties. The majority of the book consists of him making this moot point over and over in what I'm sure he viewed as hard hitting.

This may not be all that bad; he certainly is entitled to his opinion. However, on the book jacket in the author's description it proclaims that he had been part of a band that I'm sure no one reading this review has ever heard of. So, it became very clear very soon that he had implanted his own failures as a musician into this book every chance he got and into every character. Needless to say I found this aspect of the author's style a little less than becoming.

His style is fairly entertaining and pretty at times, the actual plot is interesting at first but quickly looses its grace through repetition.

With a lifetime of reading left, I feel I have wasted far too much time on this book.

I don't know anything about this author, It wass suggested to me by amazon. Way to go amazon! I realy enjoyed this book. The first page realy set the intrigue and that is the way a good dramatic fiction should read. This book may seem to slow up a bit in the first third- but then it realy takes off on it's own. The mother in this story reminded me of Gary Gilmore's Girlfreind in Executionors Song by Norman Mailor. I was sorry that this book came to an end- I thought the charectors were easily identified. It's not my style to tell people what books are about- just why they should read the book. Basicly the book is about a an artist who is almost engineered by a corporation. This is the kind of book that will leave memories with you that you will eventually mix up with your own experiances.