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Most Helpful Customer Reviews
13 of 13 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
A work of "cornball perversion," staggering originality!,
By
This review is from: Wide Open (Hardcover)
Barker herself once described this as a novel of "cornball perversion," and no one who reads it will ever dispute that! It is filled with the weirdest group of gonzo characters ever assembled, among them Ronny, a homeless man whose real name is Jim; Jim, a hairless man whose real name is Ronny and who works spraying weed killer along the roads; Luke, a photographer of pornography who smells like fish; and Lily, a violent and rebellious teenager who suffers from a clotting disorder and worships The Head. And if these characters were not already bizarre enough, Barker also opens the Pandora's box of their not-in-the-textbook psyches to the reader--showing them to be even more off-the-wall than we had ever dreamed! Providing fertile ground for all the aberrations to flourish, the author sets the characters in a remote seaside resort/nudist colony during the off-season, with additional forays to a nearby boar farm, the Lost and Found Department of the London Underground, and a bat cave in Sumatra, where a character we know only from her letters is searching for a hairy hominid with no big toes. Obviously, not your grandmother's novel.Wide Open is like nothing you've ever read before-absolutely original, sometimes wacky, sometimes poignant, sometimes violent, and always fascinating. The fluidity of Barker's prose keeps the reader zipping along, despite the fact that we can't always tell when she's putting us on, aren't always sure what's going on, and often suspect there are deep themes here if only we could catch our breaths long enough to figure them out. This is an absolutely exhilarating wild ride if the reader is willing to be "wide open."
9 of 12 people found the following review helpful:
1.0 out of 5 stars
Save me from important books from important authors,
By A Customer
This review is from: Wide Open (Hardcover)
The review excerpts on the back of this book are glowing and lead me to expect a satisfying and rich character study of some rather odd and eccentric people. Well, the characters are odd but the author's disjointed writing style and uneven storyline left me cold. It was absolutely ponderous wading though this book and I found it quite hard to care about the characters or their lives. I would occasionally be drawn in and believe that the book was finally going to get interesting but was inevitably disappointed. Wide Open left me cold and disappointed.
1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
worth reading,
By TracyB (San Rafael, CA) - See all my reviews
This review is from: Wide Open (Hardcover)
Although this book has been written in an unusual style with a cast of unusual characters, I was completely intrigued by the strangeness and was drawn in to find out more. This book is so very different from anything I've ever read before or since. The storyline feels like a disjointed dream that reflects the subconcious of some unique and disturbing characters. Not a light read but truly artistic.
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