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Sway: A Novel Hardcover – January 7, 2008
Purchase options and add-ons
- Print length272 pages
- LanguageEnglish
- PublisherLittle, Brown and Company
- Publication dateJanuary 7, 2008
- Dimensions5.75 x 1 x 8.5 inches
- ISBN-100316113093
- ISBN-13978-0316113090
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Editorial Reviews
From Publishers Weekly
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From Bookmarks Magazine
Copyright © 2004 Phillips & Nelson Media, Inc.
Review
"Sway is a gripping and masterful novel about the Manson murders, the early years of the Rolling Stones, Kenneth Anger, and the dark heart of the 1960s." (Akhil Sharma, author of "An Obedient Father," winner of the PEN/Hemingway Award)
"[Lazar] brilliantly highlights the fragility of an era when "everyone under thirty has decided that they're an exception-a musician, a runaway, an artist, a star." (Publishers Weekly (starred review))
"Zachary Lazar's superb second novel, Sway, reads like your parents' nightmare idea of what would happen to you if you fell under the spell of rock 'n' roll...Elegant and intricate...this brilliant novel is about what's to be found in the shadows, the most terrifying crannies of twisted souls, the darkest gleaming gems." (New York Times Book Review Charles Taylor)
"Lazar has created a powerful, infernal prism through which to view the potent, still-rippling contradictions of the late '60s. It's no mean feat. Despite the era's nearly impossible richness, fresh insights are hard to come by." (Los Angeles Times Book Review Mark Rozzo)
"One hypnotic tone poem.... It is not the now-historic acts of violence that make Sway so riveting, but its vivid character portraits and decadent, muzzy atmosphere, all rendered with the heightened sensory awareness associated with drugs and paranoia. The near miniaturist precision with which he describes Keith Richards's attempts to master his guitar, Brian Jones's acid trips and Anger's obsessive desire for Beausoleil bring this large-scale tableau into stunning relief." (Time Out New York Liz Brown)
"The novel moves swiftly, and Lazar handles the numerous segues from one story to another with a veteran film editor's finesse.... The ending has a powerful kick, and we're still hearing its echoes. A skillful dramatization of the consequences of making and inhabiting your own world. The Stones ought to write a song about it." (Kirkus Reviews)
"Blending fact and myth, novelist Lazar casts the Rolling Stones, the Manson family and avant-garde filmmaker Kenneth Anger as characters in his dizzying, foreboding shadow history of the Sixties." (Rolling Stone, Best New Rock Books, 2008)
"Zachary Lazar's novel Sway makes a convincing case that dark forces can be summoned with the right incantation...this is the story of a bizarre convergence of real lives overlapping.... It's about the compulsion to find the edge by plunging over it." (Austin American-Statesman Patrick Beach)
"Zachary Lazar begins where Didion left off in his fiercely imagined, kaleidoscopic novel." (Rolling Stone Jonathan Ringen)
"As a painter might do with a brush and canvas, Lazar uses words in his new novel Sway to fashion a restrained but seductive portrait of lives intersecting in the tumultuous 1960s." (Newsday Stephen Williams)
"Lazar's mode of engaging the volatile decade...is marvelously unexpected. He does not attempt to encompass or define or eulogize. He is rigorous in avoiding the kind of winking, hindsight-freighted knowingness of which a lesser writer might avail himself. Instead, Lazar finds his way inside the lives of the Stones, the Charles Manson "family," and the experimental gay filmmaker Kenneth Anger, demythologizing his characters by imbuing each one with a nuanced, deeply troubled inner life....Lazar's prose carries the day. His sentences are crafted with subtle precision, and the emotional palette of his writing is wide and vibrant....our investment in these fragile, intensely human figures is profound.... Nothing in Sway is writ large, but by carefully mapping the terrain separating the artist from the muse and the genius from the madman, Lazar makes the atmosphere of a decade almost palpable." (The Boston Globe Adam Mansbach)
"A rare find, both violent and beautiful." (GQ)
"Measured and well-researched, his writing is exquisitely spare and largely dispassionate but with stretches of empathy." (The Denver Post Steven Rosen)
"What Lazar gets at in this astonishing novel: a truth, wholly compelling, plausible, succinct. A book as beautiful and conflicted as the time it represents." (L.A. Weekly Stephen Elliott)
About the Author
Product details
- Publisher : Little, Brown and Company; 1st edition (January 7, 2008)
- Language : English
- Hardcover : 272 pages
- ISBN-10 : 0316113093
- ISBN-13 : 978-0316113090
- Item Weight : 14.1 ounces
- Dimensions : 5.75 x 1 x 8.5 inches
- Best Sellers Rank: #4,369,037 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #154,249 in Literary Fiction (Books)
- #193,520 in Historical Fiction (Books)
- Customer Reviews:
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The first third of Sway is pure black magic. A Manson home invasion rap prior to the Tate-LaBianca murders gives you likely the best insight into Charlie ever; at the very least an eaves dropping illusion of finally knowing who Charlie was.
With this, on another side of the globe, we meet the very early Rolling Stones, then poor, useless and awful. Lazar delivers wonderful scenes, especially a bit where Brian Jones and Mick Jagger sleep together (not for reasons of sex but poverty) and Jones “experiences” Jagger’s face nose to nose in the dark. We are likewise treated to lines like this re: Keith Richards, “He knew every lick from every Chuck Berry record ever made, an indication of how much time he spent alone.”
And while the magic occasionally evolves toward melodrama as Charlie heads to hell and the Stones to heaven (or at least , Marrakesh's pharmaceutical equivalent) this novel is nothing short of amazing.
Now, none of this is bad. I quite like a book that reads like a fractured and distorted fairytale. I said I didn't know what to make of the book, not that I did not like it.
Sway, as I've said, takes two different stories and winds them together. Lazar recounts the rise of The Rolling Stones, some of his information falsified but some of it quite true (I`ve seen the picture of Mick in the Uncle Sam top hat and the Omega t-shirt), and the Charles Manson murders. These two isolated groups and the events included are connected by a thin thread that goes by the name Kenneth Anger. Anger is a struggling film maker whose avant-garde styles of imagery and symbolism make him less than idea for the mainstream, which is just where he seems satisfied to be.
From the way the book describes itself, I was thinking that the two stories would intertwine on a deeper level then they did, and this was a bit disappointing. I guess it was meant to be this way. I gave me to see how things, even great things that seem so grand and therefore isolated within their own distinct worlds, can touch and brush and never impact. How sometimes you just manage to miss something larger than simple life allows without even knowing it.
There are moments, though, that the book is starkly real and you no longer feel the invader of a dream. The characters cease to be actors or players on a grand stage and become actual people, no longer characters but objects of existence just as we all are. Flawed, confused, prone to mistakes, and sometimes empty. Sometimes acting without excuse or reason. Sometimes just inflicting. Brian Jones is an abusive mess who is so out of touch with his own needs that he is self-destructive, Bobby just ambles along and thoughtlessly does whatever he decides to do for no good reason, and Anger doesn't seem to fight for anything and only exists to make his films.
The anger and escalating chaos of the 60s and 70s is depicted nicely in Sway. Vietnam, militaristic groups, disenchantment with the government and society, and the rejection of the early 60s Summer of Love ideals brought about a new society and destroyed the former not with a whimper but a bang. In fact, many of them. There is a sense, even when reading nonfiction of the time, that America was ready to explode. Indeed, much of the world was. The Rolling Stones and Charles Manson both, in their own ways, embody this feeling. The Rolling Stones is the passion, the rebellion, the new face of youth and expression while Manson is just how bad it can get.
Though if Sway did anything, it made me like The Rolling Stones just a little more.
Top reviews from other countries
I enjoy books that take real people and real events and use them as the basis of a reimagining. When, as here in "Sway”, the book is well written, thoroughly researched, imaginative, and offers insights into an era, then it’s a compelling and engrossing read.
That said, Zachary Lazar slavishly follows the well worn narrative that Altamont and the Manson Family murders signalled the death of sixties idealism and served as a metaphor for the entire era. For such an accomplished and imaginative book I would have hoped for a bit more of a nuanced or original interpretation of these events not just a rehash of an overly familiar, and lazy, narrative.
The book could/ should have been longer, which is perhaps another way of saying I wanted more. Recommended.
