Quote:
Originally Posted by Pablo
I found "American Psycho" extremely disturbing and I regret having read it. I would not recommend it to anybody (anyway, I think it has zero literary value).
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I thought it definitely had literary value as a satire on the values of the Reagonomics of the eighties. Probably pretty relevant in the light of the situation the bankers have left us in recently, too. The whole point is that for Patrick, raping and beheading a woman carries exactly the same emotional weight as choosing which pair of designer cufflinks to wear that day. Rather like A Clockwork Orange, but without the fatuous ending (and, of course, without Burgess' marvellous linguistic flights of fancy).
Mind you, I see plenty of literary value in Ballard's Crash or Burrough's 'Cities of the Red Night.'
I still get disgusted by the 'torture porn' Hollywood has been foisting upon us recently: Wolf Creek, Saw, Hostel etc. In these cases, there is no substance behind the sadism - it is presumed that this will be the main attraction for the viewer. The only parallel in books that I can think of are those semi-factual books about serial killers that revel in the details of precisely how they tortured/raped/killed their victims. For me, these are a million miles away from American Psycho.
Probably the book that I found most 'disturbing', recently at least, was Gaiman's Coraline. I found the alternate reality she enters - in which her family have buttons for eyes and everyone is perfectly happy all the time - to be really quite unsettling. It seemed such a stark reminder of what it is to actually be human, and there was a real tang of mortality to those dead eyes and beatific smiles.