Bret Easton Ellis's Top 3 Books

Halfway between the self-confidence and insolence of the 21-year-old boy who writes his first book (something that is usually transmitted by the precocious writer who is fortunate to be recognized by critics), and also by an exploitation of the generational resource as a fishing ground for readers, Bret Easton Ellis it continues to be a countercultural reference.

Mainly for the very extensive generation X coming from the baby boom and prolonged for years. But also for many other young people of new generations who find in Ellis the same cyclical concerns of Western youth in the paradoxical welfare society.

What difference can there be in the literary intention of a Jack Kerouac of the beat generation and the relief of Ellis or of the also current and remarkable Chuck Palahniuk? Probably the historical context and secondly the narrative style. Otherwise vital concerns transmuted from one time and place to another later.

By this I do not mean to reduce originality or detract from merit or anything like that. It is only about referring to that easy connection of all rebellious and transgressive literature from time to time. So that a great writer like Ellis can continue to roam freely in the consciences of new young readers.

For the rest, conciseness as a virtue, the description with precious brushstrokes and the direct and abundant language have the final effect so that reading the books by Bret Easton Ellis maintains that validity at the threshold of the ethical, of the discovery of youth itself and of that residual effect that serves so that, reading this type of literature, we always keep young the necessary critical spirit that connects us in some way with the young man abandoned to his fate of lost ideals.

Top 3 Recommended Books by Bret Easton Ellis

American Psycho

Each era has one or more disruptive writers, from the Marquis de Sade but also Charles Bukowski. In this case, it is the work itself that became a different novel, strange for some, even gore for others.

And yet it is the old commitment of the irreverent writer who dives into the darkness to bring a story forged from that underworld of the lowest passions, demons, envies and even the homicidal instinct.

Patrick Bateman's character is a reincarnation of the unfiltered mindset prototype, a kind of Holden Caulfield, star of «The catcher in the rye«, Who has managed to tame his instincts and even his psychopathy so that his intelligence finally guided him towards a success from whose summit, yes, he can deal with his animosity, giving way to his hatreds, philias and phobias.

American Psycho

Less than wax

Here is the opera prima, the novel with which Ellis offered himself like ecce homo, with the open veins of youth gushing out.

A song out of tune to rebellion finally focused on the hedonism and nihilism of the crudest hangovers in which memory confuses fiction and reality of that absolute surrender to unconsciousness in which everything could have happened, just the night before. All that remains to be done is intended to be addressed, in youth, in less than the 7 days in which God made the world.

But it is that youth is more than God, because everything else does not exist, it will happen tomorrow. And tomorrow is a place that no one inhabits yet and where the guilt or regret of the destruction undertaken today cannot reach with a smile on the lips.

Less than wax

the destruction

The lesser evil of the taste for perdition when one does not end up giving in entirely to it. Of youth glimpsed as an infinite space in which to surrender to everything until making the self a hedonistic being, the young tyrant loaded with animosity when something tries to break his circle.

Los Angeles, 1981. At seventeen, Bret is about to start his senior year at Buckley with his exclusive and sophisticated group of friends: Thom, Susan and Debbie, Bret's girlfriend, experiment with sex, alcohol and drugs as they take advantage of the last days of summer. But this paradisiacal dream falls apart with the arrival of a new student: Robert Mallory is bright, handsome and charismatic, but something about him does not fit, and no one but Bret seems to realize that this something could be related to the appearance of the Trawler. , a serial killer who threatens the town's teens and their pets.

The author of American Psycho and Less Than Zero gives us a thrilling and thought-provoking journey into his teenage self, one charged with insatiable sexual desire and jealousy, obsession, and murderous rage. Los destrozos is an absorbing story about the loss of innocence and the complicated transition to adulthood, and also a vivid and nostalgic portrait of the eighties; a narrative covered by suspense, terror, eroticism and the unmistakable black humor characteristic of an author who is the symbol of an entire generation.

the destruction

Other recommended books by Bret Easton Ellis

Imperial Suites

Clay was that boy from Less Than Zero, the ultimate survivor of the grueling struggle of death from the notion of the invincibility of youth.

Many of the characters that lived in Less than Zero also appear in this story. Clay is probably the one who has best known how to move in that future that always comes in the end.

In his world more linked to the creative, a guy who has lived on the edge like him still has a fit. Like a strange crime novel, something from Clay's remote past looms over him as he pursues his old hobbies and fleeting new loves.

Imperial Suites
5/5 - (13 votes)

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