List Books In Favor Of The Room

Original Title: The Room
ISBN: 0714530387 (ISBN13: 9780714530383)
Edition Language: English
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The Room Paperback | Pages: 288 pages
Rating: 3.52 | 4561 Users | 187 Reviews

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Title:The Room
Author:Hubert Selby Jr.
Book Format:Paperback
Book Edition:First Edition
Pages:Pages: 288 pages
Published:April 1st 2001 by Marion Boyars Publishers Ltd (first published 1971)
Categories:Fiction. Horror. Thriller. Dark. Drama. Mystery

Chronicle Concering Books The Room

Devastating, and strictly for the most daring reader.

Uncompromising, stark, bleak, unremittingly repetitive, gruesome, sickening and despairing -- The Room is perhaps not as great as Selby's more narratively interesting masterwork, Last Exit to Brooklyn, but it is no less accomplished a novel. The story, if one can call it that, is a mixture of incomplete biographical memories and revenge fantasies as imagined by a prisoner in a cell who is apparently awaiting trial for a petty violent crime (or maybe he has already been convicted), but we're never sure because the prisoner is one of the most unreliable narrators ever committed to the printed page.

His life, in the little snippets we get, is unremarkable, marked by poverty and hints of a path leading to a life of crime. Back and forth he bats around obsessions in his mind -- the grayness of his cell (which reminds him of a toy model battleship he built as a kid), the cracks in the walls, the crappy prison food, the nausea in his gut, a zit on his face that drives him even more insane because it refuses to come to a head. But his most elaborate fantasies revolve around the officers who arrested him. As the book proceeds his obsessive desire for revenge against them (even though we never really know their side of the story) takes on the proportions of a self-righteous, self-aggrandizing crusade to abolish abuse in the entire justice system. He imagines his case being taken on by the best lawyers and newspapers and going all the way to Senate hearings -- all unfolded in minute detail. Of course, this all puffs himself up into a hero in his self delusion. Adding layer upon layer in his fantasies, he demonizes the cops as vicious rapists, and then imagines the most disgusting forms of revenge against them -- treating them like dogs in training and submitting them to the most explicitly brutal cruelties one can imagine.

There are parts of this book (including the rape of a female motorist) that will make you queasy, I promise you. Along the way, Selby exhibits total mastery of stream-of-consciousness thought patterns. The ways Selby describes masturbation, or the ritual of popping a zit, or the inability of coughing up a knot of phlegm in the back of the throat or removing an ingrown hair are as astonishingly real and true as they are grotesque. Needless to say, this is not the feel-good book of the century, although there is one passage describing a memory of a hand job session between the man and his girlfriend in a movie theater that is an incredible turn on. It's one of the few explicitly sexual passages (and there are many) in the book that is not sick and violent.

Written in 1971, it is one of the most angry, misanthropic examinations of one-man's totally hopeless view of the universe as you will encounter. "There's always something fucking you up," is sort of the guy's mantra. Rap has nothing on this book as a cop-hater's manifesto either. Having said that, it's view is anti-authoritarian, but in its place it offers no solutions, just the complete angry resignation of a man confined to a 6 x 9 cell. If you can take the book's challenging repetitive elements and the utterly barbaric fantasies, then you will be rewarded with a reading experience not to be forgotten. Again, not for everyone, to say the least, and hard to take even for me, but undeniably a formidable work of literary art.

(KevinR@Ky, slightly amended and corrected, 2016)

Rating Epithetical Books The Room
Ratings: 3.52 From 4561 Users | 187 Reviews

Commentary Epithetical Books The Room
'The Room' is one that should come with a big warning 'explicit content'. It is only for the very, VERY brave. Do not go into this expecting a great deal of semantic gymnastics or beautiful wordplay. Expect regular sexual and gratuitious violence to the nth degree. Selby's intentions are to go down, down, down into the deepest, darkest corners of a criminal's psyche to find what lurks in the cesspool of stunted, starved childhood memories. As he does this, prepare to be challenged mentally and

Heroin and talent.When the two meet, the result is necessarily devastating. Such is the case of "The Room". A book written by junk.And by a genius. I was only on page 22 when Guille sensed this book was already affecting me... and wisely told me to beware. Tenías razón, Guille. You knew what would follow, didn't you? How can a novel be developed when the one and only character is locked up in solitary confinement in a 9×6 cell, with absolutely nothing to do but sit on his bunk, stare at himself

Devastating, and strictly for the most daring reader.Uncompromising, stark, bleak, unremittingly repetitive, gruesome, sickening and despairing -- The Room is perhaps not as great as Selby's more narratively interesting masterwork, Last Exit to Brooklyn, but it is no less accomplished a novel. The story, if one can call it that, is a mixture of incomplete biographical memories and revenge fantasies as imagined by a prisoner in a cell who is apparently awaiting trial for a petty violent crime (or

I don't know where to start with this one. It had awful structure and grammar, but still evoked a strong reaction from me. I was warned that it was quite graphic and dark before going into it, but I was still unprepared for what I was getting myself into. The detailed and drawn out depictions of animal abuse really turned my stomach, not to mention the brutal rape scene and other abuses committed to the human characters. Am I happy to have read it? Not really. There was just way too much to

WOW. This was the most unpleasant, challenging, horrifying, uninviting book I've ever read. It takes place in a blend of first and third person limited - third person when Selby Jr. describes to us what our protagonist (or antagonist?) does in the present and first person when we delve into our protagonist's fantasies or memories. The style itself is a bit jarring as it jumps back and forth in time with no real warning to the reader. I do like this, though, as I'm a big fan of modernist stream

i read this a long time ago, but i remember it being so disturbing that i wondered if it was even legal to have this freely available in a pubic library. i was also fully convinced that there was no possible way hubert selby jr wasnt a serial killer.

I am giving this 5 stars not because I liked it, but because it succeeded in what it was trying to accomplish. A beyond disturbingly horrible nightmare of a read but brilliantly executed. The completely anti-climactic ending left me stunned when I realized what it meant to the story. Another 'underground man' a la Dostoevsky. Hubert Selby, Jr. was quoted as saying that he could not read it for decades after writing it. Well, nor will I be able to. That said and done, I would not recommend this

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