3.5
Perforated Heart
ByPublisher Description
Almost forty years after moving to Manhattan, author Richard Morris has achieved if not stratospheric renown then at least the accomplished career and caliber of fame that he envisioned for himself as a younger man. Now financially comfortable and artistically embittered, Richard is at his home upstate recuperating from heart surgery and nursing resentment toward his publisher and his reading public who have found new, more exciting writers and left his star to wane.
In his attic, Richard comes across a stack of notebooks, the journals he began keeping when he arrived in New York in the late '70s. He is alternately fascinated and repelled by the young man he meets in these pages: hilariously naïve and egotistically misguided, the younger Richard compulsively absorbs everything around him from art and creativity to sex and drugs. As he reads more about himself, written by himself, Richard discovers that the pivotal moments of self-invention -- and self-realization -- occur far outside the conventional chronology of a lifetime.
Perforated Heart explores two wholly different characters -- a young, ambitious artist and his older self, jaded by both success and failure -- and creates an unforgettable portrait of the two men who inhabit the one individual. By turns meditative, deftly observant, and scathingly analytical, Eric Bogosian re-creates the landscape and atmosphere of 1970s New York City with fresh, vivid imagery and reveals a powerful commentary on the dynamic between creativity and commerce in the artistic world. Perforated Heart is his most rewarding and penetrating novel yet, with prose that reflects an equally astonishing range of experience and emotion.
In his attic, Richard comes across a stack of notebooks, the journals he began keeping when he arrived in New York in the late '70s. He is alternately fascinated and repelled by the young man he meets in these pages: hilariously naïve and egotistically misguided, the younger Richard compulsively absorbs everything around him from art and creativity to sex and drugs. As he reads more about himself, written by himself, Richard discovers that the pivotal moments of self-invention -- and self-realization -- occur far outside the conventional chronology of a lifetime.
Perforated Heart explores two wholly different characters -- a young, ambitious artist and his older self, jaded by both success and failure -- and creates an unforgettable portrait of the two men who inhabit the one individual. By turns meditative, deftly observant, and scathingly analytical, Eric Bogosian re-creates the landscape and atmosphere of 1970s New York City with fresh, vivid imagery and reveals a powerful commentary on the dynamic between creativity and commerce in the artistic world. Perforated Heart is his most rewarding and penetrating novel yet, with prose that reflects an equally astonishing range of experience and emotion.
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Meet readers like you in the Fable For You feed, designed to build bookish communitiesPerforated Heart Reviews
3.5
“my first Eric Bogosian book is exactly how i thought it would be lol
i would give this book 5 stars if richard kills himself in the end but alas”
“For a book I read mostly because of senator eavis/daniel molloy (oop), I really liked it!
The narration is a rhythmic flow-of-consciousness style of writing, Bogosian handles desire, drugs and sex in a clearly self-aware character study. Additionally, the arc of this character as someone who ultimately only sees desires/relationships as transactions to feed his ambition is fleshed out in the forms of his 70s and 2006 self, and reaches a self-dooming end. Artistic integrity, facing mortality, career versus family. I really liked his cynical musings on fame and authorship, revelling in his hypocrisy, and obvs all the drug trips.
I'll probably read more of his books.”
“Really liked the line “all memory is a form of fiction, but all fiction is a form of reality””
About Eric Bogosian
Eric Bogosian is the author of Mall, the plays Talk Radio, subUrbia and Griller, and the Obie Award-winning solo performances Drinking in America, Pounding Nails in the Floor with My Forehead and Sex, Drugs, Rock & Roll. He is the recipient of the Berlin Film Festival Silver Bear Award, a Drama Desk Award, and two NEA fellowships. An actor who has appeared in more than a dozen feature films and television shows, Bogosian lives in New York City.
Other books by Eric Bogosian
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