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The Gar Diaries
Young Lucas grew up as a gar fisherman's son, in the steamy backwater bayous of southeastern Louisiana. His story invites you into a brutal world that is dominated by domestic violence, poverty, and the day-to-day struggle for survival...a struggle that might have left even the strongest of us emotionally scarred and bitter.
Lucas reveals the childhood fights, the family traumas, and the fiercely wrought beauty of a visceral existence that feels ill at ease with itself. He gives us an unflinching look at a place and people we need to know.
Lucas reveals the childhood fights, the family traumas, and the fiercely wrought beauty of a visceral existence that feels ill at ease with itself. He gives us an unflinching look at a place and people we need to know.
- GenresNonfiction
282 pages, Paperback
First published August 1, 2007
7 people are currently reading
276 people want to read
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Displaying 1 - 15 of 15 reviews
September 22, 2013
This book sucked so bad, I couldn't keep wasting my time reading it! I hope people don't think all of us from South Louisiana are disgusting, filthy drunks, trolling the bayou and woods to survive! The way of life here is a beautiful celebration, not like the author describes about his miserable, dark, cock roach eating tale!
September 15, 2013
The Gar Diaries
By Louis Bourgeois
Just a story about a fisherman’s son, right…wrong! The Gar Dairies is not only a creatively written memoir, but a personal in depth chance to see what is both good and bad in life. It offers up the chance to experience what it was like growing up in the deep south, and both gaining and losing essentially himself, over and over.
I said that this was creatively written because while the book does lead us through his life, it is done in small snapshots, moments, and events, rather than a long drawn out narrative. It left me wanting to see what was happening in between these moments. While most authors choose to attempt to explain certain situations and elaborate on long drawn out personal narrative, Louis tends to give us a little at a time and leave you on your aged wanting more.
While most of the book is centered on the personal experiences that he faced; there are other interesting parts as well. Little bits and segments of others’ lives that have entangles with his, to the point that you feel how important others really can be in your own life.
Yes, we have the fights and the struggles and even some things that are so honest that they become almost too honest, and don’t really add to the desire of reading this. But, isn’t that the point. Let’s get really honest with life, with ourselves, and with others. Bourgeois is so true to his tale, that even the most absurd and powerful stories take on a whole new meaning. He is not going to leave anything out. Rants, at some points, that seem psychotic, actually add to the true mean nature that lies inside every person. Most would not admit to wanting to do terrible things, wanting to hurt others, but where honest rests, it cannot be avoided.
But, let’s not stop there. How about an essentially personal twist on the whole idea of being well…whole? What is it to be whole? A whole human, a whole body, or potentially a whole soul? What does it really mean to be at one with yourself and those around you. As Bourgeois attempts to explain what makes him whole, he is doing so without the fully intact human body that he once had. The memoir because altered upon this discovery and you get to really embrace what it is to be alive, while facing the inevitable questions of what it means to fit in in society, or just to fit into your clothes. Can I personally relate to this…no? Is there a way that many can…no. Is it worth reading and attempting to discover what this is really like, yes? With a mix of hatred, personal dwelling, drugs, and beer, you get a chance to see both the amazing and the depressing up close and personal. With every long sentence, Bourgeois takes us further and further into his mind, his emotional state, his brushes with death, and his personal revelations on god.
If you want to read a real, down to earth, passionate, horribly brutal and devastatingly provocative memoir. This is the one.
By Louis Bourgeois
Just a story about a fisherman’s son, right…wrong! The Gar Dairies is not only a creatively written memoir, but a personal in depth chance to see what is both good and bad in life. It offers up the chance to experience what it was like growing up in the deep south, and both gaining and losing essentially himself, over and over.
I said that this was creatively written because while the book does lead us through his life, it is done in small snapshots, moments, and events, rather than a long drawn out narrative. It left me wanting to see what was happening in between these moments. While most authors choose to attempt to explain certain situations and elaborate on long drawn out personal narrative, Louis tends to give us a little at a time and leave you on your aged wanting more.
While most of the book is centered on the personal experiences that he faced; there are other interesting parts as well. Little bits and segments of others’ lives that have entangles with his, to the point that you feel how important others really can be in your own life.
Yes, we have the fights and the struggles and even some things that are so honest that they become almost too honest, and don’t really add to the desire of reading this. But, isn’t that the point. Let’s get really honest with life, with ourselves, and with others. Bourgeois is so true to his tale, that even the most absurd and powerful stories take on a whole new meaning. He is not going to leave anything out. Rants, at some points, that seem psychotic, actually add to the true mean nature that lies inside every person. Most would not admit to wanting to do terrible things, wanting to hurt others, but where honest rests, it cannot be avoided.
But, let’s not stop there. How about an essentially personal twist on the whole idea of being well…whole? What is it to be whole? A whole human, a whole body, or potentially a whole soul? What does it really mean to be at one with yourself and those around you. As Bourgeois attempts to explain what makes him whole, he is doing so without the fully intact human body that he once had. The memoir because altered upon this discovery and you get to really embrace what it is to be alive, while facing the inevitable questions of what it means to fit in in society, or just to fit into your clothes. Can I personally relate to this…no? Is there a way that many can…no. Is it worth reading and attempting to discover what this is really like, yes? With a mix of hatred, personal dwelling, drugs, and beer, you get a chance to see both the amazing and the depressing up close and personal. With every long sentence, Bourgeois takes us further and further into his mind, his emotional state, his brushes with death, and his personal revelations on god.
If you want to read a real, down to earth, passionate, horribly brutal and devastatingly provocative memoir. This is the one.
This entire review has been hidden because of spoilers.
October 19, 2013
Oh boy, what do you say about such a book as this. Lucas Jeanfrueax is a kid living in Southern Louisiana, reeking out an existence with domestic violence, alcoholism, and just being in the bottom of the socioeconomic gene pool in general. I hated the descriptions of his life and all the unselfconsciousness of his moves throughout growing up, which is debatable in my mind. Like for instance, when he and his buddy are driving after a Mardi Gras celebration high on acid and they decide to kill something so they take out every dog in their path. Or on the road with Cora and Mike and he just out of no where decides to throw a bottle out the window of a moving vehicle toward another car, just to hear the glass shatter. What kind of non sense ...
So Lucas goes on with more and more neglect/neglectfulness, and is somewhat of a poor celebrity because he was a beautiful kid, and then at the age of eighteen he loses his arm in an auto accident. NOW this is where I get a little perturbed. As the daughter of a woman who has a lost limb, I wanted not to pity him for his loss, and the more I read the more angry I became. I wanted more than anything to tell him to "Oh my goodness son, BUCK UP! Are YOU the only one who's ever suffered?" , but the thing that most made me pity him was the attitude he's taken. Blaming everyone and everything but himself. Throwing his fist at God and being so blasphemous. I don't even know any proclaimed atheists in my world that would be mocking in such a way. If I were him, I'd be fearful just in case there was a God, that he knows not. How bitterly hopeless.
Truly, I about couldn't stomach this book and barely made it through to the end, although I admit I HAD to skip and skim in a lot of places. I did not and could not care for this book, and that is a real rarity for me. Not at all what I had expected from the reviews. Sorely disappointed.
So Lucas goes on with more and more neglect/neglectfulness, and is somewhat of a poor celebrity because he was a beautiful kid, and then at the age of eighteen he loses his arm in an auto accident. NOW this is where I get a little perturbed. As the daughter of a woman who has a lost limb, I wanted not to pity him for his loss, and the more I read the more angry I became. I wanted more than anything to tell him to "Oh my goodness son, BUCK UP! Are YOU the only one who's ever suffered?" , but the thing that most made me pity him was the attitude he's taken. Blaming everyone and everything but himself. Throwing his fist at God and being so blasphemous. I don't even know any proclaimed atheists in my world that would be mocking in such a way. If I were him, I'd be fearful just in case there was a God, that he knows not. How bitterly hopeless.
Truly, I about couldn't stomach this book and barely made it through to the end, although I admit I HAD to skip and skim in a lot of places. I did not and could not care for this book, and that is a real rarity for me. Not at all what I had expected from the reviews. Sorely disappointed.
September 26, 2013
I’ll start out by saying that I did not like the book. It’s not because it was “dark.” I’ve enjoyed many books that were not “happy” stories. Still, I quickly grew tired of the protagonist’s self-pitying navel-gazing. It’s not even very well-written self-pitying navel-gazing. I was tempted to put the book down and stop reading, but I pressed on. It never did get any better. The book is a series of short vignettes told in first person as memories by the main character, from his point of view in the present. The stories rang hollow to me throughout.
The author over-emphasizes the working class origins of the main character and his hatred of the middle class. You could make a drinking game out of the number of times the words “middle class” appear. How many times does he think we need to be told? Also, he seems to make a point to include every Southern redneck cliché and stereotype. Family violence? It’s there. Cheap beer? It’s there. Squirrel hunting? It’s there. The KKK? It’s there. The list goes on. And, of course, he didn’t leave out the possums.
I received a free copy of this book for review through the Goodreads First Reads program.
The author over-emphasizes the working class origins of the main character and his hatred of the middle class. You could make a drinking game out of the number of times the words “middle class” appear. How many times does he think we need to be told? Also, he seems to make a point to include every Southern redneck cliché and stereotype. Family violence? It’s there. Cheap beer? It’s there. Squirrel hunting? It’s there. The KKK? It’s there. The list goes on. And, of course, he didn’t leave out the possums.
I received a free copy of this book for review through the Goodreads First Reads program.
October 16, 2016
Couldn't get into it.
September 19, 2013
The Gar Diaries by Louis Bourgeois
Review by Barbara Bamberger Scott
“Standing under the street in the rain and in the sewage water, I realized this was some kind of test, some right of passage, to become a member of the Society of Misspent Youth…and there was a good chance I might not get out of it alive…” Thus opines the seven-year-old Lucas Jeanfreaux, the somber, sardonic narrator of this devilishly delectable coming-of-age memoir, after being dumped in the storm drain by some neighborhood toughs.
Given that author and prize-winning poet Louis Bourgeois grew up in the places he so richly describes through the eyes of anti-hero Lucas – Slidell and the Bayou country of Louisiana – one suspects there is a heaping helping of fact in this fictional “diary” of a child whose earliest memory is of conjuring up a nasty gargoyle who convinces the four-year-old to eat cockroaches until he throws up. The diary entries run from 1973 to 2005, enough time for the boy raised in poverty to survive parental scream-fests, help his father fish for the “hauntingly ugly” gar, and be tormented by smarter, richer kids, so that he declares early on, in a brilliant angler’s image, “I’ve dedicated my life to never letting the rich off the hook.”
Though chronological, the stories are so divergent that at times one wonders where they will wander next. Lucas’ memories range from watching a high school basketball star shoot himself in the head, to going on a dog killing spree, to remembering the man he called The Blue Boy because “he made me feel strange and nostalgic for something I still can’t understand.” It takes literary lyricism, which Bourgeois has in abundance, to depict the loneliness of starting primary school among the “nuns, veils, cryptic codes in very bad Latin,” so artfully that it seems like fond nostalgia rather than a deeply repressed childhood nightmare. Somehow as the years pass, the picture of Lucas Jeanfreaux gradually comes into focus: the boy who saw “poetry” in the heavy black habits of the nuns, becomes the brilliant but suicidal Honors English student.
In college, Lucas, who has lost an arm in a car accident and whose “empty sleeve fluttered in the wind like some kind of awful strewn flag of defeat,” acts out his angst in bizarre ways: admiring a lesbian actress because she seems “full of death,” fantasizing about killing the next person he sees, trading beers and mutterings with street bums, and concluding, in his twenty-something way, that “life is made up of nothing.” Yet the book ends on a hopeful note: a final diary entry describes the “chickens of Cousin Street” that have unaccountably survived Hurricane Katrina.
The Gar Diaries offers new readers a timely opportunity to acquaint themselves with the poetic prose of Louis Bourgeois.
Review by Barbara Bamberger Scott
“Standing under the street in the rain and in the sewage water, I realized this was some kind of test, some right of passage, to become a member of the Society of Misspent Youth…and there was a good chance I might not get out of it alive…” Thus opines the seven-year-old Lucas Jeanfreaux, the somber, sardonic narrator of this devilishly delectable coming-of-age memoir, after being dumped in the storm drain by some neighborhood toughs.
Given that author and prize-winning poet Louis Bourgeois grew up in the places he so richly describes through the eyes of anti-hero Lucas – Slidell and the Bayou country of Louisiana – one suspects there is a heaping helping of fact in this fictional “diary” of a child whose earliest memory is of conjuring up a nasty gargoyle who convinces the four-year-old to eat cockroaches until he throws up. The diary entries run from 1973 to 2005, enough time for the boy raised in poverty to survive parental scream-fests, help his father fish for the “hauntingly ugly” gar, and be tormented by smarter, richer kids, so that he declares early on, in a brilliant angler’s image, “I’ve dedicated my life to never letting the rich off the hook.”
Though chronological, the stories are so divergent that at times one wonders where they will wander next. Lucas’ memories range from watching a high school basketball star shoot himself in the head, to going on a dog killing spree, to remembering the man he called The Blue Boy because “he made me feel strange and nostalgic for something I still can’t understand.” It takes literary lyricism, which Bourgeois has in abundance, to depict the loneliness of starting primary school among the “nuns, veils, cryptic codes in very bad Latin,” so artfully that it seems like fond nostalgia rather than a deeply repressed childhood nightmare. Somehow as the years pass, the picture of Lucas Jeanfreaux gradually comes into focus: the boy who saw “poetry” in the heavy black habits of the nuns, becomes the brilliant but suicidal Honors English student.
In college, Lucas, who has lost an arm in a car accident and whose “empty sleeve fluttered in the wind like some kind of awful strewn flag of defeat,” acts out his angst in bizarre ways: admiring a lesbian actress because she seems “full of death,” fantasizing about killing the next person he sees, trading beers and mutterings with street bums, and concluding, in his twenty-something way, that “life is made up of nothing.” Yet the book ends on a hopeful note: a final diary entry describes the “chickens of Cousin Street” that have unaccountably survived Hurricane Katrina.
The Gar Diaries offers new readers a timely opportunity to acquaint themselves with the poetic prose of Louis Bourgeois.
This entire review has been hidden because of spoilers.
January 26, 2014
***RECEIVED FROM FIRST READS GIVEAWAY***
Reading the blurbs on the book cover, I was expecting this generations greatest author, yet what I found in its pages was arrogance. All I could think as I was reading was, 'who do you think you are?' Talking back through his childhood, he is an outcast, but he puts this across as because the other children know he is better than them. In a self pitying, death obsessed narrative that jumps from first person to third person, which I find highly annoying, there is nothing that really makes this book jump out to me as "a book that will be discussed for years to come". The only profound sentence of note that I appreciated in the 263 pages, was found on page 23:
"If you're a father, be carful with your voice; it only takes one time to ruin a child for life."
This man has truly been scarred mentally and physically, but due to his demeanour, I feel absolutely no sympathy, I could not empathise. This could just be how his voice is perceived on paper, and could be the complete opposite in person, but even he himself admits to being a "boorish asshole". I'm genuinely surprised I finished the book.
Reading the blurbs on the book cover, I was expecting this generations greatest author, yet what I found in its pages was arrogance. All I could think as I was reading was, 'who do you think you are?' Talking back through his childhood, he is an outcast, but he puts this across as because the other children know he is better than them. In a self pitying, death obsessed narrative that jumps from first person to third person, which I find highly annoying, there is nothing that really makes this book jump out to me as "a book that will be discussed for years to come". The only profound sentence of note that I appreciated in the 263 pages, was found on page 23:
"If you're a father, be carful with your voice; it only takes one time to ruin a child for life."
This man has truly been scarred mentally and physically, but due to his demeanour, I feel absolutely no sympathy, I could not empathise. This could just be how his voice is perceived on paper, and could be the complete opposite in person, but even he himself admits to being a "boorish asshole". I'm genuinely surprised I finished the book.
Read
October 4, 2013About time I reviewed this thing. It bothers me even now, which is often the sign of a book that gets under your skin and may mean something to you later on. I'm not sure that's the case with this book. I found the writing good, or good enough to convey the tale, and the subject matter bleak but endurable (for the reader)
August 16, 2013
I did finish this book but it was difficult. Some of the stories were pretty good but for the most part it just didn't catch me. I kind of felt sorry for him at first but then as the entries continued it seemed the only thing he wanted to do was shoot things and run over dogs (after dropping acid) I just lost interest. His writing style was good but the content was lacking.
October 3, 2013
(I only gave it 3 stars because it's not one of my favorite genres or subjects.) The Gar Diaries is deep and moving. Although it's not a book I would pull off the shelf on my own, I'm so glad I received it as a First-Reads giveaway. I know the subject matter isn't for everyone, but if you can step out of your comfort zone, you may be (like me) pleasantly surprised.
September 17, 2013
Very good book. Difficult to put down. I didn't care in the least for the religion (or non-religion) parts of the story but then again, I was told that this a book that would be talked about. I look forward to trying another book by Louis Bourgeois. I wonder if he is always such a "dark" writer.......
August 15, 2013
This is the kind of story that slowly pulls you in until you feel as if you can see hear and smell the Louisiana swamp water. The honesty of the author makes me blush at times and then cheer on the rage and wit of the main character. I will be reading this one again soon.
October 28, 2013
I received a free copy of this book from other publishing Company.
I was taken aback by the rawness of this book. I feel like this is a great read and will keep your interest fully tact and lead you at a good pace to the end.
I was taken aback by the rawness of this book. I feel like this is a great read and will keep your interest fully tact and lead you at a good pace to the end.
September 27, 2013
I can't say I loved this book, but I can say I do appreciate its dark poetic quality. It is stark, and often brutal, but honest to a fault. I will say I am glad I read it.
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December 14, 2013Not good
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