What do you think?
Rate this book
Verano del odio
“In his journal, Paul liked to make lists: What he ordered from Commissary (shaving cream, toothpaste, deodorant, the transistor radio he had for a week before the guards took it away). The books he picked off the cart (The Bible, Dean Koontz, Stephen King, Codependent No More.) What phone calls he made and received; also, Bible Study certificates, letters and cards, his workout routines and his moods (Anxious, Nervous, Trusting in God, but mostly Depressed). Paul has a record of every push-up he did while he was in prison but he cannot remember shit about what happened before his arrest.”
--from Summer of Hate
Waking up from the chilling high of a near-death sex game, Catt Dunlop travels to Albuquerque in 2005 to reinvest some windfall real-estate gains and reengage with something approximating “real life.” Aware that the critical discourse she has used to build her career as a visiting professor and art critic is really a cipher for something else, she hopes that buying and fixing slum buildings will bring her more closely in touch with American life than the essays she writes.
In Albuquerque, she becomes romantically involved with Paul Garcia, a recently sober ex-con who has just served sixteen months in state prison for defrauding Halliburton Industries, his former employer, of $873. Almost forty years old, Paul is highly intelligent but has only been out of New Mexico twice. He has no information. With Catt’s help, he makes plans to attend UCLA, only to be arrested on a ten-year-old bench warrant en route.
Caught in the nightmarish Byzantine world of the legal system, Catt and Paul’s empathic attempts to save each other’s lives seems doomed to dissolve. Summer of Hate is a novel about flawed reciprocity and American justice, recording recent events through the prism of a beleaguered romance. As lucid and trenchant as ever, Kraus in her newest novel reminds us that the writer can be a first responder of sorts when power becomes invisible, or merely banal.
--from Summer of Hate
Waking up from the chilling high of a near-death sex game, Catt Dunlop travels to Albuquerque in 2005 to reinvest some windfall real-estate gains and reengage with something approximating “real life.” Aware that the critical discourse she has used to build her career as a visiting professor and art critic is really a cipher for something else, she hopes that buying and fixing slum buildings will bring her more closely in touch with American life than the essays she writes.
In Albuquerque, she becomes romantically involved with Paul Garcia, a recently sober ex-con who has just served sixteen months in state prison for defrauding Halliburton Industries, his former employer, of $873. Almost forty years old, Paul is highly intelligent but has only been out of New Mexico twice. He has no information. With Catt’s help, he makes plans to attend UCLA, only to be arrested on a ten-year-old bench warrant en route.
Caught in the nightmarish Byzantine world of the legal system, Catt and Paul’s empathic attempts to save each other’s lives seems doomed to dissolve. Summer of Hate is a novel about flawed reciprocity and American justice, recording recent events through the prism of a beleaguered romance. As lucid and trenchant as ever, Kraus in her newest novel reminds us that the writer can be a first responder of sorts when power becomes invisible, or merely banal.
272 pages, Paperback
First published September 1, 2012
40 people are currently reading
1722 people want to read
About the author
Chris Kraus
76 books912 followersChris Kraus is a writer and critic. She studied acting and spent almost two decades making performances and experimental films in New York before moving to Los Angeles where she began writing. Her novels include Aliens & Anorexia, I Love Dick, Torpor, and Summer of Hate. She has published three books of cultural criticism—Video Green: Los Angeles Art and the Triumph of Nothingness, Where Art Belongs, and Social Practices. I Love Dick was adapted for television and her literary biography After Kathy Acker was published by Semiotext(e) and Penguin Press. A former Guggenheim Fellow, Kraus held the Mary Routt Chair of Writing at Scripps College in 2019 and was Writer-in-Residence at ArtCenter College between 2020–2024. She has written for various magazines and has been a coeditor of the independent press Semiotext(e) since 1990. Her work has been praised for its damning intelligence, vulnerability, and dazzling speed and has been translated into seventeen languages. She lives in Los Angeles.
Ratings & Reviews
Friends & Following
Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!
Community Reviews
Displaying 1 - 30 of 73 reviews
September 4, 2012
For me Chris Kraus is something like the perfect writer (whose books are made even greater by the honesty of their many imperfections.) She is the writer my generation needs to jump start English-speaking literature again in these hopelessly depleted, heart-sick and mediocre times, to re-invent directness in a world of spin and televisual lies. Every novel she writes, for me, reinvents the game (though Aliens & Anorexia remains my favorite, perhaps only because it was the first one I read.) She is a writer who is always driving towards the content, towards a more personal and accurate understanding of the world we live in today, alongside theory but also away from theory's hypocrisies and excesses, towards what is concrete and significant in what she is saying and how she is saying it. When I meet someone who also reads and admires the novels of Chris Kraus, I know I have met someone I'm happy to talk with for awhile. (And yet it always makes me nervous when I start to overload the praise.) Just read all of her books.
January 20, 2020
I found this book incredibly uncomfortable and at times pretty sordid. She definitely gets the message across, about incarceration and the long road to reinsertion, but to me this book is all about the message, and not so much about the story.
Another thing about such a novel, is that money is such an important element, and that was probably what made is aesthetically somewhat tiresome. Money is spoken about from the first to the last page, and even if it is an important message, the one in this novel, I found myself not believing it, the possibility of all that happens, the characters. If Paul is such a wonderful man, eaten by a system that won't give him a chance, why is that the only thing you know about him? There must be more, and still you don't see it, I suppose because it is not the most important part. But if a character is just representation, then how can you believe his-her story? can it also be emotional?
I must add though, I think Kraus is a fiercely original writer, and I love the directions she takes in her books, the places she takes you are pretty great.
Another thing about such a novel, is that money is such an important element, and that was probably what made is aesthetically somewhat tiresome. Money is spoken about from the first to the last page, and even if it is an important message, the one in this novel, I found myself not believing it, the possibility of all that happens, the characters. If Paul is such a wonderful man, eaten by a system that won't give him a chance, why is that the only thing you know about him? There must be more, and still you don't see it, I suppose because it is not the most important part. But if a character is just representation, then how can you believe his-her story? can it also be emotional?
I must add though, I think Kraus is a fiercely original writer, and I love the directions she takes in her books, the places she takes you are pretty great.
March 25, 2017
Another amazingly important novel from Chris Kraus. There might be other novels recounting the slippery descent into self-hatred, fear, and scapegoating that the Bush administration precipitated and which has firmly gripped the USA since the turn of the century but, not having read any of them--or even knowing about them--I find this novel astounding and original in its penetrating gaze into our current social and political situation. We have indeed become a nation divided into waggish "haves" who deal in cultural savvy and/or easy corporate wealth and bury themselves behind walled and gated suburban communities or urban high-rises and an other, growing America of miserably unselfconscious, often ethnically defined "have nots" who live in a shifting triangular space between addiction, insurmountable and ever-mounting debt, and incarceration.
The failed love affair of this novel, then, is the story of American bourgeois liberality, the last tattered remnants of our Christian and social conscience being crushed under the pseudo- or neo-fascist boot of privatized prison profits, a xenophobic rounding up of the usual foreign suspects (now for actual torture under the name of "interrogation"), and Ayn Randian logic that claims that hating your fellow humans is the best way to serve them. (From the other perspective, it would seem to be about blind, animal survival--ever tougher in a world that humiliates one at every turn and has forged a bond between poverty and morality that is only echoed in the few life preservers thrown to the drowning: more loans to pay off previous loans, a-moral twelve-step fatalism, and leaning guiltily on some member of that other, somehow much, much better class.)
I'm so glad someone said so. Reading this novel has been an empathetic trial and cathartic release and I will recommend it to anyone who will listen from now on--as the experience is described for the female, bourgeois half of the couple/narrative. In other words I identified wholeheartedly with the character of Catt--I, too, am a university instructor, writer, and cultural con-man. Still, I couldn't help but wonder what a member of the great American underclass, with whom I have flirted overlong and imitated but in which I have never really felt comfortable, would think of this novel. Will Summer of Hate ever be read by people like Paul? And what if they did? Would they find it condescending? perhaps in part. Such are the problems of subjectivity and the old modernist trope of representing in a novel a pair of contrasting subjectivities. Deftly done--it seems to me--but I cannot entirely judge the novel's success for my own subjectivity gets in the way.
As a writer I was at first quite disappointed to find that Summer of Hate was not written in the post-modern stylings of the other Chris Kraus novel that I loved sooooooooo much, I Love Dick. Still, I think I would defend the choice--political/sentimental novel that it is, the subject here is perhaps better suited to the modernist tradition with its firm roots in the socialistic realism of the nineteenth century. Still, I think Ms. Kraus did do much of the same kind of social critique in I Love Dick and in that novel the PoMo pyrotechnics served her well--particularly when dealing with love as a discourse, art world issues, and the exposure of the muting of the female perspective in the Occidental literary tradition. So, whatever--Summer of Hate says exactly what needed to be said, and in a traditionally sound way--Kraus is a great writer regardless--but I did slightly pine for the groundbreaking form that I so loved about her first novel I Love Dick. Now on to the other two novels that she wrote in-between--or at least Torpor; Aliens and Anorexia seems to be out of print and I can't find a copy anywhere that I can afford!
The failed love affair of this novel, then, is the story of American bourgeois liberality, the last tattered remnants of our Christian and social conscience being crushed under the pseudo- or neo-fascist boot of privatized prison profits, a xenophobic rounding up of the usual foreign suspects (now for actual torture under the name of "interrogation"), and Ayn Randian logic that claims that hating your fellow humans is the best way to serve them. (From the other perspective, it would seem to be about blind, animal survival--ever tougher in a world that humiliates one at every turn and has forged a bond between poverty and morality that is only echoed in the few life preservers thrown to the drowning: more loans to pay off previous loans, a-moral twelve-step fatalism, and leaning guiltily on some member of that other, somehow much, much better class.)
I'm so glad someone said so. Reading this novel has been an empathetic trial and cathartic release and I will recommend it to anyone who will listen from now on--as the experience is described for the female, bourgeois half of the couple/narrative. In other words I identified wholeheartedly with the character of Catt--I, too, am a university instructor, writer, and cultural con-man. Still, I couldn't help but wonder what a member of the great American underclass, with whom I have flirted overlong and imitated but in which I have never really felt comfortable, would think of this novel. Will Summer of Hate ever be read by people like Paul? And what if they did? Would they find it condescending? perhaps in part. Such are the problems of subjectivity and the old modernist trope of representing in a novel a pair of contrasting subjectivities. Deftly done--it seems to me--but I cannot entirely judge the novel's success for my own subjectivity gets in the way.
As a writer I was at first quite disappointed to find that Summer of Hate was not written in the post-modern stylings of the other Chris Kraus novel that I loved sooooooooo much, I Love Dick. Still, I think I would defend the choice--political/sentimental novel that it is, the subject here is perhaps better suited to the modernist tradition with its firm roots in the socialistic realism of the nineteenth century. Still, I think Ms. Kraus did do much of the same kind of social critique in I Love Dick and in that novel the PoMo pyrotechnics served her well--particularly when dealing with love as a discourse, art world issues, and the exposure of the muting of the female perspective in the Occidental literary tradition. So, whatever--Summer of Hate says exactly what needed to be said, and in a traditionally sound way--Kraus is a great writer regardless--but I did slightly pine for the groundbreaking form that I so loved about her first novel I Love Dick. Now on to the other two novels that she wrote in-between--or at least Torpor; Aliens and Anorexia seems to be out of print and I can't find a copy anywhere that I can afford!
September 23, 2014
This is an entertaining novel that tries to tackle the big issues of the Bush-era USA - class, race, nationalism, the prison-industrial complex, crumbling lives in crumbling cities and ways that people get by. The central plot thread is the romance between Catt, cultural commentator cum real estate entrepreneur and Paul, the ex-con with a heart of gold. This flickers along without ever fully convincing, and there's a sense throughout that the characters are pawns in Kraus' bigger political game. The disappointment then is that the political points lack nuance or bite - the targets are obvious and the delivery straightforward. The writing is clear and readable throughout, but not particularly memorable and the whole experience of reading this book is engaging without being particularly stimulating.
July 10, 2019
Tredje boken i temat SOMMAR.
Inte alls vad jag väntat mig (i positiv mening).
Som en intelligent, politisk grit lit. Figuren Paul
ger mig vibbar av en Willy Vlautin-karaktär.
Inte alls vad jag väntat mig (i positiv mening).
Som en intelligent, politisk grit lit. Figuren Paul
ger mig vibbar av en Willy Vlautin-karaktär.
January 22, 2026
Un poco crítica al sistema carcelario, un poco una visión ridícula de la clase media alta estadounidense, un poco una delirante novela sobre un romance fallido con personajes levemente detestables. Ni idea, es una novela entretenida, me gustó.
Trata de decir algo, darnos un mensaje sobre el sistema carcelario, y la injusticia de la desigualdad y la pobreza, pero creo que mucho de eso queda tapado por los personajes y la trama que de cierta forma prefiere ir para otro lado, por más que la escritora hizo lo posible para dejar claro cuál es el mensaje. Que tuviera personajes TAN insufribles no ayuda a que el mensaje llegue de forma clara, pero evidentemente hace un libro increíblemente más disfrutable, que los personajes fueran infumables es lo que hace al libro tan imposible de dejarlo.
Seguramente lea algo más de la autora, aunque no estoy del todo seguro cuántas ganas tengo de andar por la calle con un libro llamado "I Love Dick" (?
Trata de decir algo, darnos un mensaje sobre el sistema carcelario, y la injusticia de la desigualdad y la pobreza, pero creo que mucho de eso queda tapado por los personajes y la trama que de cierta forma prefiere ir para otro lado, por más que la escritora hizo lo posible para dejar claro cuál es el mensaje. Que tuviera personajes TAN insufribles no ayuda a que el mensaje llegue de forma clara, pero evidentemente hace un libro increíblemente más disfrutable, que los personajes fueran infumables es lo que hace al libro tan imposible de dejarlo.
Seguramente lea algo más de la autora, aunque no estoy del todo seguro cuántas ganas tengo de andar por la calle con un libro llamado "I Love Dick" (?
June 24, 2025
Åh ja så bra!!! Thihihi. Jag gillar verkligen hur Kraus skriver och denna roman va verkligen najs! Så kul att se hennes fiktiva skrivande. Betydligt lättare att hänga med men fortfarande kvicktänkt och lekfullt tänkvärt. Så spännande genom hela boken och slutet va perfekt öppet. Känner mig melankolisk och något upprymd
May 20, 2013
Kraus has talent for creating that punched in the gut sensation, pointing out the insanity and disconnect we all lived under during the Bush administration. Kraus is able to put her finger directly onto the emotions of those years. She illustrates a time we all seemed to be under a Xanax haze, numb and ambivalent to the cruelty the US was imposing on the outsiders of our society. This novel has its flaws, in my opinion they lie mostly with character, but they are so forgivable in the light of what Kraus has provided.
July 27, 2023
2.5/5
I liked the prose and what I think is Kraus's no nonsense sensibility, but I found her characters, which were the driving force of the novel, to be lacking. I wanted to get more into Catt's head, learn about her death wish, her relationship with men and, in particular, why the hell she stuck with Paul and bankrolled his financial issues. On some level I do think he was a sort of charity project for her, a way to help ease her conscious, but I felt like I was missing some insight into her thoughts and/or feelings that might help to clear that up for me. I couldn't tell if she was a just a privileged, slightly hollow academic looking for something to help make her life feel more real, or if there was more to her.
As to Paul, I just struggled to find him all that interesting. Maybe I'm just revealing my awfully middle class sensibilities but I didn't find him all that sympathetic. Yes the justice system is fucked up and corrupt, but I didn't find that enough of a reason to want to read about him and his issues. He seemed so pedestrian in every way I just wasn't convinced by him or his problems.
I think Krauss did a very strong job in capturing the setting and its atmosphere, and I wanted to find Catt interesting, but really I don't think there's much to recommend this novel to anyone.
I liked the prose and what I think is Kraus's no nonsense sensibility, but I found her characters, which were the driving force of the novel, to be lacking. I wanted to get more into Catt's head, learn about her death wish, her relationship with men and, in particular, why the hell she stuck with Paul and bankrolled his financial issues. On some level I do think he was a sort of charity project for her, a way to help ease her conscious, but I felt like I was missing some insight into her thoughts and/or feelings that might help to clear that up for me. I couldn't tell if she was a just a privileged, slightly hollow academic looking for something to help make her life feel more real, or if there was more to her.
As to Paul, I just struggled to find him all that interesting. Maybe I'm just revealing my awfully middle class sensibilities but I didn't find him all that sympathetic. Yes the justice system is fucked up and corrupt, but I didn't find that enough of a reason to want to read about him and his issues. He seemed so pedestrian in every way I just wasn't convinced by him or his problems.
I think Krauss did a very strong job in capturing the setting and its atmosphere, and I wanted to find Catt interesting, but really I don't think there's much to recommend this novel to anyone.
August 1, 2022
really bad to be frank
June 12, 2014
Moving out of the confessional, essayistic 'I' of I Love Dick and Aliens & Anorexia into a more traditional, novelistic third person doesn't suit Kraus. Nor does the novel's worthy, sincere politicking, which would make Orwell blush.
Similarly, narrative's complicity with capitalism, something Kraus has touched upon before, is pushed in a more overt way: Eleanor Marx and George Eliot are referenced as Simone Weil and Ulrike Meinhof were in Aliens, as symbols of the text's concerns, while sums of money are constantly, obtrusively tallied to the cent. Catt's attempt to 'Pygmalion' Paul, and the stories arc, constantly hits the barriers when we're shown over and over that life is actually really, really hard if you're poor.
There's not anything wrong with directly political art, but the story's so crudely drawn and Kraus' patronising free indirect narration - an attempt to get inside the head of a ex-con bludgeoned by society; to show us his ineloquence - shows why her usual subject is her own Jew-ish/WASP-y academic surroundings.
Similarly, narrative's complicity with capitalism, something Kraus has touched upon before, is pushed in a more overt way: Eleanor Marx and George Eliot are referenced as Simone Weil and Ulrike Meinhof were in Aliens, as symbols of the text's concerns, while sums of money are constantly, obtrusively tallied to the cent. Catt's attempt to 'Pygmalion' Paul, and the stories arc, constantly hits the barriers when we're shown over and over that life is actually really, really hard if you're poor.
There's not anything wrong with directly political art, but the story's so crudely drawn and Kraus' patronising free indirect narration - an attempt to get inside the head of a ex-con bludgeoned by society; to show us his ineloquence - shows why her usual subject is her own Jew-ish/WASP-y academic surroundings.
January 29, 2017
the kind of honesty i like. one with a thin sheen of fiction and, on occasion, a thick glob of style (but this mostly subtle, a french exit or a tasteful gesture). mannered yet truthful. paced here with a good and slow buildup but not quite manipulatively suspenseful. an effective documentary-ish presentation re: class, race, and cultural capital... and, reading it in january 2017, the appalling realization the bush II years were a restrained preview and not the nadir. dug this book.
August 25, 2022
The first 1/3 of the book was slow as molasses. There was so much detail and backstory added to Catt. Yet she still came off as rich, pretentious, one dimensional, and dry—a glorified doormat with a savior complex.
Paul’s introduction was a bit easier to get through, so the book started to pick up speed once the two characters were put on a collision course in Albuquerque. However, by the halfway mark, I was still clueless about where the story was headed (and not in a good way). The last third of the book provided some redemption as it showed the systematic pitfalls associated with a felon’s struggle to survive parole, escape the cycle of debt/restitution, re-establish themselves in society, and get an education. .
The acknowledgment page indicates that partial proceeds from the book sales were donated to ‘Middle Ground Prison Reform’. So I guess that was the point of the story? An ode to prison reform(?). Assuming that is indeed the case, then some of Kraus’ narrative choices seem even more bizarre. Don’t get me wrong…I kinda liked the prose, but the pacing/execution of the narrative was lacking.
Why position Catt as the protagonist when she’s NOT even the one in jail? Yes, I do understand that Catt’s cushy life is meant to serve as a contrast to all of Paul’s hardships, but I was bored to TEARS. Also, wouldn’t Paul’s sister, Pam, have been a better foil? Why torture us with the details of Catt’s dangerous internet antics and financial freewheeling? How does that relate to advocating for prison reform in the grand scheme of society? So many questions…
Paul’s introduction was a bit easier to get through, so the book started to pick up speed once the two characters were put on a collision course in Albuquerque. However, by the halfway mark, I was still clueless about where the story was headed (and not in a good way). The last third of the book provided some redemption as it showed the systematic pitfalls associated with a felon’s struggle to survive parole, escape the cycle of debt/restitution, re-establish themselves in society, and get an education. .
The acknowledgment page indicates that partial proceeds from the book sales were donated to ‘Middle Ground Prison Reform’. So I guess that was the point of the story? An ode to prison reform(?). Assuming that is indeed the case, then some of Kraus’ narrative choices seem even more bizarre. Don’t get me wrong…I kinda liked the prose, but the pacing/execution of the narrative was lacking.
Why position Catt as the protagonist when she’s NOT even the one in jail? Yes, I do understand that Catt’s cushy life is meant to serve as a contrast to all of Paul’s hardships, but I was bored to TEARS. Also, wouldn’t Paul’s sister, Pam, have been a better foil? Why torture us with the details of Catt’s dangerous internet antics and financial freewheeling? How does that relate to advocating for prison reform in the grand scheme of society? So many questions…
January 23, 2024
mercifully unpitying. incarceration is something so inhumane, it's impossible to imagine, even when it's described to you. it's easy to feel like we deserve a reward for even having to witness it, like so many other unfathomable cruelties enacted around us and with our help. but there are no rewards in life, not really. catharsis is an illusion to make the middle class feel better about paying taxes. drawing connecting lines between evils is another clever way to bury your guilt. and reading a book is just reading a book--god's not going to congratulate you.
July 24, 2021
en av sommarens höjdpunkter! läste ”i love dick” för några år sen och blev lite avskräckt av Kraus pretentioner MEN det här var något annat. tidigt 00-tal i USA, vilket är fascinerande i sig, en del av ”historien” jag kan minnas och relatera till. politikerna är inte vaga namn utan faktiska ansikten.
boken handlar mycket om pengar, bristen på dem i ett klassamhälle där vissa i princip är ”dömda” till att misslyckas (bokens manliga huvudkaraktär, alkoholiserad, skuldtyngd, åker ut och in ur fängelse) medan andra kan leva mer eller mindre laglöst utan att straffas (bokens kvinnliga huvudkaraktär, någon slags kulturell elit möter skattefifflande fastighetsköpare, också skuldtyngd).
boken undersöker om de här två personerna ens KAN vara ihop på ett sätt som är realistiskt, fascinerande och fruktansvärt sorgligt
boken handlar mycket om pengar, bristen på dem i ett klassamhälle där vissa i princip är ”dömda” till att misslyckas (bokens manliga huvudkaraktär, alkoholiserad, skuldtyngd, åker ut och in ur fängelse) medan andra kan leva mer eller mindre laglöst utan att straffas (bokens kvinnliga huvudkaraktär, någon slags kulturell elit möter skattefifflande fastighetsköpare, också skuldtyngd).
boken undersöker om de här två personerna ens KAN vara ihop på ett sätt som är realistiskt, fascinerande och fruktansvärt sorgligt
April 2, 2018
This book reads like it's trying to sound smart without actually being smart. Like a pretentious college student who's trying to get participation credit in class but didn't actually read the material and is thus just throwing in buzzwords. It contains lines, un-ironically delivered, like "I have been thinking about this from the position of abstraction as a form of representation," and "Abjection implies a descent. In order to suffer this degradation, doesn't the subject first have to exist?" These lines have barely more context in the text than I give here. It's like a second-rate sociologist tried her hand at being a second-rate novelist, and succeeded at neither.
But hey, it's easy to criticize. I read the whole thing, so I guess it was good enough.
But hey, it's easy to criticize. I read the whole thing, so I guess it was good enough.
December 24, 2018
Una novela con una estructura rara y muchos personajes innecesarios.
Sirve como documental sobre el sistema de justicia desigual y regresivo para inmigrantes latinos que crecen y viven sin privilegios.
Sobre, Paul, el personaje latino que sufre todas las desgracias, no se entiende qué tiene de encantador.
Sirve como documental sobre el sistema de justicia desigual y regresivo para inmigrantes latinos que crecen y viven sin privilegios.
Sobre, Paul, el personaje latino que sufre todas las desgracias, no se entiende qué tiene de encantador.
June 3, 2021
två å en halv då
January 5, 2023
Por la mitad del libro, me puse a pensar cuál sería mi próximo libro.
Malo.
Malo.
October 5, 2023
3.5. Kändes lite som att läsa en cool smart film. Iaf första hälften, sen blir avslutet lite tjopp-tjopp. Samhällskritisk men kanske lite för bundet till Amerika för 10 år sen? Vad vet jag
July 22, 2019
En mycket bra bok, seg i början men hämtade sig sedan. Var så välskriven och smart, en positiv överraskning!!!
March 15, 2018
I became curious about Chris Kraus watching Jill Soloway's television series "I Love Dick," an autobiographical fiction based on Chris Kraus's novel of the same name. So I thought I check out this more recent novel. It was a great read start to finish. I am happy that such a high-spirited literary outlier is alive and well and still writing on. I wish her stampedes of readers. I am looking forward to checking out some of Kraus's culture essays. I love discovering kindred sister/writers. Nothing quite beats the literary thrill of encountering a brilliant rambunctious mind. I can picture her hanging out with the the rogue nuns in "White Monkey Chronicles." White Monkey Chronicles: The Complete TrilogyWhite Monkey Chronicles: The Complete Trilogy Or camping out with Doctorow's "Walkaways."Walkaway
October 28, 2012
This is the kind of fiction I wish there was more of: about the real lives of people in the 21st century, free of writerly tricks. There was something about the hands-across-the-social-classes romance/reverse-Pygmalion thing that was hard to buy, but I did like Kraus' analysis of what's gone wrong with us.
November 13, 2020
Uncomfortably realistic portrait of the american justice system encased in a deliciously absurd plot. A unique female macho voice.
Read
June 16, 2020Read in two days during a 14-day quarantine I'm not keeping very well.
I love the way Chris Kraus tries to erase all the neat boxes of the world most of us live in. It worked in the first chapter of this book, where she introduces us to a character that if not her is certainly loosely autobiographical. It makes a bunch of things in your head kind of collide and makes you wish you weren't so square. After that, where she tries to create another character, one that's pretty obviously so far from her experience, it's um fine?
I love the way Chris Kraus tries to erase all the neat boxes of the world most of us live in. It worked in the first chapter of this book, where she introduces us to a character that if not her is certainly loosely autobiographical. It makes a bunch of things in your head kind of collide and makes you wish you weren't so square. After that, where she tries to create another character, one that's pretty obviously so far from her experience, it's um fine?
January 8, 2018
Promising premise and moments of cleverness throughout, but explaining the prison industrial complex through a romance between a rich white lady and a thinly drawn diamond-in-the-rough felon felt embarrassing and dated.
April 29, 2023
Found this to be kraus’s most truthful (and linear) work, but perhaps my least favorite of hers. She has maybe the best voice around, of course. The first and last 50 pages are a miracle but the rest is so-so.
January 27, 2025
Ser humillade y oprimido hasta las últimas instancias que la ley exprime (y permite) nunca había sido tan cómico y angustiante. Amo a Chris Krausssss hoy mañana y siempre. Ya la necesito para pensar cualquier cosa es una relación de dependencia.
Displaying 1 - 30 of 73 reviews