Eeeee Eee Eeee

by Tao Lin (Goodreads author)

book data

496 ratings, 3.41 average rating, 152 reviews (more data...)

rating	frequency	%
5		19%
4		32%
3		25%
2		12%
1		9%

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published

May 15th 2007 by Melville House

binding

Paperback, 224 pages

url

http://reader-of-depressing-books.blogsp...

setting

The United States

isbn

1933633255 (isbn13: 9781933633251)

description

"Tao Lin writes from moods that less radical writers would let pass - from laziness, from vacancy, from boredom. And it turns out that his report...more

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12/04/07

Jacob rated it:

I read this book and was completely frustrated by it. Imagine this, boring suburban kid drives around and has musings and thoughts that are as equally engaging. Add some dolphins and maybe a bear. The dolphins are homicidal. The bear is depressed. There might be aliens at the end. The president. It sounds good in the abstract but the execution is lacking. The writing is not engaging. Also, I saw Tao Lin read at The New Yipes in Oakland. I ate one of his grapes when he wasn't looking. I talked to...more

Like this review? yes (13 people liked it)

4 comments

01/12/08

Danielle rated it:

Has a copy to sell/swap — Read in July, 2007

This book was truly godawful. Hipster pretention at its absolute worst. I went in honestly expecting to like this-- I was incredibly optimistic. The optimism began to wane several dozen pages in, and finally I only finished it out of determination to WIN over this piece of crap. And once I WON, I threw it across the room in frustration.

If this book had a face I would punch it.

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03/06/08

Angie rated it:

Read in March, 2008

recommended to Angie by: whoever designed the cover
recommends it for: people who need people

I read this book in sporadic one-hour installments during trips to a nearby Barnes & Noble. The Barnes & Noble has four floors. On the second or third floor, there's a café with a big sign at its entrance prohibiting patrons from bringing in food from outside vendors, but on the fourth floor, where the fiction is, I can sit on the floor or in a folding chair in the section where readings are held and eat anything I want. That’s not true; technically, I can’t eat in these places, but no one ...more I read this book in sporadic one-hour installments during trips to a nearby Barnes & Noble. The Barnes & Noble has four floors. On the second or third floor, there's a café with a big sign at its entrance prohibiting patrons from bringing in food from outside vendors, but on the fourth floor, where the fiction is, I can sit on the floor or in a folding chair in the section where readings are held and eat anything I want. That’s not true; technically, I can’t eat in these places, but no one has ever stopped me. Once I brought in a sandwich and a beer and sat on the small stage in the front of the room, because I liked the way the light was coming in through the window over it. It’s as if by acting with enough confidence and nonchalance, I can persuade the people around me that I know more about the rules than they do.

I have decided that this is the only way to read this book—in erratic and unannounced bursts, alone in a place that is not my home, in flagrant and yet utterly unchecked violation of the rules of social conduct, surrounded by strangers who are having hushed and incredibly serious conversations about things that strike me as wholly meaningless. Really, I think it’s the only way to understand this book.

In eeeee eee eeee’s two hundred or so pages, characters drift in and out, with little or no fuss made over their entrances or exits. Some of them have extensive back stories; some of them seem to have no history whatsoever. Some of them play main roles for a chapter or two, dominating the entire plot, and then vanish and are never mentioned again. Some of them are children. Some of them are bears. Some of them are so unspeakably isolated and untethered that they can’t visualize their own thoughts or desires clearly enough in their own minds to devote an action to them and instead wander numbly from one stationary object to another, looking, turning away, seeing nothing, responding to nothing. This is a lot like the reading room of a popular Manhattan book store, and every public space is a microcosm representative of the broader, surrounding population. So eeeee eee eeee is about twenty-something-year-old pizza-deliverymen who have ironic and seemingly purposeless conversations with their friends, and it is about dolphins that live in an underground city and sometimes bludgeon celebrities, and it is about hamsters trying to explain the underground city to strangers in a park. But through these things, through their randomness and disconnectedness and the flatness with which the characters in the novel receive them, it becomes a spot-on telling of the state of society. it may be my generation's catcher in the rye.

We think we’re bored, but maybe we aren’t, and either way we aren’t sure how to fix it. We try things that don’t work, but we think they should have worked, so we don’t admit that they didn’t; then we are bored and depressed, and we can’t admit that either. We don’t know what to say instead, and we aren’t sure who to talk to, but we’re afraid to stop talking. Sometimes we do terrible things and don’t know why; we regret them, we cry about them, and we do them again. Sometimes the only way you can think of to tell your sister that you love her and you’re lonely and you want to be her friend is to sit on her head. Sometimes people die and no one talks about it at all, and it feels incredibly strange, to know that someone has died and no one is talking about it, and you want to ask everyone why they aren’t talking about it, but you know that you will never ask and that no one will ever explain it, and it makes you desperate. It makes you so desperate that you cover a moose’s head with a blanket and punch it in the face, and when it says, “Thank you,” you want to give it a cookie and kill it and drown, you love it and envy it so much.

eeeee eee eeee is about an invisible person in the center of a crowd of millions of people listening to one person nearby saying, “I’m so tired today. Every time I try to think about something, I forget and think about something else,” and wondering, “Am I tired? Is that what’s wrong?” and writing, “I’m so tired today,” and knowing it isn’t the answer, and thinking about someone who isn't there, and moving to a different seat. That person disappears for two weeks and then comes back, and no one mentions it. Someone stands on a chair and throws a bottle, and someone starts to cry, and everyone looks up and thinks, “I wonder if that would make me happy,” and then goes back to their books.
(less)

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08/09/07

Andrea Woessner rated it:

bookshelves: binned

recommends it for: nobody

The dumbest book ever. I had such high hopes, and it was awful. There was nothing clever or funny about it. It was just irritating. I think I quit about 40 pages in.

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07/01/08

Brent rated it:

Let me first say that I love and admire the title of this novel. I love and especially admire that each line of e's is a different length: 5, 3, 4. I can't explain why this appeals to me.

Next let me say that the design of this book, inside and outside, is nearly sublime. A notch below sublime. Subsublime. Melville House has a knack for these things.

I think I love and admire the title for its asymmetry but I don't know why asymmetry should appeal to me more than symmetry...more

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10/02/07

Noah Cicero rated it:

Read in January, 2007

I think I might have been the first person to read this book except for tao lin: that makes me better than a lot of other people: when I read this book, my penis grew very hard, I broke a wooden table with my penis: Tao Lin wrote this book in a library and maybe in nowhere PA, in a town with a place called "Ming Moon" I ate there, he told me about his childhood and how he loved the song, "Sweet Home Alabama", he said he liked to replace the word "Alabama" with Flo...more

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11/26/07

snackywombat (v.m.) rated it:

Read in March, 2008

recommends it for: Whales

Reading Tao Lin's novel is like going on an acid trip led by Thomas Pynchon and Richard Scarry. This book is determined to take you places and it will not be content with your contentedness. Not something to curl up with, rather it's something you read and hope that the subway doesn't come because you are not sure if you are going to be able to pick back up where you left off. Yet it comes and you open the book back up and you think: well, I wasn't quite sure what was going on anyway. There is s...more

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05/16/07

Eugene rated it:

Read in May, 2007

Eeeee Eee Eeee gets better than it starts. it starts with the reputed tao or the expected tao lin, which is a kinduv updated beavis-&-butthead routine. constant defensive mockery coupled with surreal episodes that function as escape chutes out of narratives that have veered too close to actual confession. ...a dead-on description of a painful and common moment of (contemporary?) early adulthood: boredom and angst and suicide... "how do you have fun?" is the book's repeated questi...more Eeeee Eee Eeee gets better than it starts. it starts with the reputed tao or the expected tao lin, which is a kinduv updated beavis-&-butthead routine. constant defensive mockery coupled with surreal episodes that function as escape chutes out of narratives that have veered too close to actual confession. ...a dead-on description of a painful and common moment of (contemporary?) early adulthood: boredom and angst and suicide... "how do you have fun?" is the book's repeated question. a familiar topic but covered uniquely and with honesty. funny.
then, thankfully, the book is smart and/or lazy enough to switch techniques. the episodes with bears and dolphins get deeper and become less cartoons than multi-reflecting max ernst figures. it begins to risk actual characterization and its longer sentences, seeming at first ironically used, eventually are permitted to speak sincerely.
the briefly appearing Jan is a heartbreaker.
throughout is a sortuv nihilistic worldview that refuses to be pinned down or admit that a full articulation is possible but which is interesting for its defiance.

(the poems of his i read were better, or, maybe his style better succeeds with that form... why? maybe the length of the novel reveals the style's flaws more because it's harder to sustain and his line is more prosaic than musical?...)

__________________

just begun this book last night... a beautiful provocateur and sometimes asshole... an effective and unique writer... curious about this one...

from this bookslut interview:
http://www.bookslut.com/features/2007_05...
Q:I'd like to shift it a little to something I'm not sure you've been asked about before. What was it like to grow up Asian-American in this country? A new book called American-Born Chinese makes it out to be very hard.

A:I'm glad you asked that question. It wasn't very hard at all. I think one person called me a "chink" in about 20 years. It was the person everyone called a “redneck.” There were like 10-15 Asians in my school of about 2000. It wasn't hard. I grew up in Florida.

I want to say something else.

In Eeeee Eee Eeee the main character's parents were born in Germany. His name is Andrew. In earlier drafts Andrew's parents were from Taiwan. I did Microsoft find-and-replace and changed Andrew to Klaus one day, because I thought Andrew was too long. I wanted a one-syllable name. I think that was the reason. Then I changed Taiwan to Germany and Shanghai to Berlin, since people named Klaus are usually from Germany. Then I didn't like the name Klaus and I changed it back to Andrew. I want ideally in my fiction to edit race and name in the same way I might move or delete a comma -- in order to better communicate how existential facts manifest in conscious human beings, so that the reader can look at the sentences and read them and then feel emotions. (less)

Like this review? yes (2 people liked it)

4 comments

04/21/08

Nathalie rated it:

Read in May, 2008

I was somehow sure Eeeee Eee Eeee was a comedy: talking bears and dolphins, killing of famous guests, colour-happy cover and a weird and intriguing title. It actually is a rather depressing book about emptiness, feeling empty and having no purpose in life. Each character - including the beasts - is either depressed or about to die.
As for the form, it is not so much a novel as poetry in a form of a novel, which I always find hard to get into whoever the author is.
If you feel adventur...more

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07/09/07

Matt rated it:

Read in August, 2007

recommends it for: stoners

The reviews for Tao Lin's work have been extraordinary, so I must be a damned idiot. Some kind of story line, syntax, sympathetic character, action, resolution, or point would have been appreciated. If Tao Lin wants to write about his own nihilistic philosophy, he should not do it under the guise of legitimate fiction. Oh, and there are moody, talking bears and dolphins.

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06/10/08

Patrick rated it:

Read in June, 2008

Whenever the author approaches something that could be an interesting story line, he interupts it with dolphins, bears, moose, and/or hamsters. However, he did use very good punctionation, so he has that going for him.

I am not sure if I am most angry at the author for writing it, the publisher for publishing it, or Meera for suggusting it.

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03/17/08

Jennifer rated it:

bookshelves: didnt-finish

Read in January, 2007

This is the worst book i've ever read. It was as non-sensical as a dream. A bear suddenly appears in your car and talks to you......but it wants to detonate a bomb somewhere with your help...and in the meantime you have a crush on some girl you work with. Noooo...i couldnt take it.

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05/26/07

Ofelia Hunt rated it:

recommends it for: penguins with razor-fins

I learned about trap-doors, bears, penguins, presidents, bunny-rabbits, aliens, alienation, alien-nation, existentialism, loneliness, and other things.

Like this review? yes (2 people liked it)

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08/12/07

Brandon rated it:

Read in May, 2007

recommends it for: high school kids

i laughed alot and was happy when i read it. i finished it in like an hour.

Like this review? yes (2 people liked it)

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03/05/08

Ramona rated it:

Read in January, 2007

extremely strange and depressing yet wonderful at the same time.

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08/13/08

Teresa rated it:

This review has been hidden because it contains spoilers. To view it, click here.

what was great:
- andrew does things that we all do but that are embarrassing to the degree that no one ever brings them into the light of day. like cutting out an ad for a concert and then on the day of the concert deciding it's too "difficult" aka scary to actually go.
- use of the animals. it was neat how the animals would give a physical presence to what exists in "real life" just as a feeling. like the bear bossing andrew around. or the dolphin in the corne...more

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09/21/07

Derek rated it:

bookshelves: read--fiction

Read in July, 2007

recommends it for: Fans of postmodern absurdity

This book is definitely worth reading. It's a quick read and contains some of the most novel writing I have ever seen. I assure you that you will stop at least once and think "I have never seen a sentence like that in my entire life". That's a gratifying feeling. But there is a lot of literary value to this book-- see below:

This book is to absurdity what Super Flat Times is to nausea. Both are examples of what happens to characters who are stuck in a world apparently d...more

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03/31/08

Cat rated it:

i had the vague feeling the entire time spent reading this... that i would have found this book for sale at urban outfitters, or h&m. for those of you know know me, we are all aware of my hatred of reading material specifically marketed for "indie kids." this book also made me feel guilty about listening to the music i do, dressing the way i do, and basially everything about how i am, which made me a little grumpy. i may also have enjoyed this book more if i had been smoking a big fat ...more

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06/28/07

Kelly rated it:

Has a copy to sell/swap — Read in July, 2007

I would like to swap this book for any of his other books as I have no money and can not find his books at the library which is where I usually find books.

I also saw him at work once, and it was weird because I knew who he was but he didn't even know I existed in life until I pushed some buttons on the register for his order.

Review:
This book would start to get going and then get afraid and start talking about bears. There were some great moments to think about and y...more

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01/02/09

Mickey rated it:

Read in May, 1911

recommended to Mickey by: Tao Lin
recommends it for: Tao Lin

Eeeee Eee Eeee is an American masterwork. I doubt anyone will write a novel like this in French.

Eeeee Eee Eeee is this country's masterwork. Tao Lin is an American (except he's a whole lot funnier). We are no longer used to novelists, or the tragic living-dead writers this country has produced. Tao Lin writes with dialogue and characters, sometimes in a single line. This novel is good, for a novel.

I hope my great-grandchildren will read Eeeee Eee Eeee, except the...more

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