Bespoke discussion
This topic is about
The Rules of Attraction
The Rules of Attraction
date
newest »
newest »
message 1:
by
MrsApple
(new)
-
rated it 2 stars
Jun 03, 2014 02:39AM
Ok, So I am 63 pages in, and as far as the story goes it's easy enough to read, but the narrative makes it hard for me to follow, am never good with books that jump from one character to the next, I read some chicklits that do that, but normally only jump between two characters, rather than the multiple ones that this one jumps between. Also driving me mad that we don't know who the girl at the beginning is, kind of reminds me of when I was younger and wanted to skip to the last page of a book, always impatient.... LOL
reply
|
flag
I'm pretty close to the end there are a lot of characters throughout the book. To start with it is completely baffling but you soon get into the swing of the story. I quite like the multitude of viewpoints though. In most books you are led to trust the character's opinion about what's going on as fact but in this book everyone sees situations in completely different ways and you have to piece together reality from these little snippets. They are all on so many drugs that who knows what's real and what's not.
Trivia about Brett Easton Ellis, he once tried to order cocaine from his dealer but instead of texting him he accidentally tweeted to 350K followers.
Mod
Yeh I really am. It wasn't what I was expecting at all because of the strange format but I have really been absorbed by it. Some of the characters remind me of people I knew at Uni :)
I finished it last night, and found it slightly infuriating... Am now half way through fault in our stars
Mod
we need to get everyone else on here
Mod
I've not started it yet! Will do tonight though. Bear with.
Mod
1. What kind of world does Ellis describe in The Rules of Attraction? Does he is glamorize it? Does he seem to approve or admire it...or something else? What do you think?
2. The story begins and ends, intentionally, half-way through a sentence. Why might Ellis have done so? What effect does it create?
3. What is at the heart of these young peoples' lives, anything? One character writes, "I am very tired. That's what I am. Tired of everything." What's the significance of that statement? Are they vacant individuals, or do they long for something underneath their shiny, rich exteriors?
1 .I think Ellis doesn't take this kind of world very seriously, he glosses over death and seems to treat suicide and depression as a bit of a joke, at first I thought that he was showing the bad side of drugs, but thinking about it, it all seems a bit too rushed to be focussing on that side of things, honestly, the way it was written made me feel like I had taken something. It was like reading through a haze..... Going by what Chrissie said above about his tweet, I would say that he approves of it all
2. he can only do this to irritate me..... ha ha, I really have no idea, but seriously, it was like doing a jigsaw puzzle and finding out that the last piece was missing, I didn't care if it represented anything, it was beyond annoying :)
3 - Not sure, will have to think some more about this, I imagine I would embelish on what I said in point 1, I guess it's a representation of uni life then.... If anyone wrote up their first year of uni as a book, it would probably be as much of a head mess as this is, for different reasons :)
Mod
2. Although I appreciate this as a literary device I agree with Cora - very irritating. It struck me almost as Ellis just got bored with the whole thing and stopped. The character's disinterest becomes the reader's disinterest becomes the writers. Very well achieved, super annoying.
3. I feel like the character's are living in a sort of self-fulfilling loop. They are searching for meaning and depth but not anywhere that they are likely to find it. Victor is a very good example of what I mean by this - he travels, presumably to get the kind of experiences once would expect by travelling - but in his droning retelling of this, you can see his heart isn't in it. He seems to think that enlightenment (or whatever the correct word is here) can come to you passively if you go through the motions.
In terms of 'tired of everything', I haven't really got an opinion on this. I believe he's talking about disaffection and melancholy which is a normal part of life, but it's hard to see why this would be such a big problem for characters who are so detached from their own lives anyway?
1. I don't think that Ellis necessarily approves of the world he has depicted, he is simply describing what is. He definitely doesn't glamorize it in my opinion. While some of the characters can view others as pinnacles of perfection (Sean's view of Laura) others will see the same person in a completely different way despite often sharing similar experiences which are just interpreted differently. I think this is a spectacular achievement though. Ellis manages to paint a world for us using severely blinkered viewpoints of lots of people, and from those 2D images from a multitude of different angles we see a whole 3D image. It's unfortunate that the 3D image is a girl dead in a bathtub or an angry coked-up student generally failing at life. But I guess that's reality and not something that should be glamorized.2. I agree, the beginning and ending is annoying. No one likes thinking their kindle is broken. But it fits with the style. It particularly represents the friendships often experienced at university. You spend every day with a group of people and then one day everyone leaves and goes their separate ways and it's like someone walking away in the middle of a sentence. Their lives may still be interesting and you would really like to know what happens next and to be a part of it but you can't. It kind of makes the reader another character in the story. Another student who has left for the holidays. It also leaves open the potential to come back into the story at a later time. But I bet even if there was a sequel we wouldn't get any closure.
3. The excess of stimulus in these characters lives due to daily drug use has caused extreme emotions to become normalised which leads to an apparent lack of emotion. Sean tries to kills himself and when that doesn't work he goes down to breakfast. He even decides not to mention it as though it is not important. With such an easy chemical route to experience emotions like ecstasy I can understand how the experience will leave them feeling empty.
1. I don't know if he needs to approve of this world because of how over dramatic it all is but because of the consistency of drugs, sex, parties etc he probably does approve of it. Maybe that was his experience of it all. It seems very glamourised and I think he has exaggerated that lifestyle slightly but actually it's probably all very realistic of L.A but also of any town or city and we're just not aware of that because we have no experience of it ourselves. I don't think it should be glamorised though, and I think he has an unrealistic representation of death. I doubt that many people think about killing themselves at uni as regularly as everyone in this story does, he treats it so casually like it flickers through everyone's minds that regularly.2. I really did not appreciate being thrown in the middle of a situation without having any context of it all it was just confusing and rushed and I hate not knowing everything beforehand. He's done this I think to highlight that this story is just a small part of a much longer story and how temporary their time is at university and we are given just a small snippet of it. It makes you think about their previous experiences and life and then at the end it leaves you thinking about what happens next. It ended much better than it started.
3. I actually think very little is at the heart of them all and it's all just spontaneous decisions with no real thought or logic to why they're doing what they're doing, but hoping for a connection amongst it all. However, with the small connections and relationships they do have they all end up disconnected anyway, which I think is a key theme of University and the people you meet. The statement about being tired sums up uni pretty accurately to be honest haha. Probably tired of the same outcome, had they made better decisions they probably wouldn't be tired of everything. The drugs has made them all numb.
