A Death in Brazil by Peter Robb
James Ellroy is an acclaimed yet controversial popular novelist. Since the publication of his first novel Brown's Requiem in 1981, Ellroy's eccentric Demon Dog persona and his highly stylized, often pornographically violent crime novels have continued to polarize both public and academic opinion. This book addresses the voyeuristic dimensions of Ellroy's fiction, one of the most significant yet underexplored issues in his work. Focusing exclusively on Ellroy's two collections of epic noir fiction, The L.A. Quartet and The Underworld U.S.A. Trilogy, it critically reflects on a vivid preoccupation with eyes, visual culture, and visual technologies that spans across both these bodies of work. Using a combination of psychoanalysis and postmodern and cultural theory, Nathan Ashman argues that Ellroy's fiction traces the development of the voyeur from a deviant and perverse peeping tom into a recognizable, contemporary social type, a paranoid and obsessive viewer who is a product of the decentered and hallucinatory cinematic world that he inhabits. In particular, James Ellroy and Voyeur Fiction illuminates a convergence between voyeurism and recurring patterns of ocularcentric crisis in Ellroy's texts, as characters become continually unable to understand or interpret through vision. Alongside a thematic analysis of obsessive watching, Ashman also argues that Ellroy's works-particularly his later novels-are themselves voyeuristic, implicating the reader in these broader narrative patterns of both visual and epistemophilic obsession.
Peter Robb has divided his time among Brazil, southern Italy, and Australia for the last quarter century. He is the author of Midnight in Sicily, a New York Public Library Best Book and a Publishers Weekly Best Book of the Year; and M The Man Who Became Caravaggio, which was a New York Times Notable Book of 2000. The Economist described Midnight in Sicily as quite simply, the best book about Italy in English and The Times Literary Supplement called it a classic.Deliciously sensuous and fascinating, Robb renders in vivid detail the intoxicating pleasures of Brazil's food, music, literature, and landscape as he travels not only cross country but also back in time--from the days of slavery to modern day political intrigue and murder. Spellbinding and revelatory, Peter Robb paints a multi-layered portrait of Brazil as a country of intoxicating and passionate extremes.
| SKU | Unavailable |
| ISBN 13 | 9780805076417 |
| ISBN 10 | 0805076417 |
| Title | A Death in Brazil |
| Author | Peter Robb |
| Series | John Macrae Books |
| Condition | Unavailable |
| Publisher | Henry Holt & Company |
| Year published | 2004-05-05 |
| Number of pages | 329 |
| Cover note | Book picture is for illustrative purposes only, actual binding, cover or edition may vary. |
| Note | Unavailable |