My rating: 3 of 5 stars
“It doesn't really matter if you are left behind the back, but what matters is your capacity to pull and push everyone by your way to get to the front.”
----Michael Bassey Johnson,
a Nigerian poet, playwright, novelist, aphorist, satirist, caricaturist and a newspaper columnist
Bruce Wagner, the American novelist, penned a very much controversial novel about the tinsel town called,
Dead Stars featuring stardom with a violent background, provoking us to move foreword with it's flow, no matter how hard the road is.
Synopsis:
At age thirteen, Telma is famous as the world’s youngest breast cancer survivor until threatened with obscurity by a four-year-old Canadian who’s just undergone a mastectomy … Reeyonna believes that auditioning for pregnant-teen porn online will help fulfill her dream of befriending Jennifer Lawrence and Kanye West … Biggie, the neurologically impaired adolescent son of a billionaire, spends his days Google Map-searching his mother-who abandoned home and family for a new love … Jacquie, a photographer once celebrated for taking arty nudes of her young daughter, is broke and working at Sears Family Portrait Boutique … Tom-Tom, a singer/drug dealer thrown off the third season of American Idol for concocting a hard-luck story, is hell-bent on creating her own TV series in the Hollywood Hills, peopled by other reality-show losers … Jerzy, her sometime lover, is a speed-freak paparazzo who “specializes” in capturing images of dying movie and television stars … And Oscar-winning Michael Douglas searches for meaning in his time of remission. While his wife, Catherine, guest-stars on Glee, the actor plans a bold, artistic, go-for-broke move: to star in and direct a remake of Bob Fosse’s All That Jazz…
What a book! After reading this book, I feel that probably Bruce Wagner has something against the life of people in and around Hollywood! My God! He just ripped down the whole tinsel town with his thoroughly satirical yet hart-breaking novel,
Dead Stars.
Warning: If you can handle a filthy read that will screw up your brain, the definitely go for it. Otherwise, you might slam the book hard across the wall.
What I felt is that the plot is woven by the author keeping in mind that he would purely ridicule his readers or make us laugh over bad jokes or the otherwise cannot be true since Bruce Wagner is definitely a fantastic writer. While reading, I was totally caught off-guard with Wagner's sardonic undertone tightly wrapped up in this multi-layered storyline.
This story revolves around the 21st century American obsession with fame. The characters are real and striking- completely wasted in short. And the author have explained them with such intricacy that even though they will disgust you, but since you have learnt everything from their back-story to sob story with much greater depth, they will manage to enthrall you till it's very end.
Most people have hated this book till date, but when I heard that this book's movie adaption is soon going to hit the screens, I instantly purchased it online. Well, to be honest, I never read anything so raunchy and ridiculous like Wagner's
Dead Stars ever before. This book will be your ultimate guidebook to the darkest world in Hollywood. At times, I was pulling my hair as to why did I ever purchased it and who will be so interested to watch it on the screen if they can't handle it's original version. Too much sex, over the top drug usage, teenage pregnancy, porn world, illicit affairs, 'text slang', sometimes it will make you enjoy the roller coaster ride of hormones and emotions but at the other times, you might feel like throwing up.
The language sometimes it is very evocative and at times, it can be pure garbage and will hit you like an unexpected snowstorm- hard and cold. Sometimes it will arrest your mind and at other times, it will make you feel ordinary. I never knew people can act so crazily to achieve stardom and Wagner has projected Hollywood in a really bad light. Well, my thoughts were never provoked even for once.
Verdict: Only read it if you can handle bad plots and raunchy characters.
Movie Info:
Starring: Julianne Moore, Mia Wasikowska, John Cusack, and Robert Pattinson
Release Date: February 27, 2015
Note: The movie will be titled
Maps to the Stars.
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Author Info:
Bruce Wagner is the author of
The Chrysanthemum Palace (a PEN Faulkner fiction award finalist); Still
Holding; I'll Let You Go (a PEN USA fiction award finalist); I'm Losing
You; and Force Majeure. He lives in Los Angeles.
Visit him here
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