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Worst book I have ever read.
So I read most of this book in one sitting (on a flight), which I think should be recommended for future readers of this book since 1) there are no chapters and 2) the events happen in the span of a few hours and kind of snowball from normal (well.... as normal as can be with 100 brothers involved) to completely chaotic. I think if I read this only in the morning on my way to work, I would have lost the thread.I wouldn't say nothing happened, but the book seemed to be about character development...
You have only to read the back cover of this book to know what you are getting into so do it. It comes well recommended, it's by a "hot" author who publishes stories in the New Yorker, Jonathan Franzen is a fan, I dunno what more I can say. The book is short, 200 pages, funny all the way through, and clearly meant to be taken as a "literary novel" whatever that might be. But 200 pages of funny may just well be too many pages of funny, and maybe we could say the same for the intellectual gamesman...
I dream like this: in fragments and loops; in absurdity and utter truth.
"You wouldn't think a bug race could be so exciting."You wouldn't think a book by a certified genius would be so vapid and tiresome.The Hundred Brothers is not plotless so much as personalityless. You can see the author trying really, really hard (including having his main character literally piss on the classics), but this book never makes the case for post-modernism, or itself.An extra star for originality and ambition of the concept.I recommend, instead, The Mezzanine for droll stream-of-cons...
I fell in love with this novel when I heard Mr. Antrim read from it a the PEN/Faulkner awards eons ago. It is so quirky and frantic. I keep it by my bedside.
A simple but brilliant absurd comedy.
As far as I can tell, Donald Antrim has something of an over-active, yet alarmingly direct, imagination. Ninety nine of one hundred brothers reunite in their family library for a dinner at which they hope to decide what to do with their father's ashes. The brothers are all individually named but very few are characterised; probably because most of them appear to have some form of personality disorder, addiction or an utterly abysmal ability to interact with other beings. There are squabbles, scu...
THIS BOOK ROCKS, IT ROCKS A FAT MIGHTY HORSE ASS.
Everyone should read this book. Here's my hook: yes, it's about a hundred brothers. They're gathered in the family library to find their father's ashes and try and achieve some kind of fraternal peace. Every brother is introduced, by name, in the first sentence. There are no chapter or line breaks.
Solipsistic late-90s trash. I hate this entire genre. Imagine if a young Michael Chabon decided he'd make a better William Burroughs than Philip Roth, but just didn't have it in him to do all those hallucinogens and thought maybe a mild Vicodin binge would send him into enough of a creative fit to churn out a couple hundred pages of social criticism. No, on second thought, that would be better than this pap.
I had to force myself to read half of this. I can't say it was dreadful--the writing is OK, though nothing special. But I was bored. There was nothing to compel me to turn the page, or even open the book again.It's apparently supposed to be funny. Maybe you need to be male? (though to be honest, I'm not that crazy about chick-lit either).Maybe I'm just not hip enough to understand the obscure references.Anyway, I didn't get it, and really, who cares?
I got to this one after reading and loving Antrim's other two novels. I waited years to read it because I was hoping he'd come out with another one and I wouldn't need to give up the exhilaration that comes from reading one of his novels for the first time. Eventually, I gave in.As you might be able to tell from the description of the book, this presents the most daunting of the formal challenges of his books and, though his general thoroughness and intricacy gives way to mayhem more readily (an...
This is a 200 page short story, a farce, that all takes place over the course of on evening. The characters ARE the plot, which is to say, the plot is how a family of 100 adult brothers might interact at a dinner. If it goes any deeper than that, someone needs to explain it to me. I was entertained in parts, but mostly I just wanted to finish it, so I could check it off the list and return it to the library.
After reading so many novels where each line has a point and purpose, this 50% filler, 50% forced, fake sounding assertions about the human condition was really quite tiresome. There is nothing original said in the descriptions of the crumbling library, yet the topic is expounded upon again and again like a student trying to meet a word count. In my personal opinion, don’t waste your time, read some short stories instead- they at least are usually well constructed and thought out.
