American Psycho by Bret Easton Ellis

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Patrick Bateman is an American Psycho. He’s a successful Wall Street broker in the eighties, he gets nose bleeds from the amount of cocaine he takes, and he’s the source of all men’s fashion knowledge for his friends. He also murders colleagues, strangers, hookers and bums, alternately keeping them, eating them and torturing them in graphic detail.

Wow. Yuck. Is this really us? Could we really be this society? Is this really a satire? Or just a disturbing stream-of-consciousness rant by a writer with a razor-sharp but slightly sick intellect and the desire to shock the shit out of us? Was this really written 20 years ago? I wonder if Easton Ellis thinks we’ve become worse or better?

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Auto Fiction by Hitomi Kanehara

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Japan through the eyes of a woman

I've just finished a book that reminds me of 'Catch 22' but it's set in Japan, with a young woman, in the 21st century. So actually not like 'Catch 22' at all. Except that once you finish it, you'll have a similar response, like you've just got off a roller coaster where you felt all the sensations of going up and down and hurtling around corners, but you wouldn't be able to describe the corners or the layout of the roller coaster to someone else. That's what 'Auto Fiction' by Hitomi Kanehara feels like.

I borrowed this from a friend who has been reading a lot of Japanese fiction lately, translated into English of course. The only Japanese book I'd heard of is 'Letters from Iwo Jima' and I only know that because Clint Eastwood made a movie of it (which I haven't seen). 'Auto Fiction' is pretty far from the stereotype of Japanese life and what you might expect Japanese fiction to look like. Or maybe it's just me who had this idea that Japanese fiction would look like tai chi and be graceful and more like 'Memoirs of a Geisha' - which was actually written by a man so I don't know what I was thinking.

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