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Take five numbers4/17/2023 ![]() ![]() Because the last 20 or so pages will leave you speechless with admiration.Īnd God said, Let there be LIGHTs CAMERA nnnnnn ACTION!Ĭut! Cut! Kaa-utt! Simon ends the whole thing even before it started. It is truly Christian, which is a very rare thing, and therefore has great power over a grumpy old atheist like myself.ġ8. So much so that I have twice, soįar, nearly missed my train stop on the way home from work asġ7. Straight up hero – after the horrors of that childhood, theįact that he remained (despite all his bluster) a deeplyĬaring and moral person is pretty close to a miracle.ġ5. Its hero is not, I would argue, an anti-hero but a bona-fide, It has more twists and turns than an episode of Sunset Beach.ġ4. It proves that anti-Semitic comments do not an anti-Semiteġ1.Ěnd that racism can sometimes be the best way to combatġ2.ĝid I mention how fucking brilliant the prose is?ġ3. It will make you hate our species a little more.ġ0. It will make you love our species a little more.ĩ. The prose is happy to be contradictory and incompatible withĨ. Mary, Joseph, Pilate, Judas the Carrot, all your favorite storybook people in a new form…”įive senses lost – a cur’s fate for a cur.ĥ. “See, I’m making this film, Jesus 2001, which could be Godfather II and my salvation, or a turkey so grosso y’could fly it in Macy’s parade – one gust of wind and twelve clowns get carried over the Verrazano Bridge… Solid-state scripture, works in a drawer. Simon is a con artist… He is an artistic beggar… He is a man of art… He makes movies… ![]() Simon is a brazen and ignorant extravert… He boasts exhibitionistic manners… He is an epitome of vulgarity… ![]() You’d be surprised how polite even the famous and the infamous can be when they get near him.” Nobody, but nobody, can out-insult Simon Lynxx. I’ve seen him knock a Puerto Rican heavyweight all the way over a compact car with one punch. If you have one leg, he’ll ask you to run a forty-yard dash… Also it helps to be six-three and crazy. Simon is the one totally unbigoted person I’ve ever known – he treats everyone like a Polish joke. “What does he care for Jews, blacks, homosexuals, women? Not a thing. One fine morning Simon wakes – cocksure and foolish – and the countdown commences… Nude, Simon drowses, screening outtakes of dreams just filmed. It hits the ancient chimney, bounces, bursts to mouthfuls, which bounce, burst and are gone. There are five known senses: taste, smell, touch, hearing and sight… The protagonist loses them all in sequence – one by one…Īn afterthought brown apple gets pitched from the low-rent altitude, fine arm action and follow-through, hooking leftward, sharp slider. Through the course of this 600-page novel, Simon loses, one by one, all of his senses (taste is lost when trying to siphon off gasoline for his roving, broken-down production van), ending in a state of complete debilitation in which he is being made ready for eternity and salvation.Īs energy packed as a William Gaddis novel and as rich in language as a Shakespearean play, Take Five is a modern masterpiece that is at once a celebration of life and a morality play on excess, as though anticipating the self-indulgent "me generation" of the decade. Con-man, filmmaker (currently working on producing "Jesus 2001", what he calls the religious equivalent of The Godfather, best known for his movie "The Clap That Took Over the World"), descendent of a wealthy and prestigious New York family whose wealth and prestige are on a sharp decline, racist and anti-Semite (though Simon dislikes all ethnic groups equally), possessor of never-satisfied appetites (food, women, drink, but most of all, money and more money), and the fastest talker since Falstaff, Simon is on a quest that goes backwards. Welcome to the world of Simon Lynxx and to one of the great overlooked novels of the 1980s. ![]()
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