Book 9 - Requiem for a Dream by Hubert Selby Jnr

Reading date - May 2020

I'm writing this review in June 2020 and I thought my current book was book 10 but it's not.  Good thing the real book 10 was something worthy of being book 10.  Maybe I should start putting dates of reading on here..

The first Hubert Selby Jnr book I ever read was Last Exit to Brooklyn.  It was 2011 and to this day, it sticks with me.  It haunted me for ages (months) because it was so graphic and covered something that I had absolutely no knowledge of..something I had never experienced nor that I knew really existed.  After reading it and getting myself over it, I was adamant I would in time, read more of his work.

I get the feeling the Hubert Selby Jnr actually experiences what he writes about, unlike certain other authors who make no secret of experiencing the lifestyle they are so good at writing about (Irvine Welsh, for one..he is an amazing author but I think a fair bit more of it is the fact that he writes in dialect).

Anyway, I saw the arse end of the film Requiem for a Dream on Channel 4 when I stumbled home drunk..I remember seeing a girl in a sex show and a woman having some kind of breakdown watching TV and that just hardened my resolve to read the book.  That too, stuck with me and flashed up in my mind over the years.

Requiem for a Dream follows a mother and son living two different lives.  The son starts out a minor drug taker and soon escalates into a full-time junky, stealing from his mum for his next fix.  The mum has her own problems, she is convinced she is going on a TV show so gets herself some diet pills which she starts taking (it's speed but she obviously doesn't know).

The book follows their very separate and different lives, you see the boy fall in love, get further and further mired in drugs and violence to get his next hit.  You see the mum trying to fit into a certain red dress she wore to the son's Bar Mitzvah and slowly going crazy taking speed and losing weight..never appearing on the TV show.  

You basically slowly just see both of their dreams die.  The boy, desperate for his next fix, puts his bird on the game..but she starts holding the drugs back for herself.  The mum, losing weight to try and fit into this dress, loses her mind and any grip on reality.

The book is dark, very dark but I could not put it down.  I finished it in a few days.

My next book of Hubert Selby Jnr's will be either Song of the Silent Snow or The Room.


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