ePub Male Gaze download

by Joe Treasure

Author:

Joe Treasure

ISBN13:

978-0330448307

ISBN:

0330448307

Language:

English

Publisher:

Picador; Unabridged edition edition (April 20, 2007)

Category:

Fiction

Subcategory:

Literary

ePub file:

1433 kb

Fb2 file:

1169 kb

Other formats:

lrf mobi doc docx

Rating:

4.2

Votes:

239

Joe Treasure Literary English

Download ePub Download Fb2

More..

You won't be putting this book down' Independent on Sunday. A unique, persuasive voice. His is a name to watch’ Time Out.

David Parker’s new start in LA isn’t going entirely as he had hoped. London feels a million miles away, and even his loving marriage is beginning to look shaky. Drawn, through an alcoholic haze, into the orbit of Astrid and her friends, he spends a night on Malibu Beach that shocks him to the core. You won't be putting this book down' Independent on Sunday. ‘Scorching. Dark and sad, but equally smart and funny’ Elle.

David Parker is adrift in a city that runs on self-belief. Raised sixth in a family of nine, Joe Treasure enjoyed a capriciously Bohemian childhood

David Parker is adrift in a city that runs on self-belief. Raised sixth in a family of nine, Joe Treasure enjoyed a capriciously Bohemian childhood. Having received his educational grounding at the hands of Carmelite priests, he escaped to Cheltenham Grammar School where he excelled only in music and art. His architectural ambitions were thwarted by low grades in maths and physics. The local college of further education allowed him to pursue more Raised sixth in a family of nine, Joe Treasure enjoyed a capriciously Bohemian childhood.

Authors : Treasure, Joe. Binding : Hardcover. Product Category : Books. List Price (MSRP) : 1. 9. The Male Gaze by Joe Treasure (Hardback, 2007). Brand new: lowest price.

The sixth and penultimate book in the New York Times bestselling I Am Number Four series! For years the Garde have fought the Mogadorians in secret. Now all of that has changed. The invasion has begun.

Przeczytaj go w aplikacji Książki Google Play na komputerze albo na urządzeniu z Androidem lub iOS. Pobierz, by czytać offline. Czytając książkę Male Gaze, zaznaczaj tekst, dodawaj zakładki i rób notatki. David Parker’s new start in LA isn’t going entirely as he had hoped.

Publish date: 01/01/2007. Ships from Reno, NV. Former Library book. Great condition for a used book!

Publish date: 01/01/2007. Seller: Better World Books West. Great condition for a used book!

Retreating from an airborne virus with a uniquely unsettling symptom, property developer Jason escapes London for his country estate, where he is forced to negotiate a new way of living with an assortment of fellow survivors. Far in the future, an isolated community of descendants continue to farm this same estate. Among their most treasured possessions are a few books, including a copy of Jane Eyre, from which they have constructed their hierarchies, rituals and beliefs.

At first glance, The Male Gaze is cheerful dick-lit. If you can cope with the gloriously ridiculous series of coincidences, and a few garish stereotypes of Hollywood hippies, then Joe Treasure rewards the reader with a fast-paced plot and wry humour. English bloke, stuck in LA, feeling detached from his wife, meets vivacious American woman for out-of-character adventures. Some of the characters are delicately observed: the sink or swim attitude of the foreigner abroad is beautifully demonstrated by David and his wife who flounder in this superficial culture while his attempts to cope with the mounting hysteria disrupting his world become more desperate.

I was the sixth child in a family of nine. My older sister Mary often had to supervise us younger ones. I drew heavily on my LA experience for my first book The Male Gaze. I gave my visiting Englishman a British wife quite unlike Leni, but even her family assumed it was really all about her. My second book, Besotted, was about two brothers who are exploring their Irish roots and fall in love with the same girl. The girl was imaginary but the brothers were modelled on me and my young brother Wilfrid.

David Parker is adrift in a city that runs on self-belief. New to Los Angeles, and alienated by the brash voices, the bronzed bodies, the mayhem of traffic, he misses London and finds himself unable to work on his book. He'd say he had writer's block if it weren't just an RE course for fourteen-year-olds. To make matters worse, he feels he's losing his wife, Rebecca, who is disturbingly eager to adapt to their new life. After a party one night in the Hollywood Hills, David is drawn into an exotic circle of friends. Astrid, wanting to understand Islam from the inside, has bought herself a burka on eBay. Mo is developing a maverick style of film therapy. Natalie, sad and soulful, claims she could hide under water as a child. But then one night, while David watches, she slips under the treacherous waves on Malibu beach. Her death has him following a trail of videotapes that exposes secret connections and leads to temptations and consequences for which he is entirely unprepared. The Male Gaze cuts through the clamour of broadcast media and the excesses of metropolitan culture to reflect on a world that seems to be spinning out of control. Written with poise, wit and clarity, it is a subtle exploration of intimacy and betrayal, of the fear of exposure and the forces of attraction, of what fragments us and what binds us together, and it marks the arrival of an assured and distinctive new voice. `Smart and funny . . . a unique persuasive voice. His is a name to watch.' Time Out

FLIDER

The previous two reviews have done a great job of introducing readers to this book. I could write a paper on it, but here I'll only add a few grace notes, not necessarily a coherent review. I'm not exaggerating when I say I loved this book. I love the elegant yet never self-conscious turns of phrase used in vivid description, wit, or thought-provoking observation--sometimes all at once. I love the blending of the big and the small picture; world events juxtaposed and mingled with the personal. A somewhat boorish, drunk, British reporter whom the protagonist, David, disagrees with politically, nevertheless points to a major truth: "That stuff you read in the papers...would be your private life if it happened to you." And of course, some of it does happen to him.. or at least he witnesses it.

David is a thoroughly likable character; intelligent, articulate, insecure and as flawed as the rest of us. It's through his "gaze" that we experience the rest of the world, and it's one that is usually at a bit of a distance--or else so close much of the picture is "off-camera", as it were. (Cameras play a major role in this book, part of the reason for the title in reference to feminist film theory.) We know his wife, for instance, only as he sees her, so we can't independently assess her. He sees her through loving eyes, but he doesn't always recognize what he's looking at; doesn't always really see her. The rest of the characters are larger than life, yet utterly true. Anyone who has lived or spent any time in L.A. will recognize them. Treasure walks a fine line in writing over-the-top characters who nevertheless stop short of caricature. He has a wonderful sense of the absurdity and irony of real life, and can write scenes that are simultaneously or in rapid succession funny and touching, shocking and farcical, tragic and comical. (No reference to Pyramus and Thisbe intended.) While his characters are often risible, the author doesn't look down on them, but rather let's us laugh at their excesses and silliness, while appreciating their humanity. David, himself, is often very funny; sometimes on purpose or in reaction to an uncomfortable situation, but sometimes even when he's making an intelligent observation or a serious point. Arguing about the merits of war (or lack of same) in the wake of 9/11, he has the following exchange:
"And I can't help thinking that we've got these armies in all their staggering wondrousness, and to a man with a mallet everything looks like...you know what I mean...a thing you hit with a mallet..."
"But can't you see we're facing a unique threat?"
"...a tent peg."
"A tent peg? What the hell are you talking about?"
It's only when he ends the argument and is ruminating on what is really behind the Englishman's point that it comes to him that a hammer is what he had been thinking of, and the realization is just as much of a non-sequitur as was the initial misstatement.

I met Joe Treasure when I introduced myself after hearing an excerpt from this book before it was published. I later became friends with him and his wife. I mention this in the interest of full disclosure while noting that it was because I was so impressed, delighted and intrigued by his writing that I got to know the author, not the other way around.

Innadril

I just finished reading "The Male Gaze" this morning.

As someone who's lived in Los Angeles for several years, and now resides in London, I was curious about what kind of "gaze" the author would cast upon that great gleaming town of make believe.

Well, I was delighted. As a book, the turns and twists of the odyssey of Treasure's protagonist, David Parker, across Los Angeles were surprising and shocking and painful and hilarious. His "gaze" on LA is one that is distanced but never judgementally dismissive, something not easy to do about a place as deliciously "judgeable" as LA. My favourite observation:

"This is where the road trip that is America's history hits the obstacle of water, and the urge to keep moving turns in on itself. I begin to understand this, as I hadn't understood it before. The is the place where the elements collide, where people come to be nurtured or transformed, where bodies must be worshipped or punished into new shapes. I begin to see the pattern underlying this stew of physical indulgence, and psychic exploration and vague cosmic yearning."

It is such a wonderful observation about the city, and yet, David, being the narrator, sitting in some present somewhere, recounting the convolutions of this California adventure in the past tense, has just told us what will happen to him, in the next 223 pages.

I was moved by the tenderness of David's flawed love for his wife Rebecca, and his reconciliation with her after another kind of voyeuristic gaze. I was also moved by David's fatherly feelings and instinctive protectiveness of a young, awkward, angry young man named Jake--all in spite of a self-professed British reserve and apparent ambivalence toward children.

Anyway, it's a beautiful book, a wonderful picture of a messed up time (to borrow an oft abused term, it's "zeitgeisty"), and an amazing portrait of two delightful fish out of their Tufnell Park water.

eBooks related to Male Gaze