Eddie Wright is one of my GoodReads friends. He sent me an email asking me to buy a copy of his bk & to review it. Ordinarily, a review copy wd be sent free to the reviewer. Regardless of that, I looked at the bk's GoodReads page & decided I'd give it a shot. I bought it & then wrote Eddie asking him to do the same for me w/ my bk "footnotes".

NOW what? It's potentially a big responsibility to review a 1st bk by a writer. I cd take the easy way out & give the bk a 5 star glowing review - thusly probably making Eddie happy & possibly insuring a good review of my own bk. &, thankfully, I LIKED "Broken Bulbs", so I'm not faced w/ considering writing a highly critical review out of honest 'necessity'.

INSTEAD, I find my self facing a slightly more complicated middle ground. I'm tempted to give "Broken Bulbs" a 4 star rating b/c I did enjoy it, it was written w/ substantial skill, & I did find it a 'compelling' read in a similar way that I've found bks by some of my favorite pulp writers compelling - writers like Dashiell Hammett or Philip K. Dick. But, no, it's a bit closer to Rudy Rucker or Jonathan Lethem. & I doubt that Wright wd be offended by these comparisons - given that an advertising review on the back of the bk reads: "philip dick wd be proud.".

This is a novel about attempting to be something, about attempting to be inspired, about being in love, about addiction. Some of these are, perhaps, somewhat reminiscent of Dick's "A Scanner Darkly". HOWEVER, this novella doesn't quite reach the profundity of detail & despair & imagination that Dick's novel does. Wch isn't to say that it's 'bad'! Far from it. It does mean that it's a bk by Wright, NOT by Dick, et al.. - As it shd be!

In fact, there were a few turns in the novel that were writerly enuf to invigorate my attn & stir my admiration. I particularly liked the scene where the young boy (I don't want to be too spoiler-specific here) reads his short story to his class.

"Broken Bulbs" is written in varying subtly interwoven & inter-related voices. A part of the joy of reading it is having these relations revealed. Older pulp novels typically had a structure where one narrative thread is left hanging at the end of one chapter to be replaced by another narrative thread left hanging - at wch point the 1st is returned to, etc.. "Broken Bulbs" is a product of an age where such a propelling strategy is no longer sufficient - instead, it's more of a meta-narrative - where the propulsion is kept going by different levels of fictionalizing - & this strategy is quite successful.

All in all, I think this is a very good 1st novella & I'll certainly read more by Wright as it, hopefully, comes along. It is, though, a FIRST novella & Wright has, most likely, greater things in him. The language here is quite good but it remains to be more fully developed. As such, I refrain from giving it a star rating. If I were to rate it a 4 star bk, I wd be giving it credit due to more practiced writers, if I were to give it a 3 star rating, I might seem to be insufficiently enthusiastic. A 1 or 2 star rating wd be too low, a 5 star rating wd be too high.

At any rate, this story will speak to many people who're struggling to make something out of their life & who're grasping for inspiration in ways that aren't always the healthiest, eh? & Wright tells the story well.

I think I've actually read this novella before, because parts of it gave me some strong déjà vu. Evidently I forgot I'd read it, probably because I didn't think it was very good. It reminded me a bit of "Donnie Darko", although I don't remember that very well so take that comparison with a grain of salt.

Mostly I didn't get what the point of this book was. It didn't tell an interesting story, but it didn't seem to have any other point. Let's hope I don't inadvertently start reading it a third time! ( )

I'm totally confused but at the same time I get it. What a ride. ( )

"Everything is equal, Frank. Everything is nothing. Everything is our minds interpretation of what we see and the values that we ourselves place on them. All anyone wants in their lives is something. And if we look at anything and if we chose to place any value on anything in our lives we have something. It all exists within us. We only have what we know. And we only know what we know. And what we know is that everything is actually nothing and nothing is actually everything. Because something and nothing and everything are all the same. All nothing is something if we want it to be. And you don’t want it to be, Frank. That’s why you have nothing, because you choose to have nothing. If you recognized for one minute that everything, that The Everything is actually nothing, you wouldn’t be so worried about it. You apply too much meaning to the concept of something. But there is no concept of something, there simply is something. Something is nothing, so therefore, nothing is something.;

I recall a passage from Freud’s –'Civilization and its Discontents', which I read years ago. Well, it surmises the aspect of emotions and thoughts being detrimental to an individual psyche only if the mind allows to get affected by these parameters. Fundamentally, what Freud claims is that a human being should be sensitively "dead" in order to escape susceptibly of caustic pain. I reckon, old Siggy’s state of unconsciousness did not entirely grasp the capricious brain functioning. It is rather impossible for any individual on this planet to let go of the past or a few unresolved feelings that are embedded deep within the dark corners of one’s heart. That is why we fear the idea of depressed thoughts, seditious beliefs and when the going gets tough we stumble upon 'medicinal nirvana'. Frank is a typical case of a mind jumble dreadfully perplexed in a quest of something.....everything.

Frank Fisher comes across as one of the many squalid druggies who raise a couple of eyebrows flocking for couple of EZ Widers and "tiny fake roses in glass tubes" with a handful of Sudafed sachets stuffed in their back pockets. The sly smirk on the cashier’s face signals the prospects of a further acquisition of quite a few 'baggies' from the nearby street corner. A rough sketch of Frank’s survival infers nothing more than he being a mere a drug addict who tries to pen a jagged script whilst greatly relying on Bonnie to hook him up with his trance concoctions. Gradually as the outer layers of Frank’s disheveled persona gets peeled off, a childlike vulnerability illuminates through the rigidity of his drugged exterior. Perceiving Frank’s character brings out a medley of emotions ranging from anger to empathy to a heartfelt grief. (How wrong was Freud eh?)

Who the fuck is Dusty? Ooh! Dusty is my favorite character or is he a sort of a moral fiber. Anyhow he is a pathway to Frank’s rescue from the eternal self-chase. Dusty to me is quite a bloke in the plot.

I have been fairly lucky this past week with couple books. It is an absolute thrill to read manuscripts of fresh writers. Firstly, since they write with such gusto that every penned word enlightens their charmed persona. Secondly, commercialized capacities and over zealous editors do not muddle their views and expressions. Broken Bulbs is a bona fide, satirical symbolism of a troubled soul and worth assessing every bit.



( )

Those three stars you see up there, those are three ambiguous stars. I am not too sure how I feel about this novella. I don't think I completely get it.

Meet the protagonist, Frank. Full of self-loathing and he feels as if he is nothing. And how does one fix that? With drugs. He finds refuge in drugs and, for the most part, 'Broken Bulbs' swims inside his drug-addled mind. Drugs fuel his search for something, THE EVERYTHING. At times they put him on a creative kick and he would work on his film-script featuring Dusty. Some other times he would be pining for Bonnie, the drug dealer. And often he breaks into lengthy philosophical monologues (which may or may not mean anything, I don't know).

There is certainly some merit in this experimental novella. The writing style is fresh in many ways (even though stuff being written about is rotting and dark). The narration can be disorienting and abrupt in places, varying from staccato to stream-of-consciousness-y. Some whimsical and amusing scenes pop out here and there, like the angry postman bit. The film script with Dusty's cold and deadpan manner, the talking hamster and what not is almost surreal and is perhaps the most interesting part of the story.

Overall, the writing does complement the content. But it seems to need some polishing, the non-uniformity can be a bit jarring at times. Also the deep philosophy stuff didn't quite appeal to me, but may be that's just me.

So far I feel ambivalently okay-ish about the book, but then came the ending! I didn't like the ending, that I know for sure. Here is why...

After spewing out all that philosophy, guess where his search for something, THE EVERYTHING ends? By sleeping with Bonnie. What is this supposed to be now, a gritty-reboot of [b:The Lovely Bones|12232938|The Lovely Bones|Alice Sebold|http://photo.goodreads.com/books/1312524577s/12232938.jpg|1145090]? ( )