Last Exit to Brooklyn (2024)

A Society of Laws

The pomposity of the literary establishment in the 1960’s was as bad as it ever has been. I can recall my encounter, as a twenty year old, with Last Exit. But before I bought it, I got a copy of the New York Times review. ‘Another Grove Press porno piece,’ or something roughly equivalent is what I remember. So I ignored the book for the next 50 years. A big mistake, only to be excused by lack of experience. As Sam Goldwyn put it: “Don’t pay any attention to the critics; don’t even ignore them.”

The fact that the book rates on the filth scale at about the same level as a middling episode of Law & Order SVU, proves just how obsessed with limiting literary experience those who controlled the book trade really were. Narcissistic street boys, casual prostitutes, transsexuals with authentic feelings and thugs were people who couldn’t be taken seriously as people. Nor did their views about what constitutes human relationships, especially the language in which those relationships are described, have any place in literary fiction.

What amazes (and frightens) me is how much nothing has changed in the last half century except for a more general awareness of the under-culture of casual violence and criminality as a way of life. There is of course nothing new in its existence except its increasing publicity. So the world looks like its gone to hell in a hand basket. And the improved visibility of this world is used to justify everything from racism to evangelical revival; from the war on drugs to the war on immigrants. But it is bunk. Selby knew that a substantial portion, often the largest portion, of the ‘civilized world’ lives in uncivilized conditions. And so has it always been, even if the rather more civilized portion ignores it.

Membership in the under-culture is not a choice; it’s an adaptation to reality. The most significant component of that reality is law. It is the law that creates the under-culture of addicts, street sex workers, and petty thieves who mature into not so petty thieves. St. Paul, he whose mission was overthrowing the law, had it right when he quotes the law to his own advantage, “for sittest thou to judge me after the law, and commandest me to be smitten contrary to the law?” But Paul had one law on his side - Roman citizenship. There is no such loophole for those of the under-culture. The law applied to and in the under-culture is essentially arbitrary oppression by the strong of the less strong. In that situation, survival means knowing your place, sticking to your assigned role, and accepting your lack of relative strength.

The under-culture is a culture of victims who accept their status and act in implicit protest with as much malice as they can get away with. Hopelessness not love is the most powerful emotional force. Love presumes hope; it doesn’t create it. So the law of the under-culture is not the law of the jungle. In the jungle, there are adaptations of speed, size, coloring, and intelligence that give hope and consequently the opportunity for instinctive love. In the under-culture, hope is a lethal trait, a delusion that literally kills.

Despite its grisly content, therefore, Last Exit is a book created out of empathy. Selby knew his characters, and he recognized their dilemma: adapt or die. Since the under-culture doesn’t change much from generation to generation, what he has to say is as important now as it was then. There are many, apparently an increasing number, who share much with Georgette, Shelby’s transvestite sacrificial figure, whose “life didnt revolve, but spun centrifugally, around stimulants, opiates, johns...”

Postscript: A comment by another GR reader provoked a realization by me that Selby had described a process of criminalization of minority groups that is more or less traditional in America. See: https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...

This novel was like a car packed with high explosives and driven into the middle of American literature and left there to explode in a fireball of nitroglycerine sentences containing jagged ugly words which could shear your mind in two. I can't believe how powerful it still is, I read it years ago and it seared my thoughts and turned me inside out, and it practically did the same again even though a lot of cruelty and evil violence and scenes of underclass horror have flowed from other writers of other fictions since 1964

1964, year of the cheeky moptops singing I want to hold your hand and the year of Last Exit to Brooklyn in which we meet teenage hooker Tralala.

Two years later it was published in Britain and immediately prosecuted for obscenity and found guilty and withdrawn. Then it was cleared on appeal. When I look at the title page of my hardback copy I find it's the first 1966 British edition, the one that was busted. (Hey – I'm rich! No, it hasn't got a dust jacket, so it's probably still worth the two quid I paid for it instead of the £100 I'd get with the dust jacket. What a crazy world. But I'm not selling anyway.)

This is a great novel but its greatness is difficult. The difficulty does not lie in its famous non-punctuation (I nearly went into shock when I spotted an apostrophe in the word "we're" on page 57 – it was such an obvious misprint) and busted up Brooklynese syntax:

Goldie lit a few candles and told her Sheila was turning a trick so they had come down here and Im sure you don’t mind honey, handing her some bennie, and told Rosie to make coffee. Rosie lit the small kerosene stove in the kitchen and put on a pot of coffee. . When it was ready she passed out paper cups of coffee then went back to the kitchen and made another pot, continuing to make pot after pot of coffee, coming in inbetween to sit at goldies feet. The guys slowly snapped out of their tea goof and soon the bennie got to their tongues too and everybody yakked.

This is not difficult. The prose flows hypnotically from almost boring and then and then and then narrative to dialogue to interior monologue and back again without any breaks. The minutely described incidents trundle along and without warning violence erupts and the violence is then described in the same slightly stoned unemotional way. Selby makes no judgements, he's just on a mission to tell you about this stuff he knows and he knows you don't know. So this book's difficulty comes from the constant depiction of degeneration, the unredeemed bleakness and horribleness of Selby's truthtelling, that all the characters are relentlessly graceless, nasty, violent, or nervewrackingly stupid, and that their lives both internal and external are revealed pitilessly to our flinching ears, that the men appear to hate the women, that the couples all have babies and children who they find unbearable, that there's never any money which causes most of the bitterness, that there's never any love.

And here's the other difficulty. The two longest and greatest of the intertwined stories are the Queen is Dead and Strike. Both depict gay men and both I think enshrine the worst possible images of gay men.

That night Harry went to the dragball. Hundreds of fairies were there dressed as women, some having rented expensive gowns, jewelry and fur wraps. They pranced about the huge ballroom calling to each other, hugging each other, admiring each other, sneering disdainfully as a hated queen passed. O just look at the rags she's wearing. She looks like a bowery whore. Well, lets face it, its not the clothes. She would look simply ugly in a Dior original, and they would stare contemptuously and continue prancing.

In Strike Selby gives us a guy who finds out he's gay and goes through a horrible personal meltdown during which he performs a sex attack on a ten year old boy.

So Selby has prancing fairies in drag and he has a gay man attacking a child. Underneath its avant style, Last Exit is about as politically incorrect as its possible to be. You really can't say that, Hubert.

Of course there was a tradition in literature of dragging the people of the abyss into the light of day - Zola and Dostoyevsky in Europe, Jack London and Sinclair Lewis in the USA. But Selby makes those guys look like mealymouthed tergiversators, which they really weren't. Selby's amplifier goes to 11, not ten like everyone else's. His book is a white hot shriek of pain. It's awful.

Last Exit's influence has been massive. Andy Warhol's early films and Lou Reed's Velvet Underground songs start here (Sister Ray is like a scene from Strike), likewise his "New York" album. Madame George by Van Morrison likewise. Last Exit also bequeathed Trainspotting to us (and fortunately Irvine Welsh was able to suffuse great humour and pity into his tales of junkie scumbags.)

It's five stars from me, but I don't know if I'd honestly recommend it to anyone.

The harrowing portraits of men hating women, mothers loathing their children, & the truly devastating absence of love. A phenomenal work of art that's raw, revolting, & insidious. Owes a large debt to the dementedness of M. de Sade, though the prose--as stark and jarring, as opaque, as a broken shard of obsidian--is just damn Beautiful.

I can hear from my window some kind of Requiem suddenly coming on...

This book is an assault.
Thematically it’s an assault.
Stylistically it’s an assault.
Emotionally it’s an assault.
So reading Last Exit to Brooklyn and enjoying it, like I very much did, could be akin to a kind of literary Stockholm syndrome.

Less a novel and more a collection of vignettes, Selby Jr.’s first major work is a dark, depressing, visceral, gruff, and scroungy account of the lives of some of the most depraved and tragic characters this side of Shakespeare. Perhaps the most famous book to be banned in the UK in the 60s, along with Lady Chatterley’s Lover. However the content of Last Exit makes Lawrence’s novel look like The Gruffalo.

Written in a style that I can only describe as somewhere between Kerouac and nonsense, the book takes the reader hostage. Due to its style it is nearly impossible to skim this book, or not give it your full attention. So you are forced to read every single word in order for any of it to make sense. Which means you are forced to witness every murder, every rape, every mutilation, and every single blowjob. In many ways it reminded me of Burgess’ A Clockwork Orange, both are written using ‘difficult’ prose and both do their best to completely destroy the reader.

I like to think that I’m not easily shocked, that it would take something truly bleak for me to be disturbed. I mean, I’m someone who was left pretty disappointed at how tame Salò seems now. During 2 Girls 1 Cup I just feel sorry for the cleaner. But there’s one story in here, Tralala, that once I finished it, I had to say, ‘well fuck me’. Bleak doesn’t even begin to cover it.

Obviously this book will not be for everyone. There’s literally more rapes than full stops. But it does wonderfully capture that odd time in American literature. The 60s. Post-Beats, mid-Vietnam, pre-psychedelia. A time when really anything went. And it did. And this is the result.

Creo que no había leído un libro que me estuviera provocando tanto asco y rechazo como lo estaba haciendo este de Hurbert Selby Jr. Y yo, que soy profundamente rencoroso, pensé en imponerle un castigo ejemplar, darle donde más dolía: le otorgaría una vengativa y solitaria estrella.

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Y sin embargo, uuuf, era incapaz de dejar de leer. Ahí estaba yo, pegado a sus páginas a pesar de la incomodidad que me suponía no poder saber si únicamente estaba hechizado por lo abyecto de la narración o si algo tenía que ver en ello “la maestría literaria” del autor. Era incapaz de desligar una cosa de otra o quizás demasiado cobarde para intentarlo. Quizás no quería indagar en las causas de por qué la lectura me estaba afectando de la manera en la que lo estaba haciendo, quizás sentía que eso tan horrible y monstruoso a lo que me estaba enfrentando también vivía en mí. Me estaba ablandando y, como suelo intentar ser tan justo como rencoroso soy, pensé que concederle solo dos estrellas seguía siendo un castigo apropiado.

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Pero empecemos por el principio. Con esta cita se abre la primera de las 6 partes en las que se divide el libro:

“Porque el hombre y la bestia tienen la misma suerte: muere el uno como la otra, y ambos tienen el mismo aliento de vida. En nada aventaja el hombre a la bestia, pues todo es vanidad.” (Eclesiastés, 3, 19)

La cita, aunque se entiende su sentido, no es ajustadamente fiel a lo contado en la novela.

La especie humana comparte con otras especies animales muchos de los instintos que nos mueven a actuar. Aquí se muestra, o mejor dicho, se exhibe con una escalofriante dureza a hombres y mujeres que son incapaces de dominar esos impulsos. Pero lo que leemos en este libro y lo que no tiene parangón en el reino animal es la crueldad, la depravación y el más absoluto de los desprecios por la dignidad humana, incluso por la propia, de la que hacen alarde muchos de los personajes.

Había que reconocer que la novela estaba logrando conmigo con una eficacia máxima aquello que el propio autor confesó perseguir: “No quiero que leas una historia, quiero que la experimentes. No quiero contarte una historia, quiero llevarte a una experiencia emocional.” Y ya empezaba a estar bastante seguro de que algo tenía que ver la forma en la que estaban relatadas esas depravaciones y crueldades. Una forma nada ortodoxa, que en su día fue objeto de desprecio por los académicos pero que yo ya había disfrutado en otros autores como James Kelman, un escritor que comparte con Selby ética y estética y que recibió el mismo desprecio de la crítica. Se había ganado una estrella más.

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Pero aun así, la novela me seguía pareciendo gratuitamente escandalosa, una objeción que ya había tenido con otra de sus obras, “La habitación”. Imposible leer Tralala y no quedar horrorizado y sobrecogido, pero también indignado por la, pensaba, innecesaria degradación y violencia a la que era sometida su protagonista. Y en esas estábamos cuando, casualidades de la vida, leo en la prensa una noticia sobre una reciente sentencia de cuatro años, sí, solo cuatro años, a tres individuos que en 2008, sí, en 2008, se turnaron para violar a una chica de 18 años en un coche en el aparcamiento de la discoteca en la que la acababan de conocer. La víctima, bastante perjudicada por el alcohol, fue introducida en el asiento trasero del coche, desnudada y sucesivamente penetrada vaginalmente hasta la eyaculación sin el uso de preservativos. Según declaraciones de testigos, mientras uno de ellos la violaba, sus amigos le jaleaban e invitaban entre risas a otros jóvenes a sumarse a la acción: “Entrad, que hay barra libre”, “venga, que no se entera de nada”. Y Cuatro años… como cuatro estrellas.

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Mis reticencias se habían ido derritiendo una tras otra, y aunque solo fuera por aquellas palabras de Kafka acerca de los libros que muerden y pinchan, aunque solo fuera porque había conseguido en mí una de las funciones más importantes de la literatura que, en opinión de Vargas Llosa, es “recordar a los hombres que, por más firme que parezca el suelo que pisan y por más radiante que luzca la ciudad que habitan, hay demonios escondidos por todas partes que pueden, en cualquier momento, provocar un cataclismo”, aunque solo fuera por la belleza sórdida de ese relato maravilloso que es “La reina ha muerto”… ¡¡qué coño, ahí van las cinco estrellas!!

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Had I read this at the time of release in 1964 it would have seemed like being struck by a lightning bolt from hell where one was made to feel sick, disgusted and appalled by it's graphic depiction of pretty much the worst that human behaviour has to offer. Fast forward to 2015 and nothing has changed, this is a shocking, gut-wrenching read which creates a vision of hell on earth for a bunch of New Yorkers who are just about as far away from the american dream as possible. Selby Jr was a genius in my view, he really had a pair of balls to even be thinking of putting pen to paper and you truly do stand up and take notice. You want to run and hide but you can't, you want the pain to stop, but it doesn't, you want the book to end, but you don't, then you start to think, hang on a minute this guy has got a point, this is human nature whether we refuse to believe it or not, this IS real life in all it's horrible glory, and a wake up call for all those who think america is a big fat cream cake sprinkled with stardust and a cherry on top.

I read Last Exit to Brooklyn a few years ago, when I actually lived in the titular city and tried to “run” a regular drinking session where my friends and I discussed incest book club. I chose this book for: its reputation, a trusted friend’s personal recommendation, and because Hubert Selby Jr. also wrote Requiem for a Dream (never read, love the movie). Though I generally have a sunny disposition, I also have a penchant for sad songs, movies about addiction, and slutty women. It is a reflection of a core that doesn’t usually see the light of day, one that stays hidden mostly due to an annoying need to be liked by the entire human race (unless you are really close to me, then I will abuse you much more than the people I hate).

This novel has acquired cult status level for the same reasons that a lot of other creative works have. It exploits a variety of taboo subjects: here we have sex, drugs, and a metric fuckton of violence. Gay sex, Bible quotes, alcoholism, spousal abuse…it’s all there, set to the backdrop of a long-ago Brooklyn, glorified by the relative newcomers for being more real, more authentic. These particular readers are trying to erase their own roots for their own reasons, and in the mindless appropriation of all things related to their newly adopted city, piles of thick-rimmed black glasses are left too dirty too see what this book is actually made of.

Hubert Selby, Jr. writes strangely yet evocatively, and Last Exit is obviously meant to represent a largely ignored (in literature published before 1964) class of human.

The New York Times Book Review says it is: “An extraordinary achievement…a vision of hell so stern it cannot be chuckled or raged aside.”

Harry T. Moore says: “The raw strength and concentrated power of Last Exit to Brooklyn make it one of the really great works of fiction about the underground labyrinth of our cities.”

Imagine a hundred more reviews like these. The above two were lifted directly from the book’s Amazon page, which proves that the novel is being marketed in such a way as to cement it as a “classic of postwar American writing.” To appeal to those of us attracted to sad songs, addiction, and slutty women. To appeal to those who identify with, or at least try to project an image of identifying with, the seedy underbelly of life.

The problem with this is that they are looking to explore the seedy underbelly of a city that is a seedy underbelly itself.

Synopsis (credit, Wikipedia, obviously):

Last Exit to Brooklyn is divided into six parts that can, more or less, be read separately.

-Another Day, Another Dollar: A gang of young Brooklyn hoodlums hang around an all-night cafe and get into a vicious fight with a group of US Army soldiers on leave.
-The Queen Is Dead: Georgette, a transvestite hooker, is thrown out of the family home by her brother and tries to attract the attention of a hoodlum named Vinnie at a benzedrine-driven party.
-And Baby Makes Three: An alcoholic father tries to keep good spirits and maintain his family’s marriage traditions after his daughter becomes pregnant and then marries a motorcycle mechanic.
-Tralala: The title character of an earlier Selby short story, she is a young Brooklyn prostitute who makes a living propositioning sailors in bars and stealing their money. In perhaps the novel’s most notorious scene, she is gang-raped after a night of heavy drinking.
-Strike: Harry, a machinist in a factory, becomes a local official in the union. A closeted homosexual, he abuses his wife and gets in fights to convince himself that he is a man. He gains a temporary status and importance during a long strike, and uses the union's money to entertain the young street punks and buy the company of drag queens.
-Landsend: Described as a “coda” for the book, this section presents the intertwined, yet ordinary day of numerous denizens in a housing project.

Like I said: evocative. Not to mention the author’s distinct neglect of “proper” grammar and literary conventions. However, as I quickly thumbed through the pages of this surprisingly fast read, all the deep, dark, supposed “truths” of how people really lived rang so empty that I became disgusted by all the fucking tricks he was using. He skipped the more subtle yet infinitely more powerful inner darkness of things, to focus on dry, famously “colloquial” accounts of girls getting gang raped, girls being beaten, transvestites slogging through life on benzies, etc etc ETC.

It brought another of our "book club" selections to the forefront for comparison: Truman Capote's Breakfast at Tiffany's. I didn't love this book either, but for all its shallowness Capote nailed the dialogue head on. It sounded like actual people talking. Last Exit's supposed mastery of the same thing is a complete farce.

This was my original review, from 2009:

"I thought it was successful in its goals, and innovative, and very interesting structurally and it affected me profoundly. However, I couldn't get past the violence and single-mindedness of this book. In its "realistic-ness" I found no reality, if that makes sense."

I gave it 3 stars originally, but I will reduce it to 2.

I still stand by that short and sweet account, but I have finally figured out where my intense dislike for -- NAY, repulsion towards, this novel comes from.

The Brooklyn of this book is not my Brooklyn. I don’t think it was the Brooklyn of its characters, or the Brooklyn of 1964. If there is one goddamn thing I have learned about life, it’s that it’s hard, and full of things and people that make you feel bad. There is a yin to that yang however, and sometimes the hardest shit reveals more beauty than any empty life of ease and luxury could offer. I would have found Last Exit to Brooklyn more believable and real if Georgette the transvestite had found some solace in her friends, if Selby Jr. had included moments of muddled joy in between the raucous, never-ending torment and hard-hitting unlikeability of the characters.

My Brooklyn was sweaty migrant workers broiling in the relentless August sun, yes, but who knows what unholy hell they escaped from? Brooklyn was and is: empty, drugged out eyes at parties, quick fucks in bar bathrooms, countless empty mornings robbed of endorphins – tempered by the heady highs of pursuing Dionysian fun. The terror of a walk home in Bed Stuy at 3 am folds its leaf over gently and reveals the awesome beauty of a walk in Park Slope on a glorious May afternoon.

Brooklyn is a million things; so is every other city.

Do you see my point? This book neglects the roundness of life. It cuts corners and goes for shock value instead. That’s not authenticity, and those who loved this book because it was real and authentic should reevaluate...everything.

They say any press is good press...

I hereby announce that this novel has won my lifetime award for unique descriptions of debasement and viciousness. Nevertheless, while being severely repulsed, I did admire the book for its excellent and innovative writing.

Rare is the book that leaves me so disoriented and raw-nerved. When I finished this I sat slack-jawed for a minute letting my cigarette burn out and trying to fix my mind on something/anything. This is an excruciatingly penetrating vision of the total dregs; a narrative of self-delusion, rough trade, addiction and thanatos thanatos thanatos. Selby, Jr. never seems to slant toward exploitation or pulp and strangely enough, in spite of the godawful hopeless hate-filled suckers that populate his writing, seems to have some sort of very real and desperate heart. I didn't like the characters (you can't) but oh god did I want to stop with the beating into senselessness, I really really wanted them to claw out some bitty iota of self-awareness, life-force, something/anything. Do I sound like some dumbfuck blurb or what? Whatever. Read this.

Es un libro muy original. Escrito en un estilo peculiar.
Son narraciones sobre personas cotidianas en situaciones cotidianas, todas relacionadas entre sí. La misoginia, el sexo, la violencia, drogas, homosexualidad son temas recurrentes. En general, mucha miseria, miedo y frustración. Fracasados que solo piensan en llegar al día siguiente y desean poder acordarse, aunque sea vagamente, de lo que hicieron la noche anterior.
Al final, mis sensaciones no son muy positivas. ¿Es un libro interesante? Sí, mucho. ¿Me ha aportado algo? Más bien poco.
Una cosa sí está clara. Este libro no sigue ningún canon clásico de narrativa: el autor pone los puntos y las comas donde le da la gana, si es que pone; para las mayúsculas y minúsculas no hay criterio; los guiones no existen para los diálogos; ni acotaciones ni nada de nada. Que el lector se espabile. Y, aunque parezca mentira, se puede leer sin ningún problema.

It's a very original book. Written in a peculiar style.
They are stories about everyday people in everyday situations, all related to each other. Misogyny, sex, violence, drugs, homosexuality are recurring themes. In general, a lot of misery, fear and frustration. Losers who only think of arriving the next day and wish to be able to remember, even vaguely, what they did the night before.
In the end, my feelings are not very positive. Is it an interesting book? Yes, a lot. Have you brought me something? Rather little.
One thing is clear. This book does not follow any classic canon of narrative: the author puts the dots and the commas where he wants, if at all; for upper and lower case there is no criterion; scripts do not exist for dialogues; no remarks or anything. Let the reader wake oneself up. And, incredible as it may seem, it can be read without any problem.

A searing sift through the slurried slums of post-war Brooklyn. The only book that uses shock, violence and vulgarity to depict a world of tragic isolation that truly pierces the heart, gets you so deeply you feel you are THERE, in this boneyard of brittle bones and broken bodies, crying and fighting and fucking and SHOUTING AT YER FREAKIN KIDS TA SHUT THERE TRAPS.

Selby's editor on this book was Gilbert Sorrentino, who helped Selby refine his extraordinarily precise style, his pitch-perfect dialogue, distinctive abuse and misuse of punctuation, his staggering pacing. His essay in the collection Something Said illuminates the construction of these elegant art-bombs, unlocking the complexity and beauty in Selby's compostions.

Best Brooklyn novel, bar none.

Good God, this is a brutal book. The writing style's brilliant, but the stories are so vivid that the pain of the characters is visceral. It's not a novel so much as it's a series of short stories that tie together to portray the hell-hole that was 1950's Brooklyn. There was a whole obscenity case about this book when it was published in the early 1960's: the story that received the most attention for being obscene, however, was not the one I found most painful. The most infamous story was "Tralala", which is about a teenage girl who slowly destroys herself (and is destroyed by others) as she uses her body for male attention and for money. However, her character was not as sympathetic as that of Georgette in "The Queen is Dead". This is one of a few stories written in a hybrid first/third person stream of consciousness style, which makes you feel for Georgette, a young gay man and sort of transsexual. Overall, it's amazing how words on a page can break your heart, but Last Exit to Brooklyn definitely does.

What a nasty,ugly and unpalatable book. But it's not an easy one to forget about,thanks to these very attributes.

On the one hand,it is supposedly a cult classic. On the other hand,it faced obscenity charges,and is very controversial. The author was a drug user,he was sick,and he was pretty desperate.
He figured that he knew the alphabet,so he might as well try his hand at writing.

It's not pretty writing,there are expletives galore. The language takes a fair bit of deciphering. It's jarring prose,it is downright offensive. It presents the ugly side of life,and does so with a vengeance.

The subject matter including gang rape,drug use,paedophilia etc. is none too appealing. However,there is one thing to be said for this book,such nasty things do happen in reality.

I read one story,it shocked me alright. I tried skimming the rest,I couldn't. I read a more sanitised summary instead. I hated this book,and yet I wouldn't forget it.

I have just reread Last Exit to Brooklyn (1964) for my book group, having first read it umpteen years ago, and it is still a powerful and disturbing experience, though time has reduced the impact of its graphic tales of drugs, street violence, gang rape, homosexuality, transvestism and domestic violence.

As I was rereading I was struck by the parallels with Trainspotting (1993): both in the depiction of street life and the extensive use of an unpunctuated vernacular. What Last Exit to Brooklyn lacks in comparison with Trainspotting is any humour. 1950's Brooklyn, as depicted here, is an unremittingly bleak world populated by universally unsympathetic, venal characters.

This time round I was also struck by the rather one dimensional and slightly sinister depiction of the book's gay men.

Not a pleasant read but, undeniably, a landmark book that still stands up.

4/5

My second Selby and I was just as amazed. My first one of him was his 1978-published book, Requiem for a Dream (4 stars also).

Hubert Selby, Jr. (1928-2004) wrote like no other or maybe I have not encountered those "others" yet. I have encountered Saramago's and Garcia Marquez's novels with practically no punctuation marks. Selby's had some but he substituted apostrophes with forward slashes "/". According to Wiki, Selby's reason for this was the symbol's proximity to his typewriter, thus allowing uninterrupted typing. Selby was a high school dropout and got seriously ill (his lung was operated due to tuberculosis) while in the Marines. Suffering from chronic pulmonary problems for the rest of his life, even without formal training, he began to write reasoning to himself that "I know the alphabet. Maybe I could be a writer."

And he did and I am not only amazed but also inspired. Who knows? I even have already attended a writing workshop. Selby did not and yet his writing was brilliant. He did not use quotations and was not concerned about grammar. His prose was stripped down, bare and blunt, Wiki says. For me, that's what makes his unorthodox writing simply beautiful.

This book contains the five short stories that were originally published in magazines. The Queen is Dead in 1958 and Tralala in 1961. Both stories, in fact all of the 5 stories in this book, deal with and vivid depiction of homosexuality, drug addition, rapes, pornography and cruelty to ones' own children. This detailed shameless portrayal of post-war Brooklyn in the 50's was the reason why this book was originally banned in Great Britain and Italy in 1967.

My first impression of the book was: shocking. A homosexual being beaten by his lover. A prostitute getting gang-raped. Small toddlers being unattended because the father is a slob and the mother has to work. A closet union shop steward manages the picket in the morning and moonlights as a gay lover frequenting the gay bars at night and dreaming of killing his wife. All these disturbing characters can make a reader drop the book and move to one with positive and uplifting theme (I used to do that, so I know what I am talking about). However, Selby's prose is beautiful and has the ability to make his characters practically leap off the pages of his book. You can't help but be sympathetic to those people whose main problem really is that they are poor.

Hold on though. There is Ada the widow who still washes and irons the pajamas of her long-dead husband and puts them on their marital bed. The woman in the neighborhood talk at her back referring her as "that filthy Jew" and the children mock her. Selby used Ada as the only sympathetic character in this book and it worked like magic because of the contrast and irony that she provided.

One of my unforgettable reads this year.

Hubert Selby's travelogue brings you deep into an exotic land you've never visited before. I mean, technically Sunset Park in Brooklyn is like ten minutes away on foot, but Brooklyn's come a long way in forty years and I don't know anyone like anyone in this book, which is great for me because there is an awful lot of rape going on.

And the thing is that Selby is such a terrific observer of people, and he has this wonderful sympathy for them, so he gets you inside even the most loathsome of characters - and everyone here is basically loathsome, so when I say "most" I mean MOST - and you understand a little of why they're like this, the loneliness and hopelessness and hurt fury inside them. It's really pretty terrific stuff, but you get the feeling he doesn't trust it, he doesn't think it's quite enough to get your attention, so after all that he's like AND THEN EVERYBODY GOT RAPED, like a kid kicking his brother because any attention is better than no attention. For all I know that worked; maybe this wouldn't be a cult classic if it wasn't notorious for its groundbreaking obscenity trial. I'm just saying, he's a really good writer and this book gets a little dark sometimes.

It isn't a novel, it's a collection of loosely linked short stories. Tralala's story is the famous one, partly because obscenity and partly because I think the 1989 movie focused on it. But the best, and the longest, is Strike, about a crooked union rep for a crooked union striking against a crooked factory while looking for crooked love from crooked people. The ending makes no sense - did I mention rape? - but everything else is basically a masterpiece.

The only really weak story is Landsend, the final one, which is too sketchy to amount to anything and besides Selby's point is more than made by then and it starts to feel repetitive. Up 'til then, the stories actually build on each other very nicely and then everybody got raped.

HIGHEST RECOMMENDATION!
Grabbed this from my stash Saturday evening and started blazing through it, rapt! Could not put it down. Finished Sunday...

Uncompromising portrait of petty slothfulness and violence in grim Brooklyn in the 1950s. The 1989 Jennifer Jason Leigh film was fine and disturbing, but it can't capture the earnest immediacy of this book and the machine-gun style of expression of the colloquialisms and the stream of consciousness. This is masterly, it seems to have flowed off Selby's fingers the way Kerouac's "On the Road" did. No quote marks or identification of speakers, but they're not needed because it makes sense without all that. (Books this good sometimes make me question the need for punctuation, actually...)

I actually had difficulty trying to start this book in the past, but reading Joyce's "Ulysses" has raised my reading comprehension level greatly, so this thing flows like buttah.
The terms "gay" and "Miss Thing" were already in use in 1957. Who knew?

This is raw and frank and vivid and emotionally harrowing. The cold amorality of the city. Selby's expression is refreshingly free; he's a genius at depicting squalor...

It's a world of coffee in styrofoam cups and queens who suck cum out of used condoms found in the park...

This could end up being a favorite. Let's see.

UPDATE:

More than halfway through now. "Strike," which takes up the entire middle third of the book, is the kind of proletarian literature one rarely encounters. A real, on-the-ground look at a brutish, closeted gay married shop steward, swaggering like a little Caesar, trying to draw attention to his pathetic self...It's rare to see labor and unions depicted so unflatteringly in American literature. It's nice for a change to see actual WORK LIFE depicted in a book. Too often we get the after-hours doings of characters and nothing more in novels, always the sex bits and never the workaday stuff that takes up most of our daily lives. Gotta respect this. Great historical value in this book as well. I'd add this along with "The Jungle" and "Christ in Concrete" to the list of best prole lit.
This part of the story starts with a hint of gay pedophilia and ends with an overt act of same. Not much that Selby shies from...

Also must note, "Strike" is written in somewhat more a conventional style by comparison to the preceding chapters. Omniscent narrator and punctuation, though a lot of ellipses... (like that)

Also, a must in the realm of gay/queer lit in its evocation of gay bars, drag balls, rough trade, and repressed sexuality taking the form of violence and compensatory extreme male hetero behavior.

The heroes of the book, if there can be said to be any, are the stoic, browbeaten women. Selby's portraits of women are by and large sympathetic, even in the face of the menfolk's rampant misogyny. Women also are seen as sexual beings who want orgasms as much as men. I doubt this was commonly admitted in much other lit. in 1957.

The last section of the book, "Landsend" is a concentrated portrait of a half dozen family tenants in the tenement block, alternating stories of the same characters. Heartbreaking vignettes. The old woman, Ada, probably the only truly sympathetic character in the novel. Selby's depiction of her reality is lyrical, perhaps the only real lyricism in the book. It gave me chills.

This is a classic. Definitely a new favorite.

I can picture this book being read in college literature classes. I am sure that it deserves its place in modern American Literature and I am also sure that this book and Selby have their fans. I won't dispute his genius. My rating is not based on the "merit" of the book, but on whether I liked it and the truth is that I found this book to be repulsive and nauseating. I think that I was expecting it to be sort of like Kennedy's Iron Weed (which I liked) but much darker but Last Exit isn't dark---it is more like wallowing in a sewer and I kept reading only by hoping to see what Selby was trying to say to the reader. I kept looking for insight into the human condition. I must confess that in the end I just didn't see the point. I found the loosely related stories that make up this "novel" to be repetitive. Follow a repellent and completely repulsive character around, watch them victimize people, and then watch them subjected to extreme violence at the hands of other equally repellent and repulsive characters. As much as I hated reading this book one thought never left my mind. I felt sorry for Selby. He must have lived with a terrible darkness inside him to have written this book. The scary thing is that as bad as this book is, his novel The Room is supposed to be much darker. Looking at the reviews I see one person stating that they felt like burning their copy---and they LIKED the book! That's a common thread. Even the people that give his books 5 stars didn't enjoy reading them.

I'd previously thought that recent authors chronicling amoral and desperate lives in blunt direct terms (say, Bret Easton Ellis and Irvine Welsh) owed a lot to Bukowski in particular. But Last Exit to Brooklyn both predates Bukowski's first novel and points most directly ahead to the likes of Trainspotting. Except this is more obliteratingly bitter, more deathly demoralizing. Selby's vision is positively apocalyptic, but only in the most frighteningly believable terms.

It is wrong that Last Exit to Brooklyn didn't shock me as much with its events as its insight? I don't mean to sound all rough and tough, I grew up in a working class Chicago neighborhood, but I knew people a couple steps removed from Selby's characters. Maybe people feel better when they frame the Last Exit to Brooklyn universe as far away from home, but the novel's power's in the transposition of the darkness to the every day. I mean, there are people feel the same as these characters all around, within a block, for certain, unless you live in central South Dakota or wherever. The isolation, the frustration, the sense of feeling trapped, and the crossing over from the civilized to animal, inarticulate need, is all around us. I'm not saying we all suck or we can't transcend Selby's world, but pretending we have when we carry casserole dishes to our mother in law's houses on Christmas Eve and play golf on Saturdays isn't authentic, either. I guess that's what makes Last Exit to Brooklyn so excellent. It's one of those "How do you want to live your life?" books that exposes raw darkness and dares you to allege it's not there. You can hide it away or you can face its stark presence straight on. The big moments aren't as terrifying as the small, the rolling away from your boyfriend and realizing you hate his fucking guts and want to be left alone. The explosion deep inside that makes you not want to shoot up a school but get drunk and hit on that girl from work. Sure, the Last Exit to Brooklyn people are, more often that not, awful, and even worse (like Ada), very sad, but they're human and recognizable. The last two sections, on the factory strike and the housing projects, are near-masterpieces. Selby's the real deal. I really liked Last Exit to Brooklyn. Dark, scary, offensive, and honest, this novel's important. If you haven't read it, check it out.

One of the best books I have ever read, hands down. I discovered it at a time where I was aching to find the style that best suited me as a reader, the genre above all others that roped me in and never let go. Selby helped me find it.

After reading the inside of the box for the film, "Requiem for a Dream", I was compelled to find this book that Darren Aronofsky, the director, adored so much. He was from Brooklyn, and the Brooklyn that is described here, so it certainly has much more meaning for him. But after opening it and reading the first sentence, just as with Aronofsky, I was attached at the hip to this book, and have since read it many times over again, although only at times when my stomach and my faith in humanity are sufficiently reinforced enough to handle it.

Wholly depressing almost in its entirety, and yet somehow keenly fascinating, Last Exit to Brooklyn is a forage deep into a dark and ugly world, one where the light of the American dream has never pierced even one tiny ray of its brilliance upon the people within. The characters range from the greedy to the angry to the confused to the misguided to the utterly without hope. Almost all those with a good heart that appear fall victim to the protagonists' everyday stompings on morality.

However, don't be mistaken and think that the novel is without depth. Selby guides those special characters in the story, the ones you never thought you could care about, into your heart, quietly and covertly. He pulls the rug out from underneath you at the most unlikely possible moment, and instead of contempt, you suddenly feel pity, grief, despair, and on occasion (on a very basic level), empathy and understanding.

After more ravaging of your psyche then most minds can handle, just when you are beginning to wonder, "How could human beings end up like this?", one of the novel's most powerful images comes forth. The final section of the multi-layered work (full of characters that rarely intersect) depicts a housing project in Brooklyn, no doubt quite similar to the ones in which the main characters all grew up. Selby writes of children in the opening paragraph, frolicking among the betrodden edifices, pretending to kill each other with guns.

There is something so powerful and potent about the hard-hitting, brutal, grisly, painfully painfully REAL way that Selby writes. It is something that is certainly not for everyone to experience, but something that no one should dare ignore. The review on the back of my copy calls it "a vision of hell so stern it cannot be chuckled or raged aside." I'd say that pretty much hits it right on the head.

Not a read for children, adolescents, or even squeamish or sensitive adults.

This book is brutal, but fantastic!! There are no likeable characters here, but you can't help but feel sorry for the desperate situations they are in at times. A portrayal of the nastiest, lowest forms of character amongst us. A much cruder version of the human conditions that Emile Zola wrote about almost a century previous to this.

I'm wondering why I've not read this before now. Looking forward to reading more of his work.

Brutal and haunting.

I read one or two of the sections of this book years ago in Evergreen Review and then I read the entire book. That was many years ago, but the writing is still imprinted in my mind. This would either be a five star book - it's remained with me for all of these years - or a one star - I can't imagine wanting to read it again.
I'll go with five stars because any book that has that kind of effect on me deserves five.

This book turned me into a transparent, impalpable entity and sent me back in time to the harsh, ruthless but incredibly alive quarter of Brooklyn in the 1950's; letting me observe a number of local souls going about their daily life, struggling to survive, trying to grasp pleasure and avoid pain whenever they can, dealing with their internal demons while the world around them continues its eternal assault. There is no pity, no forgiveness, no respect to be expected where weakness is shown, instead, there is treatment so harsh that it makes you think about martyrdom, about purification through spiritual annihilation. Several stories of several souls, very different from each other, their paths often intertwined... Descriptions of their homes, of the people in their lives, and their intimate desires, their dreams, hopes, their secrets, their dreads... A place inhabited by such tumultuous souls could not be anything else, and could not bring its inhabitants anything else. You feel as if their worries, hopes and heartaches have created an invisible net in the quarter that prevents them from leaving, from escaping their often tragic, inevitable destiny. A book that touched me deeply, in a way very few books have been able to. What I feel from his writings and from the interviews I have seen is that Hubert Selby Jr was an incredibly spiritual person, that he had a very rare understanding of the human soul. Through his words we get a glimpse of the light that was inside him.

The high ratings and high praise for this book put me in mind of the following scenario: a group of people stand around a display at a gallery - simply, a pile of shit upon a table. The idiots surrounding the table do not dare to let the others know their hidden truth: they don't (don/t) get it, it looks like shit to them! No one wants to be the first and possibly look the fool, so they begin to ascribe to it those catch-phrase buzzwords they've heard others use in similar situations. Brutal! Truth! Avant! Garde! and they all turn and nod and pat each other on the back for being so very smart and hip.

Folks, it ain't art, IT'S SHIT.

The dialogue is such a headache-inducing mess that if I ever came across people that actually spoke in such wretched patter I'd cut their damn tongues out. This pales in comparison to the grammatical butchery that makes my own run-on sentences look like unfinished thoughts. The author mistakes his aversion to periods and paragraph breaks for the real flow of conversation. SHIT! Replacing apostrophes with /'s? Is this how cool you are Mr. Selby? SHIT.

Like the drag queens who treat us to an unrealistic evening (speed consricts blood vessels, erections need blood, just sayin') this piece looks like a book from the outside, but inside?

SHIT!

seriously? there were actually a couple of times I had to put this down because it was so brutal it was scaring me, it literally made my heart race, but not in a 'spooky' scary, it was in a 'wow this actually is happening somewhere in the world', it has such an air of truth about it that it gave me shivers on multiple occasions. absolutely amazing book.

Amikor Fenyő Miklós felhúzta a csőnacit, és belőtte magának a kacsafarok-frizurát, aligha voltak információi arról, Brooklynban hogy megy ez. Mert bizony az ottani jampik nem önfeledt limbó-hintózással vezették ám le a feszültséget. Az önszórakoztatás eszköze náluk a mások fél- vagy egészen holtra verése volt, miközben úgy ették a benzedrin-tablettát, mint más a szőlőcukrot. Ha szerelemre vágytak, nem Marina után sikoltoztak az utcabálon, mint szegény becsületben megbolondult Szikora Robi, hanem megerőszakoltak valakit. Ha pedig elfogyott a pénz, akkor simán kerestek egy matrózt az utcán, akit kirabolhattak – és összekötve a kellemest a hasznossal, mellesleg félholtra is verték. Jó, aláírom, bizonyára voltak tisztességes lilazakós jampik is, akik számára a szabálysértés maximum azt jelentette, hogy túl hangosan éneklik az „iminimi-szeminimi- juváp-csuvaminimi”-t, de ezek a brooklyniak, nos, ezek brutális arcok voltak. És Selby olyan közel hozza őket, hogy érezzük áporodott szájszagukat, és el tudjuk képzelni a félelmet, amit azok éltek át, akik összefutottak velük valami sötét sikátorban.

Iszonyatosan kegyetlen, mocskosul naturális regény. Nem is értem, vajon miért akarták betiltani anno. Hisz alig elképzelhető olyan szöveg, ami jobban elrettentené az embert ettől az egésztől. Hogy a létezés eme pokoli segglyukában kössön ki. Nyilván Selby olyan dolgokat is tollhegyre tűz (1964-ben!), amelyekről addig senki nem beszélt – és ugye amiről nem beszélünk, az nincs is. Aprólékosan ábrázolja a homoszexualitást - magával az aktussal együtt -, az erőszak pedig ebben a világban a mindennapok elidegeníthetetlen része, tulajdonképpen a problémamegoldás egyetlen lehetséges eszköze. A létezés, amit leír, zsigerileg taszító – tulajdonképpen meg is köszönhetnék neki a konzervatívok, hogy ilyen csodás ellenreklámot csinál a nagyvárosi szabadosságnak.

Hogy itthon miért nem jelenhetett meg a rendszerváltás előtt, az persze világos. És nem csak arra gondolok, hogy akkoriban milyen kevésbé tolerálták a cenzorok a trágár beszédet és az agresszió ilyen nyílt ábrázolását. Hanem mert bizony ez a regény baromi távol áll attól, amiben a szocializmus hinni akar. Itt szó sincs osztálytudatról. A munkások, a szegények nem viselik méltósággal sorsukat, hanem vadállattá teszi őket a nincstelenség. Nem fognak össze, hanem csak kínozzák egymást: férj a feleséget, szülő a gyereket, fehér a feketét, egyik részeg a másikat. A munkáltató persze tetű, de a szakszervezet se sokkal jobb, kész maffia. Nincs menekvés, nincs lehetőség kimászni a szarból. Csak el lehet feledni egy picit, hogy ez az egész szar, ha benyomsz hat sört meg három benzedrint. Vagy ha ez se elég, akkor elintézed, hogy másnak még nálad is szarabb legyen, és az úgy jó.

Egy ideig.

Aztán másnap kezdődik minden elölről.

Giungla d’asfalto

Dopo Requiem per un sogno torno a leggere Hubert Selby Jr.
Ultima uscita per Brooklyn è un viaggio da incubo nei bassifondi di New York in compagnia di ragazzi sbandati, prostitute giovanissime (indimenticabile Tralala), mariti violenti, pedofili, travestiti, delinquenti, ubriaconi, drogati…
Più che un romanzo vero e proprio, sono 5 storie (più una “Coda”) che si intersecano tra loro; è un libro molto crudo, molto violento, molto brutale, un libro che quando venne pubblicato (erano gli anni ’60) suscitò grande scalpore e ne fu bloccata l’uscita in molti paesi.
Selby è un autore strano, poco prolifico, un irregolare dalla prosa anarchica, uno scrittore che non ha paura dell’estremo (ma nemmeno se ne compiace): non distoglie mai lo sguardo, anche quando pudore, vergogna, voltastomaco e orrore consiglierebbero di farlo.
Ero sicura di essere adeguatamente attrezzata per una lettura del genere, ma questo libro mi ha messa alla prova, è stato una provocazione continua e anche una sorpresa, perché non sempre le mie reazioni sono state propriamente quelle canoniche.

https://youtu.be/-6MGzrzCmqI

An truly unsettling read, as all of the Selby I've read to date has been. Nauseating at some points.

One thing I remember about this book was that the explicit spelling out of gruff, blue collar, New Yawk accents (kind of like the NYC equivalent to the way that Mark Twain captured thick southern accents in Huck Finn, etc) was so grating and constant that I literally was hallucinating (mildly) that everyone around me (in northeast Illinois) was speaking with these accents after setting down the book while its contents still weighed heavily upon my mind.

Easily one of the most scarring books I've ever had the fortune (yes, you read that right) to read. This book is like a brief trip to hell. It's full of the absolute worst humans imaginable- cruel, brutish, stupid, common, empty meat-suits- and yet you get no pleasure from their screams. In fact, their lack of humanity makes their horrifying lives even worse, because they don't even seem to know how appalling their circumstances are. This book combines the drawn-out frustration of Kafka's Castle with the senseless violence of Burgess's A Clockwork Orange, except twice as gruesome.

Halfway through the book, I'm thinking "Why am I reading this? Why don't I just put it down?" But I really hate giving up on books halfway through- so many books redeem themselves entirely in the last few pages- so I powered through, hoping this was one such book.

It was not.

Relieved to have finished this book which had made my own life look bleaker somehow (Selby is gifted at this), I put it away and pick up a rather less soul-sucking book. But I found myself thinking about this book still, because it was still really bothering me- like having my heart rubbed on a cheese grater, seriously. And about a week later, an idea occurred to me.

What if Selby wrote this book not because he's a pervert who enjoys writing pretty language around nauseating sadism, not because he's some heartless creep... but because he *isn't*, and neither are we? What if he wrote this at a time in his life when he was feeling numb to his own humanity, and wrote this to provoke a reaction in himself? To create this scene utterly devoid of humanity, in order to remind himself of his own humanity, that he could still have these heart-rending reactions to human suffering, even if those humans were despicable themselves? What if he wrote it to remind us that we can still feel, still react with empathy for suffering and recoil from things worthy of disgust?

With that in mind, I rethought the entire book, and what had been a harrowing trial to read became something of a heartening psychological journey for me.