Eve's Hollywood
Ratings9
Average rating3.7
15
Ratings9
Average rating3.7
"Journalist, party girl, bookworm, muse, artist: by the time she'd hit thirty, Eve Babitz had been all of these things. Immortalized as the nude beauty facing Duchamp over a chessboard and as one of Ed Ruscha's Five 1965 Girlfriends, it turns out that Babitz was a writer with stories of her own. In Eve's Hollywood she gives us indelible snapshots of southern California's haute bohemians, of surpassingly lovely high school ingenues ("people with brains went to New York and people with faces came West") and enviably tattooed Chicanas, of burnt-out rock stars in the Chateau Marmont. In her deceptively conversational prose, we are brought along on a ride through an LA of perpetual delight: to a joint serving the perfect taquito, to the corner of La Brea and Sunset where we make eye contact with a rollerskating hooker, through the Watts Towers, and shopping at Central Market. This "daughter of the wasteland" is here to show us that her city is no wasteland at all, but a glowing landscape, swaying with fruit trees and bougainvillea, buffeted by earthquakes and Santa Ana winds. By the end, there is little doubt that Babitz herself is proof there's more to Hollywood than meets the eye"--
Reviews with the most likes.
One sentence synopsis... A love letter to Los Angeles conveyed through several snapshots of different characters and areas of the city.
Read it if you like... trying to decipher which celebrities are loosely disguised in these semi-autobiographical stories.
Further reading... no longer in LA so need Paris book recs next to stick with the read-where-you-are theme. I still plan on finished Babitz's books, however I've been warned these last two were the best. If you've read them let me know!
The author likes to name drop, but all the people she mentions stopped being famous 50 years ago so it's worthless. I mean, who the fuck is Stravinsky?
The author also says many times throughout the book that she looks like Brigitte Bardot, but I looked up pictures of her from her prime years and she looks as much like Bardot as I do. Perhaps she is not referencing beauty but big tits, which she does indeed have, but big tits does not a Brigitte Bardot-look-alike make, darling!
4 stars for the chapters about being a teenager, Le Conte and Hollywood High, bunny shoes and stacked hair and dancing the Choke.
1 star for everything else, it was super boring. I'll be very kind and round up to 3 stars but maybe I'll change it later.
Eve says more in the spaces between words than most writers manage to cram into a trilogy.
