Sex & Rage
Ratings10
Average rating4.1
15
Ratings10
Average rating4.1
It is the 1970s in LA, and Jacaranda Leven - child of sun and surf - is swept into the dazzling cultural milieu of the beautiful people. Floating on a cloud of drink, drugs and men, she finds herself adrift, before her talent for writing, and a determined literary agent, set her on a course for New York and a new life.Sex & Rage is a recently re-discovered classic from author Eve Babitz, herself a muse to many an artist, writer and musician in the 1970s. A semi-autobiographical novel, it charts the highs and lows of a life lived at the limits, and transports the reader to a sunnier, dreamier, more reckless time and place.
Reviews with the most likes.
I thought I wouldn't enjoy this book because of the reviews, but I liked Jacaranda a lot, and I was rooting for her at the end.
Here are some quotes from the book that stood out to me while reading.
“The more someone liked her writing, the fewer clothes she felt she had on”
“Sometimes when you have had a little too much to drink, people who don't know how wonderful you are might get the wrong impression” — “You're fun when you're drunk. The life of the party”
“Jacaranda's face mirrored, over and over in the shop windows, how vulnerable and foreign she was.”
“Those skies had been done as well as they ever could be. All the art she'd ever done was but a thimbleful of color compared to one inch of this Matisse...Picasso had been through the sky, come out the other end, dug to China with a child's shovel, and sen opposite skies...while Matisse just sat at home. And somehow his skies were bluer.”
“Expensive transient bursts of well-being” as an explanation for: drugs, travel, alcoholism, LA.
