Name: Less Than Zero
Rating: 3.456 (125 reviews)
ISBN: 9780330447973

Bret Easton Ellis

Less Than Zero

Less than Zero

Read in Swedish, e-book edition from Modernista. Well written, but not my kind of book or story. 

Tove Söderberg

such a bleak and uncomfortable read but i was kind of into it… heavy on “kind of” though

kemi

In 1985, Bret Easton Ellis shocked, stunned and disturbed with his debut novel, Less Than Zero. Published when he was just twenty-one, this extraordinary and instantly infamous work has done more than simply define a genre, it has become a rare thing: a cult classic and a timeless embodiment of the zeitgeist. Twenty-five years on, Less Than Zero continues to be a landmark in the lives of successive generations of readers across the globe. Filled with relentless drinking in seamy bars and glamorous nightclubs, wild, drug-fuelled parties, and dispassionate sexual encounters, Less Than Zero - narrated by Clay, an eighteen-year-old student returning home to Los Angeles for Christmas - is a fierce coming-of-age story, justifiably celebrated for its unflinching depiction of hedonistic youth, its brutal portrayal of the inexorable consequences of such moral depravity, and its author's refusal to condone or chastise such behaviour.

liz long

Roman

Unter Null

Celine

With an introduction by novelist Ottessa Moshfegh Eighteen-year-old college student Clay is back in his hometown of Los Angeles for Christmas break. Clay is three things: rich, bored and looking to get high. As he reacquaints himself with a familiarly limitless world of privilege, along with his best friend and his ex, his shocking, stunning and disturbing adventure is filled with non-stop drinking in glamorous nightclubs, drug-fuelled parties, and endless sexual encounters. Published in 1985, when Bret Easton Ellis was just twenty-one, Less Than Zero is a fierce coming-of-age story which quickly defined a genre. A cult classic beloved for its dogged portrayal of hedonistic youth and the morally depraved, this extraordinary and instantly famous novel is a landmark in modern fiction: an inventive, precocious and invigorating story of getting what you want when you want it.

Louis Norton

this book irritated me, but what irritates me the most is the fact that I couldn’t stop reading it

paola !

Less Than Zero (Picador Books)

Colton Ray

Perhaps its our current cultural moment, but I find it nigh impossible to give a single care about the angsty, tough, rough lives of rich L.A. kids who can afford to spend their jobless days high on coke and wandering through parties and one-night-stands being just too cool to care about anything. The characters don't care about their own lives, so why should I? 

There's nothing substantive here, just repetitive drugs, party, sex, and whining. No arcs, no plot, no characterization. I didn't need a whole novel to realize that unearned wealth breeds entitlement and boredom. At least American Psycho had a clever hook. At least Patrick Bateman actually got off his butt and DID something, unlike Clay. On the final pages of the novel, Clay finally gets told off in this completely accurate description: 

"You were never there. I felt sorry for you for a little while, but then I found it hard to. You're a beautiful boy, Clay, but that's about it."

But just because you're aware of the emptiness of your protagonist doesn't change the fact that he is still an empty vessel on a somnambulist journey where he never goes anywhere, accomplishes, or learns anything. Ellis was clearly trying to ape The Great Gatsby for edgy Gen-X'ers, but it didn't work for this reader. Less Than Zero turned out to be a perfectly apt title.

Set in Los Angeles in the early 1980s, a best-selling novel follows a cast of upper-class, good-looking, oversexed, drug-addled, thrill-seeking, college-age characters on the road to perdition. Reprint. 17,500 first printing.

_linia_

You're a beautiful boy and that's all that matters.

“It’s something you must live with if you live in the hills.”

Niko

“Disappear Here.

The syringe fills with blood.

You're a beautiful boy and that's all that matters.

Wonder if he's for sale.

People are afraid to merge. To merge.”

Hoooooly shiiiiiiiiiiiiiiit. 

“It’s something you must live with if you live in the hills.”

Katherine 

There's a book and a movie. Read the book. It's better.

Reading this after finishing The Shards was enlightening in some areas, and ruined it in others. Overall, the simplicity of the timeline, and inner conflict and disillusionment were incredible, and I could not put it down. 

Jacque

A viscerally disturbing story of a rich, urban generation. A trudge to read through the first two thirds, but at the end I was fucked up and about to vomit. Deeply depressing, and horrifically based in reality.

Maya

Adriana Sanchez

Kelsey Lynn

I read this for a reading challenge, the prompt being an authors first bòok. I was warned by multiple people not to read it but I'm glad I did.

Ellis writes in an apathetic, straight forward and Minimalistic style that surprisingly made this book very powerful and brought it to life. On the outside this book is just about rich entitled children going on drug binges and living pointless broken lives, the author gives you play by plays of Clay ' s visit home from college in a very basic "and then I brushed by teeth and called Blair" kind of style.

 It seems boring and depressing, yet somehow enthralling , and if you stick with it you see a broken child coming to terms with just how messed up everything is and beginning to ask himself why.

 This book is depressing and haunting. Clay is apathetic and unfeeling, disconnected from everything and the authors style makes this so believable. I felt it in my gut, this heaviness, this despair. I felt clay ' s disconnection.

 I feel like lots of people will struggle with seeing it for anything other than rich kids on drugs. But the few who will read it and feel the character will get a haunting coming of age story about children who have everything and because of it have nothing .

one of my all time favorites — quite graphic but it's a great fly on the wall narrative depicting the dark underbelly of rich white asshole suburbia. 

markelle e. e.

Patrick Baumann

Almost quit reading in the beginning because everything was so dull and depressing. But that's what the book is actually about and in the end it moved me quite a bit.

erin hanley

i reread this book all the time and it always fucks my shit up

Casie Blevins

Awful. The worst of the worst of humanity. The characters are the real walking dead. Vacuous. Vapid. Empty. Pointless. Hopeless. It's been a very long time since I have hated a novel but I truly hated this one. At least it wasnt long. How the hell did they make a movie out of this novel? Oh yeah, they didnt. They couldnt. Because you can't put the depravity found in this book into a blockbuster movie, and for damn sure not in the eighties. The movie is Less than Zero Lite, and the plots barely resemble one another.

steffi

Jessica Smith

This review probably won't be very long. Basically, this is about the general malaise of obscenely rich kids in LA who have nothing better to do with their time than do lots of drugs. This means they make lots of bizarre and illogical decisions, and some of them seem very fuzzy on the idea that all human beings are entitled to bodily integrity and (view spoiler)[not being abducted, raped and/or murdered on camera (hide spoiler)]. At least the narrator isn't so bereft of ethics that he enjoys watching that, but he doesn't go to any lengths whatsoever to try to stop it either. He says things sometimes about how caring is too hard, it just makes you get hurt, so he tries not to. I'm not sure if the book is nihilistic or a denunciation of nihilism or both.

To its credit, the book is hard to put down – it just kind of rattles along at a consistent pace until the end, and the segments it's divided into are mostly shorter than a page each so it's really easy to do the "just one more... just one more" thing. Plus, it's really short. That doesn't make it fun to read, though.

Galaxia

this novel sketches an eerie portrait of Los Angeles and the drug-soaked underbelly of the elite. Ellis never fails to deliver a story that sits on the precipice between slightly surreal and achingly realistic, and i really loved the vacuous delivery and overall tone. while the novel was definitely interesting, the lack of any semblance of a linear plot made it difficult to connect to any of the characters and the novel ultimately lacks the impact that i wish it had had.

Less Than Zero

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