/lit/ - Literature

[Anonymous No.8975648]

Anyone read this, and can rate it?

Here's a couple reviews I found on Amazon
" Norm Macdonald has a leg up on all of them. Based on a True Story isn’t really a memoir, as the cover claims. It’s closer to a novel, a Russian tragicomedy, perhaps. Dostoyevsky by way of 30 Rockefeller Center . . . This is a gutsy gambit—many readers will likely pick up the book for stories about hosting “Weekend Update”—but Mr. Macdonald’s willingness to take risks pays off mightily. A straightforward story about a comedian losing his money over and over again might be juicy, but it wouldn’t necessarily be any different than any other tale of addiction. It certainly wouldn’t be art. And that’s what Based on a True Story is. It’s a sui generis work of pseudo-memoir that will have you simultaneously laughing at Mr. Macdonald’s wit, scratching your head at the veracity of his stories and pondering mortality, as embodied by a dying child who wants to club a seal before he goes. It’s the best new book I’ve read this year or last."

"There are two things you should know about the book: First, it is easily the most ambitious thing Macdonald has ever done; Second, it is pretending hard to be nothing of the kind. . . . Based on a True Story turns out to be Macdonald’s experiment in hyperliterary comedy. It’s disorienting, funny, sometimes stupid, and often wildly beautiful. That’s the weird part. After a couple of amusingly implausible anecdotes about gambling, drugs, and Hollywood, a chapter on his childhood erupts into waves of unbelievable lyricism—with reflections on aesthetics and memory and trauma so poetic I kept sending passages to a pal who’s a Nabokov scholar to see if they reminded her of him too (even as I pictured Macdonald rolling his eyes at the comparison). . . . There has never been a less straightforward book. It’s playful and spry and just unbelievably cagey. But it broke me, and I’ll tell you why: Macdonald is a pretty extraordinary wordsmith, capable of working in an impressive range of styles and genres."

"A driving, wild and hilarious ramble of a book, what might have happened had Hunter S. Thompson embedded himself in a network studio."

[Anonymous No.8975659]

>>8975648
Norm McDonald belongs on the Blue Collar Comedy Tour.

He is such a boor compared to his contemporaries and even to this new generation of Twitter comics.

[Anonymous No.8975669]

>>8975648
If you like Norm, you will like the book. If you don't like him, you won't like the book. I am not trying to be deliberately vacuous. The book is really just Norm on paper and won't live up to what the reviews you quoted say. I enjoyed it a lot and thought it was good, but those reviewers really need to tone it down for a book that was filled with jokes that Norm has already done on podcasts, radio shows, and tv interviews for years now. I hope his next book is more original.