American Psycho (French Edition)

by Bret Easton Ellis, Alain Defosse (Translator)

Overview

À vingt-six ans, Patrick Bateman est un golden boy de Wall Street ; le parfait yuppie des années 80. Il est aussi un serial killer ...

"Patrick Bateman est, hélas, un des personnages de roman les plus intéressants qu'on ait créés au cours des dix dernières années." Michel Braudeau, Le Monde.
"Le premier roman depuis des années à faire résonner des thèmes aussi profonds, dostoïevskiens... [Bret Easton Ellis] nous oblige à regarder en face l'intolérable, ce que peu de romanciers ont le courage de faire." Norman Mailer.
"On entend rarement dire, dans la fureur des commentaires, que ce roman est une satire, une satire hilarante, écœurante, pince-sans-rire, consternante... Ellis est avant tout un moraliste. Dans ses romans, chaque mot prononcé d'une voix laconique naît d'une indignation intense, douloureuse, éprouvée au regard de notre condition spirituelle..." The Los Angles Times.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9782221128107
Publisher:	Groupe Robert Laffont
Publication date:	04/14/2016
Sold by:	EDITIS - EBKS
Format:	eBook
Pages:	495
File size:	776 KB
Language:	French

About the Author

Moins que zéro, en 1985, il a connu un succès foudroyant et s'est imposé comme l'un des écrivains majeurs de sa génération. Suivront Les Lois de l'attraction, American Psycho, Zombies, Glamorama et Lunar Park. Traduite dans le monde entier, adaptée au cinéma, son œuvre est l'une des plus significatives de la littérature contemporaine.

What People are Saying About This

Katherine Dunn

A masterful satire and a ferocious, hilarious, ambitions, inspiring piece of writing, which has large elements of Jane Austen at her vitriolic best. An important book.

Norman Mailer

The first novel to come along in years that takes on deep and Dostoyevskian themes . . . [Ellis] is showing older authors where the hands have come to on the clock . . . He has forced us to look at intolerable material, and so few novelists try for that anymore.

Fay Weldon

Bret Easton Ellis is a very, very good writer [and] American Psycho is a beautifully controlled, careful, important novel. . . The novelist's function is to keep a running tag on the progress of the culture; and he's done it brilliantly. . . A seminal book.

Editorial Reviews

This review is based on the galley issued by Ellis's original publisher, Simon & Schuster, before it cancelled the book. The book is now going through the editing process at Vintage. There may be some changes in the final version. The indignant attacks on Ellis's third novel will make it difficult for most readers to judge it objectively. Although the book contains horrifying scenes, they must be read in the context of the book as a whole; the horror does not lie in the novel itself, but in the society it reflects. In the first third of the book, Pat Bateman, a 26-year-old who works on Wall Street, describes his designer lifestyle in excruciating detail. This is a world in which the elegance of a business card evokes more emotional response than the murder of a child. Then suddenly, for no apparent reason, Bateman calmly and deliberately blinds and stabs a homeless man. From here, the body count builds, as he kills a male acquaintance and sadistically tortures and murders two prostitutes, an old girlfriend, and a child he passes in the zoo. The recital of the brutalization is made even more horrible by the first-person narrator's delivery: flat, matter-of-fact, as impersonal as a car parts catalog. The author has carefully constructed the work so that the reader has no way to understand this killer's motivations, making it even more frightening. If these acts cannot be explained, there is no hope of protection from such random, senseless crimes. This book is not pleasure reading, but neither is it pornography. It is a serious novel that comments on a society that has become inured to suffering.
— Nora Rawlinson

Library Journal

Bret Easton Ellis is a very, very good writer [and] American Psycho is a beautifully controlled, careful, important novel…. The novelist’s function is to keep a running tag on the progress of culture; and he’s done it brilliantly…. A seminal book.” —Fay Weldon, The Washington Post
 
“A masterful satire and a ferocious, hilarious, ambitious, inspiring piece of writing, which has large elements of Jane Austen at her vitriolic best. An important book.” —Katherine Dunn
 
“A great novel. What Emerson said about genius, that it’s the return of one’s rejected thoughts with an alienated majesty, holds true for American Psycho…. There is a fever to the life of this book that is, in my reading, unknown in American literature.” —Michael Tolkin
 
“The first novel to come along in years that takes on deep and Dostoyevskian themes…. [Ellis] is showing older authors where the hands come to on the clock.” —Norman Mailer, Vanity Fair

From the Publisher