Seb 2008-09-24

1 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

I totally agree with everything the "one star" reviews said about this book! Ok I get it, Josie. You're small, pretty, ...whorish. Yes and your little brat boyfriend killed himself...and his mother is moody...blah blah blah. Your car is a piece of crap, you go to punk clubs, you cry alot, every little thing reminds you of Michael and you spend 2 freaking pages describing it, just before devoting another 4 pages to more of the same. I've been skipping pages 2 or 3 at a time, scanning for something lurking in a paragraph somewhere that may be in any way different from the 2 chapters before it. All I've found is bits and pieces of plot here and there, and more redundant blabbering about her poor poor dead boyfriend and her pathetic little life. I'm afraid that for the first time ever, I will not be able to hold out long enough to actually finish this book. Usually I hate putting down a book without at least finding out what happens in the end, but for this one I could honestly care less. I need likeable characters (I can only really get into a book if I can either identify with or find interest in at least ONE character), I need an actual plot! This book has offered neither. I loved White Oleander...but I wonder what Finch was thinking with this one.

K. Hunt 2008-09-23

3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

This book was beautifully written, and you can slip into the voice of the character most effortlessly. It's a book that months after reading I still recall passages and images from frequently. This book was so enchanting that I didn't want to put it down, and didn't want it to end, but I related so closely with the main character that I actually became depressed reading it!

Regardless, a great book from a great writer, but certainly not a light read.

Rick Pittman 2008-09-10

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

Paint It Black: A Short Review of Janet Fitch's Novel

Having read and enjoyed White Oleander by Janet Fitch I suspected that her novel, Paint It Black (Back Bay Books, Little, Brown & Company) would be a good read also. I was correct. I am reading slower than I used to. Perhaps it is the underlining and the marginal notes slowing me down, but I thoroughly enjoyed the novel. I've always loved stories about art, artists, musicians, and writers, and maybe that's why I was attracted to this story of Josie Tyrell, and the tragedies, loves, and nemeses of her life. The novel is rich in allusions, intense in conflict, and the author's prose and diction is rich. The novel is a portrait of Los Angeles and its bohemian rock music, film, and art scene. It is also a study of grief (over a suicide); of artists, creativity, and their quests for perfection; of dreams and dreamers; of the heavy hand of guilt; of beauty, love, loss, and sadness; and of how people live in and are supported by the music they listen to. Fitch has amazing and intense insights into the human psyche and heart.

I've tried to analyze why this novel affected me so deeply. Maybe it's because I've known nude models like Josie and writers, artists, and musicians like Michael. Perhaps it's because, like Michael, I am often haunted, and have my own personal demons, demons that refuse to be exorcised.
[...]She is a brilliant and insightful writer. Her writing deserves our attention.

Though there many more I could have selected, here are some of my favorite quotations from Paint it Black:"Nobody ever really loved a lover. Because love was a private party, and nobody got on the guest list." (1)"[E]ven lies could be true, if you knew how to listen." (27)"She just kept talking, like a drunk arguing with ghosts . . ."(32)"How right that the body changed over time, becoming a gallery of scars, a canvass of experience, a testament to life and one's capacity to endure it." (67)"The stupid things you say in the rain, that can't ever be washed away." (81)"Pen had no sense that someone might want to keep her private life private. Privacy wasn't even a concept. She'd never closed a bathroom door in her life." (83)"Each man kills the thing he loves"--Oscar Wilde (This is repeated many times in the novel and has to be a theme)."It was the way the world really ran, in little signs and signals." (160)"Girls were born knowing how destructive the truth could be." (236)"Sometimes things that happened were just too solid to move, like some huge bookcase or black breakfront that had dug its legs into the floor over the years." (272)"That kind of tenderness couldn't be permitted to last. Nothing that beautiful could live long. It wasn't allowed. You only got a taste . . . then you paid for it the rest of your life. Like the guy chained to rock, who stole fire . . . You paid for every second of beauty you managed to steal." ( 278)"You gave things away you couldn't afford to lose. Private things. You showed yourself and you couldn't take it back." (306)"Insomnia and the hulls of dead dreams blowing across the floor of the empty rooms like dry leaves." (337)"It was a mistake you could never recover from." (351)"(Her soul) A moldy old scrap only fit throwing away, not even the devil would take it on consignment." (361)(I love the desert, and I love this quotation Fitch has) "[S]he understood people who'd choose to live like that, isolated in a dry hard terrain, so far from comfort . . . Hard people, whose own company was even more than they could stomach." (378) And here: "[T]he Arabs invented zero, because they were a desert people, at home with absence. . . This was his landscape, bitter cold, populated only by rocks and strange leafless trees, no softness or mercy, no touch of green." (411)

annon 2008-08-12

0 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

It was almost impossible to finish this book. I didn't find any of the characters interesting and didn't care what happened to them. The book was filled with pages of mundane details that just felt like they were there to fill up space. I was really looking forward to this book, but it was a disappointment.

Stolen Buttons 2008-07-22

3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

This is a truly beautiful book.


You feel every weighted emotion Josie goes through, your heart taken by a hold so strong that you almost understand what it would feel like for your one true love, the one thing you cherished most, to commit suicide unexpectedly. How do you put together the pieces of a world fallen apart?

But the real basis of this story is passionate and unwavering love. A love the guides you in the understanding of life and the people that make up the world around you. A love that teaches you to see the world in color after only seeing black and white. A love that will never fade even though the body does.

Whole and complete, fulfilling in every way, Paint it Black is my favorite book and one of the most worthwhile reads you will ever encounter. It's true art and Janet Finch never ceases to amaze me with the exquisitely crafted stories she tells.

Read it, you will not be disappointed.