Guided Tours of Hell: Novellas

by Francine Prose

Book Overview

"In a style that is brisk, witty, richly detailed, and suffused with a wry subtlety, Prose offers an astonishingly accurate anatomy of the human mind."--Elle

Writing with the elegance and humor that have brought her work international acclaim, bestselling author Francine Prose has created an exhilaratingly transgressive fiction that examines the difficulty of feeling the appropriate emotions about the greatest historical...

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 006008085X
• ISBN13: 9780060080853
• Release Date: September 2002
• Publisher: Harper Perennial
• Length: 256 Pages
• Weight: 0.40 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.7" x 5.5" x 8.2"

Customer Reviews

Three cheers for three pigs

This book contains two novellas. The first is a well-crafted study of how charismatic individuals spin history for personal gain, be it social/sexual or material. The fact that the Holocaust is the history being spun is timely and fascinating.The second is a full length novel that has been unfairly savaged by previous reviewers for being formless, with "thin" characters, unattractive "pathetic" main character etc. etc. Anyone's entitled to his opinion, but I believe these reviewers missed the point. This is an existential story written from the perspective of a woman who is neurotically obsessed with her (older) lover. I think it's brilliantly done. Certainly we know lots of OTHER people who have been in such relationships. Do all romantic heroines have to be heroically self-assertive? What a depressingly narrow range of reader tastes if that is the case! Nina's musings as she flounders in the emotional vortex of her obsessive love for Leo are fascinating and generally close to the mark. Her character is 'thin' because love-obsessed persons are self-absorbed and have a constricted range of expression. That Prose "made Paris boring" is not a criticism, but high praise! The embarassingly simple point is that even the most attractive environment will be sterile and dully malevolent when filtered through the opaque lens of emotional dependency.

Highly recommended...

My Creative Writing professor recommended this book to me, and I flew right through the first of the two novellas. I think it's brilliant---it's hard enough to write about the Holocaust, but it's even harder to do it with a true sense of humor. And though the second novella isn't as strong as the first, the first is so good that I stand by the five stars I'm giving it.

When will Ms. Prose get the praise she deserves?

Is there a more striking cultural critic writing literary fiction today? Are you sick of the solipsism and self-indulgence of folks like David Foster Wallace and Martin Amis? If so, these two novellas are for you. The shorter of the two, "Guided Tours of Hell," gives us a pathetic American playwright who, at a Kafka conference at German Death Camps, can't divorce his consciousness from petty rivalries. It takes guts to set a satire at the sight of one of our century's greatest tragedies, but Ms. Prose does it and to devastating, shocking success. The commercialization of the Holocaust -- most speciously seen in the film "Schindler's List" and publicity and self-congratulating that surrounded it -- is the perfect backdrop for this tale of male rage and cultural jealousy. Ms. Prose is a marvelous and graceful prose writer with a cultural critic's sharp eye and an academic's reservoir of knowledge; her writing is a pleasure, and a terror to read, as you never know what unpleasant truth you'll discover about yourself.

Sympathy or Empathy

Unguided Tours of Hell is a winner. Prose's character exposition through the limited but insightful internal monologues is witty and poignant. She delivers the characters in less than ten pages and develops them in the remaining sixty. It was difficult at times for me to know whether the attraction to this book was its delectable prose or the reflection of some of my own character flaws. The sensitivity of the story's background heightens the tension built by their petty interactions. While most times I just wanted to sympathise with the characters, the truth is, I could actually empathize.