The Buzzing

by Jim Knipfel

Meet Roscoe Baragon-crack reporter at a major (well, maybe not that major) metropolitan newspaper. Baragon covers what is affectionately called the Kook Beat-where the loonies call and tell him in... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 1400031834
• ISBN13: 9781400031832
• Release Date: March 2003
• Publisher: Vintage
• Length: 272 Pages
• Weight: 0.75 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.5" x 5.3" x 8.1"

Customer Reviews

If you liked the memoirs, you might like The Buzzing

It depends on why you liked the memoirs. If you liked them for clean, unobtrusive prose and an acute, peculiar and hilarious, but compassionate, take on things you might otherwise miss or take for granted, I think you'll like The Buzzing. Knipfel's prose is deceptively simple: elegant, not ornate. He's generous with detail, yet manages not to crowd the reader. In fact, it may be that very space, together with an unorthodox approach to structure, that disconcerted some readers who liked the other books. The memoirs present discomfiting slices of imperfect lives, but Jim Knipfel is always right there to reassure the readers that he sees what we see, that our uneasy feelings are valid, and that everything's okay enough at the end of the day. It's almost like being able to rubberneck at a car crash with the injured driver patting us on the head and telling us thanks for looking. The Buzzing is different. Nothing gets tidied up for us. The main character, Roscoe Baragon, is not there to hold our hands. He's funny and he has a six-toed cat, but he leads us into anxiety-provoking places and leaves us there. I loved it. This is the first book I've read in a long time that gave me room to think, let alone something to think about.

Great book!

I got a real kick out of this novel. Neat characters, well-told, funny, weird, ultimately sad. There's a lot going on in this book, and always surprises, so I never got bored with it. Lots of in-jokes for fans of Japanese monster movies and 30s era horror pulp. I liked it well enough to go out and buy another of his novels.

Fun, Thought Provoking--Buzzing!

*The Buzzing* is not a work of enormous originality or even of genius, nor is it meant to be. What it IS, is one of the finest First Novels by an American author I've read in a very long time--and it's a real page-turner, and very much a novel of our age. Its social satire is subtly scathing, and its brilliance understated--it begins as a sort of *parody* of a bad detective novel, and quickly goes into deep waters without the tedious ponderings of the longer works of a Pynchon, whose glowing praise of it graces the cover. Nor does it offer the vacuous koan-like soundbytes of the author's contemporaries, such as Palahnuik. Instead, it does something different--it becomes profound and thought-provoking BECAUSE it's hilarious and fun, with a bevy of characters we all recognize from life. I enjoyed every page. There is substance here, too--the book operates on more than one level, with life imitating art--and vice-versa.What a pleasure it is to read something unpretentious that is enjoyable and thought-provoking at the same time!

The Paranoids

As obsessive, absorbing and funny as Thomas Pynchon's CRYING OF LOT 49 - THE BUZZING's main character, Roscoe Baragon, is a 42 year-old journalist who was once a crack-reporter, but has degenerated into, well, mostly just cracked. After years of writing for major city newspapers, Baragon settles into a rut where he produces rather shoddy reporting on the various conspiracy theories fed to him by his network of less-than-sane "informants", and he publishes these theories in his column called The Kook Beat. Over time, Baragon begins to get sucked into the paranoid world of the conspiracy theorist himself... what follows is a wonderful portrait of a man losing his grip on one reality and maybe seeing some truths in another... afterall, can the conspiracy theorists be wrong all the time?