Ritratto Di Un Tossico Da Giovane (2011) - Plot & Excerpts
There are few books I can honestly describe as absorbing, haunting, or engulfing; books whose clean, paranoid prose flies with bullet trajectory towards inevitable ruin, self-destruction, and also self-regeneration; books who gesture the dissonant rhythm of a doomed soul that must be responsible for their actions, yet prudent about their tortured origins -- I can't like or dislike Bill Clegg. His is a story of turbulence from birth spread out through his youth and spread-eagled into the angelic, hellish world of crack addiction. Whether fictionalized in spots or not, the startling grittiness of his episodes, wrought in incredibly expressive yet subdued prose, is all real -- frantic and ignorant of time. It is indeed the time displacement itself of his chapters, named as you would song names for an album of Orphean proportions, that evokes a deeper commitment to the fragmentary nature of memories and their propensity to be lost and distorted with time. We take a walk through the colorful doom of Clegg's mind as it recalls, thoroughly stunned but inevitably enraptured. To be revolted by this man's story is essential to the experience, and completely logical, but to see it as beautiful and strange is also important, as there's a reason why we cannot break ourselves from the intensity and nightmare-dream duality of this beautiful and devastating memoir. It's partly a cautionary tale, but that in itself is obvious unless you were already considering becoming addicted to crack -- the label is redundant because the horror is self-evident. It's not merely Clegg asking for absolution or pity for his actions, or him just taking responsibility -- this is also too simple. More than anything I walk away from Clegg's portrait stricken by the depth of a life's experience, enraptured by the extremes the human soul, and jettisoned from curiosity into broken, titanic awe. What Tim O' Brien did with the Vietnam war Clegg conjures here with his crack addiction: he's created a portrait of human memory and of the human condition in all its otherworldly distortion. Such a thing is possible with literature: for the writing itself to preserve and gesture a experience so that the essence of the experience transcends the experience itself. Ok, so GoodReads says 5 stars is "amazing!" and this book is not "amazing" like that because it's a book about drug addiction. But it's quite amazing in the depth of the descriptions of addiction and what it looks like and feels like and acts like.It was so difficult to read and to watch him spiral down into that really awful place where he doesn't shower or eat or change clothes because crack is more important.I cried when it ended. (not a spoiler - because he totally couldn't have written the book if he'd died)
What do You think about Ritratto Di Un Tossico Da Giovane (2011)?
Well-written, but I was hoping for more recovery and fewer crack binges.
—Haplo
Very powerful book on the consequences of addiction.
—vivi393
