276°
Posted 20 hours ago

A Bright Ray of Darkness

£10.995£21.99Clearance
ZTS2023's avatar
Shared by
ZTS2023
Joined in 2023
82
63

About this deal

Do read it because writing like this has given way to a weaker strain of pop-culture and dreadful prose.

I'm not sure what it was exactly, because the thought of reading a book about an actor starring in his first broadway play, doing Shakespeare of all things, while in the midst of a third-life crisis, didn't sound super up my alley.

Hawke’s novel is auto-fiction (I’m presuming) about a movie star who has cheated on his rockstar wife, faces the public fallout from same, is about to make his Broadway debut (in Henry IV) and is in a spiralling existential crisis entirely of his own making fuelled by drink, drugs and self-sabotage. Ethan Hawke, whose acting career has combined celebrity wattage with indie integrity, brings hard-won experience to his latest literary endeavour . Like guy is ridiculously famous, guy gets girl(s) -- all of them -- guy feels sorry for himself while he struggles with fortune's whims (love-hate relationship with fame, struggles with domestic life, mostly), and guy talks about how rough it is to be roguishly handsome and 180 pounds of muscle.

Apart from the fascinating insight into an actor’s preparations for performing on Broadway (and not just any actor, but a successful movie actor appearing on the Theatre stage for the first time; and not just in any play, but in classic Shakespeare), it was a great story about a flawed but extremely likeable character. A Bright Ray of Darkness, is an unhinged story of a famous actor married to a rock star at the cusp of divorce. To calculate the overall star rating and percentage breakdown by star, we don’t use a simple average.Hawke genuinely has something to say, and clearly cares about the novel as an art form and gets better each time out.

A four-time Academy Award nominee, twice for writing and twice for acting, ETHAN HAWKE has starred in the films Dead Poets Society, Reality Bites, Gattaca and Training Day, as well as Richard Linklater's Before Sunrise trilogy and Boyhood. Fortunately, the play is also an opportunity to climb out of himself and be someone else at the very moment he really needs that. There's definitely some male fantasy stuff happening re: the women in this book and there are problems to pick at this -- but also, the relationship particularly between William and the woman playing Lady Percy speaks to a depth of understanding about showmances that people outside of the theater can't ever really comprehend. I like the guy and really enjoyed The Hottest State and Ash Wednesday when I last read them 20 years ago or so. It came across like Ethan Hawke, author, has a lot of deep thoughts and decided to "hide" his wisdom in multiple side characters (who sounded similar), hoping we wouldn't notice how deep he is (hiding, not so well, behind the arras).What saves him is theater: in particular, the challenge of performing the role of Hotspur in a production of Henry IV under the leadership of a brilliant director, helmed by one of the most electrifying—and narcissistic—Falstaff’s of all time. In questo senso il romanzo autobiografico di Ethan Hawke è anche un percorso di formazione perché non si smette mai di crescere e di imparare dai propri fallimenti. So, so much faux-deep philosophizing on the nature of fame/meaning of life—like drunk conversations at a Hollywood party. It’s a demanding part and the production’s director is a supremely driven, hard-nosed veteran who will accept nothing less than total focus on producing the very best performance from his cast.

It is just a self-absorbed, self-pitying narrator who expects his soon-to-be ex-wife to show up and applaud his theatrical brilliance as he performs in a Shakespeare production. Well written with some extremely heterosexual scenes, but that doesn’t detract from the plot as they are infrequent and mostly flashbacks. Be that as it may, I thoroughly enjoyed Hawke's tome, and am tempted to read at least some of his backlist. William Harding, aunque una estrella de Hollywood, es un joven atormentado, disgustado consigo mismo tras el fracaso de su matrimonio, esperando aún una reconciliación que le permita perdonarse, mientras torpemente —y a veces hilarantemente— trata de manejar los restos de su vida personal con whisky y sexo. He is the author of Rules for a Knight, The Hottest State, Ash Wednesday and A Bright Ray of Darkness.The writing is fantastic, and the narrative and the characterisation are so true to life yet distant enough to be fiction. A bracing meditation on fame and celebrity, and the redemptive, healing power of art; a portrait of the ravages of disappointment and divorce; a poignant consideration of the rites of fatherhood and manhood; a novel soaked in rage and sex, longing and despair; and a passionate love letter to the world of theatre, A Bright Ray of Darkness showcases Ethan Hawke's gifts as a novelist as never before.

Asda Great Deal

Free UK shipping. 15 day free returns.
Community Updates
*So you can easily identify outgoing links on our site, we've marked them with an "*" symbol. Links on our site are monetised, but this never affects which deals get posted. Find more info in our FAQs and About Us page.
New Comment