The Electric Michelangelo By Sarah Hall

Leslie

I'm the first person to champion ambitious prose, even when it overreaches. I was absolutely with this book for the first 50 pages (at least through the anecdotal preamble about Cy's mischievous, unorthodox upbringing in a seaside consumptive hotel/abortion clinic). But once Riley is introduced and Cy is ensnared in the seamy underworld of tattooing, seadog villainy, and other tediously familiar treachery, the monomaniacal narrative voice begins to bulldoze the protagonist, wringing from him any agency, personality, or authority. The only character who truly matters in this novel is the voice, with all of its purply, breathless bravura and adjectives in triplicate. It's a shame, because there's so much I admire in here, and the author clearly has a nearly perverse love of language. But after 300+ pages of relentless, battering description, my palate grew numb to the pleasures. I had no real investment in Cy (essentially a palimpsest on which the voice could ink and re-ink a smattering of colorful anecdotes and baroque histories), and there was no modulation to the narrative, which at first proved exhilarating, but quickly grew exhausting. Instead of plot, there was a lot of overwrought philosophizing about ink, self-destructive and misunderstood geniuses (again?), and learning to love.

Still, for all of my curmudgeonly grousing, I'll read her other books, in hopes to find something equally promising but more focused and balanced.

Niki

FINALLY done with this book. It's not a particularly pleasant experience when you keep rolling your eyes and asking yourself "When is this going to end already??!", and that's the experience I had with this book.

I don't know if Sarah Hall got too ambitious or too lazy with this. On the one hand, it's ambition when you clearly gave the book your all, but on the other it's laziness that you're completely sidelining the characters in favour of Purple Prose Description of a Place no.3748. The book could have benefited greatly from some classic "show, don't tell", because all it does is tell us things. "Cy did this, this, and that" "Reily drank and did this and that when he was drunk" and so on. Most of the book is told vaguely and you never really feel like you're in there, standing next to the characters.

Speaking of said characters, they're terribly developed. Cy is supposed to be the protagonist, but I never felt like I really knew him. We were mostly in his head while he was little, but as soon as Riley entered the picture (as much as I liked Riley, which wasn't a lot but it was still more than the others, except maybe for Grace) he's thrown to the curb immediately, and becomes almost a background character. We're vaguely told about his apprenticeship and those years he spent learning to tattoo, but there's no weight in any of that, we're never in his head, he's a stranger to us. Same goes for basically every single character in the book, they feel like phantoms who are just there for a bit because the book needed characters and couldn't just be Purple Prose Description after Purple Prose Description for pages on end.

I think that Sarah Hall should have published a poetry book with all those descriptions instead of this book. You could really tell that that's where her heart was, but you could also tell how annoyed I was having to read entire pages of descriptions when I just wanted to see how the characters were doing, goddammit! And it's such a shame because the characters were incredibly interesting, tattoo artists, Suffragettes, conjoined twin bar owners, a husband-and-wife tattoo artist and strongwoman (as in, the circus performance, not the cliche Strong Female Character) duo, a performer who lives with her horse inside her apartment building, and a lot more.

I don't know if this was just me. Maybe someone else would have enjoyed this style of writing a lot more than me, and I'm not saying that "I'm right, you're wrong", it just probably wasn't for me. I like character-driven stories a lot more.

BUT there's one more thing that bothered me a lot in this book, and that is its treatment of women. It's so sexist and borderline misogynistic that I could have sworn a middle aged man wrote it. Women are nothing more than objects in the story. The Suffragttes are ridiculed. Reeda is mostly alright, but after she dies so that Cy can go on to live with Riley for Plot Comfort, he doesn't even remember her anymore, and there's a cringeworthy part of "Cy had been living with women all this time, and now he's with Riley, a Man". Riley and Cy are frequently having sex with their female customers in a very degrading passage, where they're described as incredibly horny after getting tattoos from them for some reason (??????). Claudia is also pretty cool at first, but then the only thing we ever see her do is mourn her miscarriages, you know, because women are Mothers first and foremost. Nina, in the end, is a ray of hope, but we didn't see her for more than 10 pages. She was probably a ~sign that times were a-changing~, but she's not in the book enough to bring forth those changes at all.

And, of course, the cherry on top is Grace. I was SO HOPEFUL for her in the beginning, because she was finally a character that wasn't afraid to speak her mind, demand what she wanted, and try to take agency of her own body in an era when it was almost unheard of, not to mention that she was completely independent and Cy, a raging sexist, was respecting her. But, naturally, the plot had to swiftly punish her for being too spunky for her own good , but it's not nearly satisfying enough if you consider the gravity of the situation. She also never appears again after that.

Everything I've described above can be explained as "those were sexist times! The book is set in the 1910s-1940s, and it's just being ~realistic~!" or "The book is from Cy's perspective! That's how he viewed women!". My answers to those counterarguments are that 1. even if a book is trying to be realistic it should still try to challenge those views and not enforce them by the plot, and 2. Cy's hardly the POV character. I'd argue that he's hardly even the main character, even if the plot revolves around him.

So, yeah. I didn't like the book all that much. I only pushed through it because I hate DNFing books. I wouldn't recommend it unless you're really into descriptions instead of anything happening plot-wise.

☕Laura

This is the story of Cy Parks, from his coming of age on the shores of Morecambe Bay in England to his career as a tattoo artist on the boardwalk of Coney Island, New York in the early decades of the twentieth century. It is the story of the three people who would shape his soul, all three somewhat eccentric and flawed, tortured and gifted. His mother, Reeda Parks, runs a hotel for consumptives in Morecambe Bay, where the "soft air" is said to assuage their symptoms, and shows him what it is to give oneself to the care of others. His mentor, Eliot Riley, teaches him the art of tattooing while fighting his inner demons and his own bad habits. And then there is Grace, an enigmatic circus performer who would become his muse and his canvas, his true love, the source of his greatest sorrow.

The language in this book is stunning and the author's ability to bring the settings and characters to life is incredible. We are able to see these three souls through Cy's eyes and to love them as he does despite their scars and their failings. I drank this book in from start to finish and it will stay with me for a long time. It is just wonderful.

Rachel Bea

This book was written really well with some truly beautiful passages in it. I highlighted about 9 different passages that I loved. So it's strange to me that I just... didn't really care for the book that much? I don't know, I don't want to dissuade anyone from reading it, but at times I just wished I was reading something else.

Nancy B.

I expected this book to be a kind of fluffy story about a tattoo artist and his adoration of a girl, but it turns out that it's really a brilliantly drawn coming of age novel for the art of tattooing, america, and one engaging young man. The girl, who doesn't come in until late, is intriguing and solid, with a feminist bent that is believable and respectable. Sweet!

Stephanie (aka WW)

“I’m finished!” - the Goodreads button says it all. I am DNFing at 50% because I do not care one whit what happens to Cyril the tattooist. The author’s “sensual and lyrical prose” is not at all to my liking. The first 50 pages were promising, but the next 100 just a mess of fancy words. I’m finished.

Allie

What Sarah Hall does well in "The Electric Michelangelo" are descriptions. The images of blood, coughed up from lungs or pulled with a tattoo needle, are vivid enough to make me queasy. Likewise, I can perfectly imagine the characters and their every mannerism, except the main character Cyril whose perspective gives the story. However, after all these carefully constructed visuals I was left wanting more plot. The main action takes many fewer pages than the descriptions and happens so abruptly that I had to reread it to understand what had happened. After creating all these fascinating characters, I really wanted Hall to do something with them. I realize that some things were left intentionally mysterious, but I feel like a great thing about fiction is its ability to reveal some of the secrets that you never find out in life.

Shazia

I can't believe this won the Booker Prize. I chose it because of the prize (I've liked books by many other winners) and the intriguing subject matter - a tatoo artist from the period after the Great War and during the second World War, set in an English coastal tourist town and Coney Island. I think it won the award because the writing is so artful. Each phrase is a little poem. It seemed to me that the author got so caught up with her beautiful writing that she forgot about the need for plot or character development. Other people may be fine without that, but I am not. There are definitely interesting part, but mostly I slogged through this book out of sheer determination to finish. This book struck me as a prime example of what B.R. Myers was complaining about in "A Reader's Manifesto" in The Atlantic .
http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/a...

Meghann

i did not enjoy this book. i finished it out of obligation; i think i kept wanting it to be better but it just never was. i didn't really care about anyone in this story, though it was a little interesting to learn about early tatooing methods.

John Naylor

I glanced at other reviews before writing this one. Quite a few of them agree that this book is overwritten. It might surprise some people to know that I agree with this sentiment. It is overwritten. If I was editing it then it would probably lose 100 pages. However, it has enough quality and charm to merit a 4 star review despite this.

The story is mainly about the three main loves of the main character's life. His mother, his employer and his model. Each love is very different and all are cruel on some way. The settings of Morecambe and Coney Island are vastly different in the time period portrayed but also have hidden links that help the reader to familiarise. The book does leave open endings but not to an extent that would frustrate the reader.

I enjoyed the journey that the book took me on. I think the author created her characters, her landscape and her plot quite expertly. She did not rush to do so and the book benefited from that. It just lacked the balance between being enough and being too much. I would recommend this book to those who need to get away and go into a simpler time. It has left a mark on me like any good tattoo should.

Carol

This book was terrific - I had very much wanted to read it and it lived up to every expectation I had. Set during the first half of the 20th century, it's about Cy Parks, who grows up in an English seaside resort town and becomes a very good tattoo artist. He emigrates to America, where he plies his trade in Coney Island. There he encounters the enigmatic Grace, who does an equestrian act in one of the park's circuses. Their oddly intimate relationship develops through the medium of her request for an unusual full-body tattoo.
Hall's prose is gorgeous - her poetic and perceptive descriptions bring the story and its characters right inside. Reading this book was a distinct pleasure.
The Electric Michelangelo also has a distinct Tom Waits feel to it. This story and its characters bear a strong resemblance to the people and narratives that appear in Waits' material. For me, this added an extra savor to the novel.

Suzanne

This was remarkable. Flawed, perhaps, but still remarkable.

Sarah Hall is a woman drunk on language and in love with words. Some people think too many words. But I don’t know what I would cut. Her words, lots of them, conjure vivid and colorful characters and the vanished, bizarre, and sometimes sinister worlds they inhabit. They are fascinating worlds, but not always pretty.

The two parts of the book follow Cyril Parks in his youth as a tattoo artist apprentice in a seaside resort in Northern England and then through most of his adult life in Brooklyn as he practices his trade in Coney Island. His relationships with the important people in his life influence who he becomes, for better or worse: his activist, feminist mother, Reeda Parks, who runs a hotel for holiday tourists; Eliot Riley, his talented, but cantankerous, confrontational, alcoholic boss and mentor; and the bold, mysterious, and doomed love of his life, Grace. These characters will stay with me.

Many Goodreads reviewers have given this book low ratings for several reasons, including “there is too much description” and “too little plot.” This depends upon your definition of “description” and “plot.” I prefer to praise it for its exuberant and skillful prose and character-driven story. Certainly, it probably could have been edited down a bit, but people who love interesting writing will be rewarded for being patient enough to take this journey at its own pace.

This seems to be Sarah Hall’s second novel (2004). My expectation is that some of the kinks will have been ironed out in her subsequent books, which I will most definitely read. A talent to watch, for sure.

Mrs. Danvers

This book sings. It is amazing that such a young woman could write such a thoughtful story of a man's whole life, with such vitality and mastery.

Infada Spain

3,5 to be precise...

Peter Stone

It’s always wonderful when you finally understand something which you previously regarded as largely incomprehensible. This is a beautiful book about a tattoo-artist, not a subject I would normally be drawn to. But now I understand why some people, particularly those without great wealth, must have a tattoo. Unlike posh clothes or large mansions, it can say something about you, be it hidden away under your shirt or blazoned on your face for all to see. It is a statement of your very self, the essence of your being and it may well excite, amuse, horrify or upset others - brilliant. Sarah Hall writes compellingly beautiful prose as she unravels the life of Cy Parks as he learns the dark art in seaside Lancashire before moving to Coney Island during the early part of World War 2, where our hero finally and tragically finds the love of his life. It is a seedy, deceptive world brought to life by the author’s vivid descriptions of the characters inhabiting the amusement parks of hot dogs, cheap booze, freak shows - and the tattoos they choose to be painfully inked on their variously shaped bodies. Cy returns to Morecambe in later life and finds a kind of peace - as I did - great book!

Stacey

This is the longest I have stuck with a book for a while, despite its difficulty. It literally took me 10 weeks to read (I'm measuring in weeks because of the whole pregnancy thing; I remember that when I started it, I was about 11 weeks because parts of the book were making me nauseous, and now I'm 21 weeks and the whole thing just made me tired lately). It's not because the book is overly long-it's about 340 pages--it's just that it's very dense. There is almost no dialogue, and the paragraphs are all very long and detailed. I felt that I couldn't skip over anything, though, for fear of missing something lovely. The quality of writing is this book's strength, and I suspect that's why it was a Man Booker Prize finalist. Depending on my mood, I was either fascinated by the book's originality or annoyed by its tediousness. Although I am ultimately glad I finished it, I am more glad that it is over and I can move onto something else. I could not recommend this to anyone, unless you are really into writing, tattoos, or reading at the pace of Chinese water torture.

L.S.

[carte vorbita -humanitas:]
Dragos Bucur reuseste o lectura excelenta, ba as spune chiar o interpretare excelenta. Si autoarea mi-a lasat o impresie buna, deoarece a stiut sa vorbeasca frumos si ingenios despre un subiect care imi displace - si anume "arta tatuajului".
Cy o priveste pe Grace drept opera lui de arta, o opera pe care o iubeste. Se indragosteste de ea doar dupa ce Grace isi pierde frumusestea pe care el i-a dat-o.

Sara Bauer

Too dense to unpack via Goodreads. I'll do a full review on my blog in time, but I must say, approach this novel with extreme EXTREME caution.

Colin Davison

How I wished I could write like Sarah Hall; then how I wished she would stop. I’ve rarely felt so exhilarated at the start of a novel and so impatient with the writer by the end.
First things first, and definitely not keeping the best until last. Hall’s description of Morecambe as a working-class holiday resort is wonderfully evocative, the sort of writing to be achieved only by someone who has long breathed its air. Talking of which: ‘One way to verify your location was to watch the way the visitors breathed. There was method to is. Deliberation. They put effort into it. Their chests rose and fell like furnace bellows. So as to make the most of whatever they could snort down into them.’
The characters among whom Cy Parks grows up have the saltiness of the environment, especially the dyspeptic, alcoholic tattoo artist Eliot Riley to whom he is apprenticed. Riley is a split personality, in appearance as well as temperament.
‘None (of his tattoos) showed below his wrist cuff, or above his shirt collar .. but under his hide it was another story, it was a soul half blackened with some kind of loathing and scorn .. He was a man split in half, as if he had been born in two.’
At work he is sober, consumed with his trade of bestowing bi-tonal beauty on the bodies of his customers. ‘Outside .. there was the Eliot Riley who was frowned at in the street, challenged in bars, named by the press as disreputable, and of his own inebriated volition was morally redundant.’
There is humour in the early pages too. Cy’s mother runs a boarding house, where the 12-year-old tries to show a visiting girl two years old that he likes her ‘by giving her an extra-large helping of cabbage at dinner.’ And there is an amusing episode involving a friend’s mother who runs a bogus electro-therapy business. When Cy and his pals mischievously play with her equipment, it is he who is often the test-subject for increased voltage, because he is the tallest, the theory being ‘that the longer the legs the further the electricity had to travel and the more diluted and harmless it became.’
There is already a suspicion however of an author trying too hard, and when she writes about the boys selling tickets to see Cy, smeared in shit, munching potato peel, appearing out of the dunes as a boggart, credibility dives to the level of Just William adventures.
The language even at such moments is poetic and allusive. Cy remembers his old room at Riley’s parlour – ‘It was a still-life, a place of inanimate objects assembled with meticulous and menacing care, and washed over with tension. It held its breath.’
And with rare succinctness, the book defines its central pre-occupation as poor man’s art, as Riley says: ‘It’s human art that you can’t peel back off the human or put away in a dresser drawer .. It’s personal socialism.’ Later, after Cy has moved to Coney Island, a fellow worker tells him, ‘the working man has a picture gallery of his own, like the mansion house or castle is his body.’
The trouble is that the novel itself is more like a painting than a story, and a swirling painting of clashing colours at that. The picture gets lost in its own depiction, the narrative trapped like a one caught in the quicksands of the bay.
Cy’s first adolescent crush gives him a feeling of something uncontrollable ‘like the diaphanous flutter of fate’s lungs, the sluicing of its digestive system, its marrow brewing of new blood.’ And meeting the woman who is to be the love of his life, he immediately notes that ‘Her eyes, even in the inadequate light, were each a litany of struggle, strategy and survival.’ God knows what he would have seen if the light had been half decent.
She is Grace, a circus bare-back rider who keeps her horse in apartment, but she is not the most surprising figure among the Coney Island grotesquery of the deformed, natural and fraudulent. There is Swiss Cheese Man, hoisted by hooks in his skin, a giantess, and the Siamese twins, with distinct personalities, sweet and sour, who run a local bar.
It’s a place of gruesome fascination, where the execution of an elephant or a public display of premature babies fighting for life become 10-cents-to-view spectacles. The latter are ‘children that were still closed, like mushroom caps, or sprouting bulbs .. There was love and pain and longing in the air, filling the muted exhibition corridor with something thick and enriching like fertilizer in the soil, as if the pungent, solicitous emotions of the women might open the premature, closed children, and somehow help them live.’
But Coney Island is in decline, ‘tipped over like a fat girl in costume for the public to be titillated by her privates.’ Like Morecambe ‘gone putrid and without its former inhibitions, as if the Tory councillors had .. left town taking their .. prudish notions with them.’
Cy returns to Morecambe after a particularly nasty incident involving acid and blinding, but leaving me feeling that I hadn’t really travelled anywhere. My head was dizzy from the constant, wordy elaboration, the distressing scenes I’d witnessed. Unusually, I was thankful to turn the last page.
At one point, Hall writes that Cy and Grace had ‘conversed about many things, cultural, political, the new psychology of warfare.’ But not alas in this ultimately depressing novel.

Rob Stainton

I'm sure this is excellent in its genre. Poetic images. Fascinating situations. Quirky life episodes. But 100 pages in no story had emerged. And I am a "narrative guy"

Peter Mathews

Hall's novel tells the story of Cyril "Cy" Parks, a young man from the northern English resort town of Morecambe. Starting in the early twentieth century, the plot, such as it is, follows Cy's life from youth to old age. His early life is dominated by his mother, Reeda, punctuated by boyhood adventures that come to an abrupt end when he is apprenticed to Eliot Riley, the town's tattoo artist. After the passing of these two role models, Cy heads across the Atlantic to Coney Island, where he falls in love with Grace, a woman who asks him to tattoo eyes over her whole body. When things turn out tragically with Grace, Cy drifts around the world, eventually returning to Morecambe as an old man, taking on a young woman, Nina Shearer, as his own apprentice.

Throughout the book, Hall's words seem to be made of concrete. Decorative, poetic, but heavy and inert, the novel moves from the sheer force of her authorial determination rather than any sense of inner momentum. Hall's story is monotone in its heavy-handed attempt to generate meaning. Her metaphors are clumsy and unsophisticated, including the death of Cy's father on the same day as the protagonist's birth, the experimental sinking of Cy in quicksand, and the disparate natures of the Siamese twins who run the Varga, Cy's favorite bar in Coney Island. Hall seems desperate to saturate everything in her novel with meaning, but ends up instead with a cacophony of confused, forced metaphors.

Even more questionable is Hall's decision to engage with history in her novel. The vague references to the Renaissance, especially to Michelangelo, are so shallow as to be laughable. Hall also imposes her own views back onto the early twentieth-century world that Cy inhabits in a way that provides a very one-sided perspective on how culture has changed. His mother Reeda, for instance, is a feminist before her time, an advocate for women's rights who performs secret abortions in her hostel, and is far too saintly to be believable. Despite the historical realities of the world in which he lives, therefore, Cy inhabits in an unrealistic bubble that is unconvincingly welcoming and tolerant toward women and minorities. Hall is so insistent on preaching to the reader that, toward the end of the novel, Cy even delivers a diatribe to his young apprentice on the importance of young people voting.

The problem with The Electric Michelangelo, in the end, is the ubiquity of Hall's fingerprints over every last inch of her creation. The novel suffers, not because "nothing happens," but because Hall is unable or unwilling to open up her story to the contingencies of the artistic process, and by trying to control too much she fails to allow her ideas and prejudices to stand on their own merits.

Val

Cyril Parks grows up in Morecambe, a working-class holiday resort where his pragmatic, compassionate, widowed mother runs a guest-house. She rents rooms at a discount to customers the other guest-house proprietors do not want to know about, consumptives and sufferers from industrial lung diseases and wartime gas attacks hoping the clean Morecambe air will cure them. She also 'helps out' a succession of women in her back room at night. She teaches Cyril not to flinch from the unpleasant aspects of life.
When Cyril is fifteen he is apprenticed to Eliot Riley, a boozy, venal tattoo artist and learns his skills. He also learns how art can lift someone out of a dark and base life, for Riley it is the only thing which can. After Riley's (and his mother's) death, Cyril takes his skill and his knowledge and sets off for a new life in the USA.
Part two of the book shows his life as the self-styled 'Electric Michelangelo' in Coney Island. This book has been described as a love story and Cy does become enamoured of a fascinating woman in the last two chapters of the novel, , but it is more about places and people and an art away from the mainstream of society.
The book is flamboyantly overwritten, but this somehow suits a story which concerns the extremes of both the highs and lows of life, and never the ordinary.

Richard Moss

I've been a fan of Sarah Hall's writing for some time now, but hadn't actually read this Booker shortlisted novel - her second.

Lyrical, deep and colourful, it may be her best to date. It follows tattooist Cy's journey from childhood to old age, and from Morecambe on one side of the Atlantic to New York's Coney Island on the other.

There are of course sharp contrasts between the two locations - Morecambe is oh so English, as grey as the skies that loom over the resort. Coney Bay is all brash colour.

But there are parallels too. Both are on the cusp of decline - outmoded and overtaken by time. Both attract crowds but also draw people on the edge of society - from Morecambe's Consumptives to Coney Bay's "freaks". And both of course need tattooists.

There are also personal parallels - Cy sees connections between his English mentor and the woman he falls for in New York.

Bodies and skin are ever-present with tattoos representing declarations of love, loss and identity.Bodies are enhanced but also assaulted and defaced.

There is wonderful writing here, complex and profound, but also memorable characters and a great sense of both locations.

Sarah Hall truly deserves her reputation in the top drawer of British writers.

Kimberly

“War was a peculiar thing…It brought out the best and the worst and the downright incomprehensible in people. It made them slough off the dead skin of reason and deepen the roots of nationality. They became creatures of habit, more so than ever before…War sent people out looking for principles and decency and even fragments of God to be woven up in chain-mail and used as armour against all the bestial suffering and immoral wickedness inflicted by other human beings, those accused of creating a convenance with evil. But it also gave them an excuse to behave very badly themselves under the big black umbrella of a far worse phenomenon.” Thoughts on WWI and WWII, The Electric Michelangelo pg 245

An awesome read, something that finally challenged my mind and was very wonderfully written. If you love the history of Tattoos, have them, thinking of getting them, or just love a good read...this is for you.

Ellie

The premise of this story was what drew me to it. Seaside resorts, amusement parks, early 20th century life, and body art all appealed to me, but Hall really could have benefited from some good editing. Her writing reminded me of the stuff of 19th century when writers were paid by the word. I often found myself wishing she would get to the point and move the story on. The second half was much more engaging, perhaps because the setting was a faster paced Coney Island, with rich, eccentric characters. However, even then, I longed for more character development, because each of these people obviously had a back story worth telling. I was especially disappointed that she did not follow up on Grace's story, or, for that matter, give us a hint as to what brought her to this place. The same could be said for most of the characters, even Cy ultimately. What was his mother's relationship to Riley? All in all, this was a less than satisfying read, merely okay.

David

I can see why people like this so much, the richness and the color. At the same time, it isn't for me so much. I want a story from this, but have trouble finding it. Things happen, but there's 90% of the book just for build up if it's Cy, and not enough payoff. I think there's too many stories without focus, too much favoring of maximalism, too much fascination with pure ornamentation for my taste. Many will love it for exactly those things, but I wanted things much tighter. Just me though, still much good inside.

Catherine

I am a fan of the photographer Dianne Arbus and although I didn't know it when I put this on my wishlist, there are strong similarities in style. If Arbus had written, it would have been a book like this. There is distance from the characters yet aching intimacy.The atmosphere is so loaded, so heavy so exotic, yet the story so understated. Her writing is original, her phrasing accomplished. Wow! What an awe-some writer -- in the real sense of that word.

Garrett

Man, this book is fantastic, and I think the lady that wrote it did so when she was pretty young, in her 20s I believe. I'm not usually a real big fan of novels but this book is great. A really fun read for anyone interested in yesteryear, traditional tattoing, rogue citizens, outsiders, freaks or NYC. This book kind of reminded me of the also-awesome book Geek Love.

Peggy

blah, blah, blah x 1000 and i still don't understand the characters or their motivations. i know an awful lot about the bloody phlegm that was coughed up but each event that should have revealed something about the characters failed to reveal anything meaningful. empty!

Title	:	The Electric Michelangelo
Author	:	Sarah Hall
Rating	:
ISBN	:	0060817240
ISBN-10	:	9780060817244
Language	:	English
Format Type	:	Paperback
Number of Pages	:	340
Publication	:	First published March 18, 2004
Awards	:	Booker Prize (2004), Orange Prize Fiction Longlist (2004)

The Electric Michelangelo by Sarah Hall

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