Published: July 17, 2010
Words: 100781 (approximate)
Language: English

Ebook description

One sweltering night, in a neighborhood on the cusp of change, boy meets girl. If they’d gone home together, they might still be alive. Set in 1988, NY's East Village and inspired by real events – a beautiful,dancer slain, her corpse dismembered, possibly fed to the homeless – a dilettante journalist becomes obsessed by the case. Loisaida is a story about sex, drugs, real estate and murder.

Adult-content rating:

This book contains content considered unsuitable for young readers 17 and under, and which may be offensive to some readers of all ages. For more information, see the Support FAQ.

Tags

crime, drugs, 1980s, new york city, cannibalism, east village, heroin addiction, ibogaine, tomkins square, loisaida, neonoir

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Reviews

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Review by: Nick C on March 15, 2011 :
Excellent. Evokes a really strong sense of what certain parts of the city are, or were, like.
(reviewed long after purchase)

Review by: Pete Morin on Nov. 08, 2010 :
One of the first things a virgin visitor notices about New York City is the air. Especially in the summer, the weight of the city, its gestalt, its vibe, hangs in the air. It's more than smog. It is the very lives of the inhabitants emitting their inimitable energy.

Marion Stein's LOISADA captures that air from the opening paragraph and doesn't let it go. I read this novel almost non-stop, with a break to eat, sleep, and wipe the Manhattan grit from my face.

One reviewer comments that the novel begins choppy and slightly disorienting before you discern its structure. While there is some truth to that, it is no different than the initial disorientation of entering Manhattan itself. Once oriented, this story screams along at an exhausting pace. You can smell the body odor, the urine, the stale sex.

What I find most impressive about Stein's storytelling is that all along, as we follow the main character on his mission to "solve" the mystery of Ingrid's murder, we are aware he is going to fail - and yet the tension of his hunt prevails.

Few novelists can pull off a multiple POV story with such power and complexity. Stein captures the flavor of New York in a fashion that would give Jimmy Breslin goosebumps.
(reviewed long after purchase)

Review by: Larry Harrison on Aug. 15, 2010 :
Marion Stein's stunning new novel, set in New York's Lower East Side (Loisaida) in the 1980s, is largely based on the real life murder of Monica Beere, whose body was rendered into soup and fed to the homeless in Tompkins Square Park. This is noir at its best, a dark tale that explores human frailty among those who pursue justice, as well as among the perpetrators of horrific crimes. In her psychological insights, as well as in the quality of her writing, Stein is a worthy heir to Raymond Chandler. She is able to tell a captivating story, and the result is a book that is impossible to put down.
(reviewed within a month of purchase)

Review by: benNaftali on Aug. 11, 2010 :
I bought this because I just finished reading her other book and I liked it so much. This is another terrific book. I hung out in the East Village in the 80s. I remember seeing some of these characters. It brings it all home - all I need is some of the "downtown" music and drugs. Stein writes in a gritty style that makes the characters come to life. As crazy as that time was, I sure miss it!
(reviewed within a month of purchase)

Review by: Malcolm Harden on Aug. 09, 2010 :
As a passenger on a rollercoaster you have no control over the route, you catch rapid glimpses of various scenes but they are fleeting and incomplete. Everything rushes at you. Some moments are exhilarating, some nauseating and some scary. It is only once the ride is over that you are able to piece together the different sights and assess the experience as a whole. This book is very like that.

I found the opening weak. The initial paragraphs did not particularly hold my attention. The style was problematic, jerky with broken sentences and I found it difficult to read. It felt like something that had emerged from a college writing class... the ideas were there but the execution was lacking... the text didn't flow smoothly and overall it felt messy. Whilst I haven't changed my views on the opening, my overall judgment was wrong. This proved to be a writer of significant talent and the book a magnificent work of fiction.

The story is told largely as a series of first person narratives from a wide variety of characters. Their individual observations weave in and out, sometimes offering different perspectives on the same events, adding extra depth to characters and sometimes foreshadowing each other's fates. The style is highly modern and colloquial with a heavy volume of expletives. It is often overlooked that writing simple prose can take great skill to do successfully. The most successful blank verse in poetry is written by those with an understanding of meter. To break rules you need to understand why they are there.

The simplicity of the style here is deceptive. Choices are carefully made which imbue each character with recognizable and distinguishing speech patterns and mannerisms. No one could easily mistake one of Johnny's speeches for Peter's or Raven's narratives for Kyra's. It is even possible to hear Ingrid's foreign accent in her journal entries. The author has an excellent ear for dialog and writes it convincingly.

Since so much of the story is told through the characters' own words there isn't the place for the heavy passages of imagery and description of the traditional novel. However many of the characters are good observers and a fair amount of information is conveyed through their eyes. Enough certainly to make the reader feel the grime and decay of the various apartments and to help them differentiate the many characters which appear. With so many minor characters present there is a risk that the main characters will be lost in the throng or that minor characters will not be easily recognized and isolated. Neither of these threats is realized. All the characters are credible and sufficient information on their lives and motivations is provided to distinguish them.

The plot concerns the tenants, some there illegally, of a New York building and their friends, lovers, drug-dealers etc and all the others who wander into and out of their lives. One of the inhabitants is murdered by some of the others. A young reporter becomes obsessed with investigating the death. In the words of the song he takes a Walk on the Wild Side, entering a world of depravity, drugs and prostitution, where just about anything goes, from incest to cannibalism. This is about as down and dirty as it gets. Those who are looking for an uplifting message or an emotionally-fulfilling ending should seek elsewhere. This is life at its bleakest. The book was inspired by real events but stands as a work in its own right.

Presentation of the book was excellent. I found just one possible typographical error, a letter "v" floating on its own in a sentence, and it says much for the writer's care, talent and learning, that I spent a considerable time debating possible meanings, including roman numerals and reproductive references, before I finally dismissed it. Good use is made of italics and bold text and obvious care has been taken with the manuscript for which the author is to be congratulated, particularly when so many ebook authors neglect these finishing touches.

This is not a casual read. You will need your wits about you. There is a great deal of information to process and a wide variety of characters to remember and understand. The intelligence of the author shines through and there is excellent research on many areas including Tarot and the occult. Though, Tarot readings in novels are generally problematic, they are a deus ex machina to give the character/reader information they otherwise wouldn't possess. This was better handled than most though I still had some serious concerns about the credibility of the reading.

Many readers will not like the amount of explicit adult content and bad language, occult references, or the plentiful descriptions of drug taking which this book contains. It is therefore difficult to recommend it to the general reader. To those who are not bothered by such things I heartily endorse it. At one level it is a tale of the dangers of fixation with the unobtainable, how fragile our lives can be and how badly we can over-value the contribution we make. At another it fits into a long tradition of novels exposing the difference between the Dream and the reality of life in America. It requires a strong stomach but is definitely worth taking the time to read.
(reviewed within a week of purchase)

Review by: Stacey Danson on Aug. 09, 2010 :
If it were indeed possible to give this a rating higher than 5 gold stars I would do so happily. This book is gutsy, tight and hard...as are the characterizations Marion Stein has crafted. make no mistake people these aren't one dimensional read it and forget it characters. These people breath, sweat, deficate and fornicate. Survival of the darkest in the food chain, where hunger is a disease of the soul.
You don't need to have been there to be there...she ushers you in, gives you a scent, a taste, and you are swiftly addicted. Hi fast and devastatingly real. I own the book, and like any good little addict will tell you, I must have more.
Brava.
(reviewed within a month of purchase)

Review by: xhema on July 18, 2010 :
this is a great book, really truly awesome. Marion Stein gets the characters right, their narcissism, the drugs, their love lives, the violence, everything. The characters, drifters, Yuppies, and other outcasts converge in Lower Manhattan when it was bad, but also when it was edgy.

If you grew up in New York in the 80s, when it was the bad old days, you will love this book.
(reviewed the day of purchase)

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