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    The Electric Michelangelo
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    The Electric Michelangelo
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    The Electric Michelangelo
    Ebook425 pages11 hours

    The Electric Michelangelo

    By Sarah Hall

    3.5/5

    ()

    Currently unavailable

    Currently unavailable

    About this ebook

    “Wickedly imagined and richly written. . . . Prose as highly colored as Hall’s has to to be savored.”—The Independent

    SHORTLISTED FOR THE MAN BOOKER PRIZE

    Cy Parks is the Electric Michelangelo, an artist of extraordinary gifts whose medium happens to be the pliant, shifting canvas of the human body. Fleeing his mother's legacy -- a consumptives' hotel in a fading English seaside resort -- Cy reinvents himself in the incandescent honky-tonk of Coney Island in its heyday between the two world wars. Amid the carnival decadence of freak shows and roller coasters, enchanters and enigmas, scam artists and marks, Cy will find his muse: an enigmatic circus beauty who surrenders her body to his work, but whose soul tantalizingly eludes him.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherHarperCollins
    Release dateJul 4, 2017
    ISBN9780062803320
    Unavailable
    The Electric Michelangelo
    Author

    Sarah Hall

    Sarah Hall was born in Cumbria. She is the prizewinning author of six novels and three short story collections. She is a recipient of the American Academy of Arts and Letters E. M. Forster Award, Edge Hill Short Story Prize, among others, and the only person ever to win the BBC National Short Story Award twice. 

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    Reviews for The Electric Michelangelo

    3.5/5

    180 ratings14 reviews

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    • 3/5
      The first half of this, or possibly even the first two thirds, could belong to a decent literary novel - largely through the quality of the prose. But prose can only get you so far. The lack of any structure, plot or apparent purpose to the book becomes glaringly obvious shortly after its central character arrives on Coney Island, and soon after it goes to pieces. All that's left is trite and implausible melodrama, plus a very heavy-handed symbolism. The part with Grace reads like a short story that's been slotted in. And the prose itself starts to tire, straining as it does to be constantly clever and poetical. Really, it's the sort of thing creative writing postgrads do for PhDs. Have no idea how it got Booker short-listed - possibly because none of the judges read entries in their entirety. No idea what Haweswater is like, and certainly I have no trouble believing there is a decent novel in Sarah Hall, but this isn't it.
    • 5/5
      The Electric Michelangelo is the story of Cy, a dreamy boy who becomes a tattooist - not exactly by accident but not exactly by choice either. It's more by the force of will of Eliot Riley, master tattooist extraordinaire who chooses Cy to be his apprentice. Riley is a force of nature, a fighter and drinker only at peace with a tattooing needle in his hand. "He had a visage that was photographic, not attractive in its looks but memorable, bringing back images of it during previous meetings with a flash of the brain's bulb and the fizzle of recollection like burnt celluloid." In the second half of the book, Cy leaves Morecambe Bay and winds up with his own tattoo booth on Coney Island, and forms a relationship with Grace, a circus performer who is as fierce and strange as Riley, in her own way. As a tattooist, Cy sees a bloody and brutal world: not just the nonconforming milieu of Coney Island folk, but the stories with which people explain either the marks already on their bodies or the ones they ask him to put there. (An important, and fascinating, theme of the book was the symbolism of drawing on the body - and what events or elements of their lives people choose to mark.) Some of these stories are actually quite hard to read. At other times the book is fascinatingly grotesque, like a Victorian museum of oddities. But it can also be surprisingly lyrical and even tender, in the relationships that Cy has with his mother, Riley, and Grace. An excellent read.
    • 4/5
      The Electric Michelangelo has to be one of the most beautifully written novels I have read in a long time. Hall obviously revels in description and human scenery, and she has a rare gift for it. This is not a book to be rushed through and, despite the text being broken up into small sections of a page or two, it's probably not a novel you should read while commuting. This is a subtle, captivating book that is best savoured and read slowly. Cy Parks is a sympathetic character, and a wonderful creation, but it his surroundings and the characters that he meets, in both Morecambe and Coney Island, that seem to dominate the text, yet it is the fleeting quality of these encounters, and the almost surreally larger-than-life settings, that give the story its almost dream-like quality. Despite this, Hall does not shy away from the less salubrious aspects of both Cy's professional life as a tattoo artist and the underworld that he inhabits. It is the fact that she can still write beautiful prose while describing acts of horrific violence or sickening illness that truly marks Sarah Hall out as a first-class writer in my book.The only real criticism I can make of The Electric Michelangelo is that the end felt a little rushed to me; after a couple of hundred pages of marvellous prose, all perfectly paced, it was anticlimactic to have several decades passing in the blink of an eye and I personally wanted something more spectacular to happen to mark the end of such a memorable and eccentric work of fiction.
    • 4/5
      beautifully written and superbly descriptive.
    • 3/5
      At times the language is so abstract and figurative that I thought I would need to diagram the sentences to understand it, but the story is compelling, and in the end I enjoyed this. The book creates fascinating characters, but we see most of them as cars passing on a dark road - they emerge from some unilluminated past, and disappear before we learn much about them.
    • 4/5
      I really enjoyed reading this book. Would I recommend it? Most definitely -- to an audience who is willing to take time to savor each and every word, not to an audience who wants your average storyline & a pat ending. This book rises high above most books out there on the market or even on the bestseller list.The Electric Michelangelo is Cyril (Cy) Parks, who grows up in Morecambe, a seaside town in England where "When the tide ran out the crowds came in...Hundreds of pale and lumpy legs appeared from under clothing. Skin pinked and peeled, lotions were applied to late to sore knees and rosy shoulders. Flowery-capped heads bobbed up and down in the water and feet splashed in the waves...Even the rain, reliable and persistent when it decided to appear, could not dampen the celebratory spirit of the promenade, people ran laughing and shrieking either into the sea where wetness would not matter, or into the cafes and public houses of the town, leaving sand prints on the seats and tablecloths when they departed..." (32-33). There Cy lived with his mother, Reeda, who ran a hotel for consumptives among other things. Book One of this novel traces Cy's childhood years up to the time when he eventually becomes the apprentice to a tattoo artist named Eliot Riley. Riley meets a tragic end and Cy decides to take himself to New York, to Coney Island and open his own tattoo stand where he is known as the Electric Michelangelo. Book Two follows Cy in New York,where he meets a mysterious woman named Grace who asks him to tattoo her entire body (except face neck & hands) with the same design over and over again...an eye.Sarah Hall writes about pain and healing, damage & scarring, redemption and loss, a yearning for a time and place that no longer exists and acceptance of new situations. understand. A fine work, and I'm very happy to have read it.
    • 4/5
      This was a beautifully written book with a most uncommon protagonist. I congratulate Sarah Hall for picking a tattoo artist for her main character to tell this incredible love story.
    • 4/5
      I did enjoy reading this book, however now I come to review it I can only think of all the things I thought were wrong with it.Mainly that it was too long. Somewhere in here is a good novella about the less reputable side of two seaside resorts, on opposite sides of the Atlantic in the early 20th century. I think, however, if you wanted Sarah Hall to produce a novella, you'd have to commission a short story from her!She is just so verbose, typical example - drunk man not happy with his tattoo, three lines of dialogue and all this : Outside was a man who had been holding his own vinous face in a pose of disgruntlement all afternoon. He was sauced, soused, drunk enough that he could not maintain a plumb line of balance. He pointed to his forearm.- Not happy, buddy. Remember me? Not happy.- I can see that. What are the chances of you coming back later this afternoon?- Hah! It's a mess, you did a shitty job. And I want my money back.The man looked dishevelled, wired and exhausted at once, as if he had not left the Island since his visit to the booth four days ago. Coney Island was persuasive when it wanted to be, cajoling its weaker-willed visitors into enjoying its offerings longer than stamina and finances should feasibly permit. Until they were deprived of money and reason and sleep, and then they spoiled, and everything they had done sickened them and they would try to retrace their crimes... and on and on.She also has to set up all her dialogue wordily as she needs to explain who is talking who is listening, and in what context. This is because she never uses conventional speech descriptors or punctuation, just a dash, as in the example above; this adds to the word count.A final complaint - this ought to have been up for a prize at the Literary Review's Bad Sex Awards : He might have made love to her and meant it, hunting out her preferences, slaughtering them with generosity, but that he was sure afterwards she would walk away, casually. Her hands were almost too light on him now as she moved them, making him tense and lock his muscles together so as not to convulse and jerk as new nerve endings sparked under her caress. He found he was biting down hard on his lip. Blood was tricking along his pelvic bone and he had the unmistakable sensation of becoming heavier, fuller, firmer. He knew if he drew Grace in towards him now, so that their skin met, her body would feel a fraction colder than his own, and the state of her would tell him her mood was made of vapour. It would be like touching a soft white effluent, like that quiet portion of the northern lights, the last, most obscurely hidden element of the atmospheric wonder, the humble white pulse of illumination almost lost behind the seeping blood of the sky. And his hands would move right through her. Like Aurora Borealis, he knew he just had to let her be, in all her loveliness, not knowing how much of herself she would disclose, how much she would come to him, until she was gone.Or maybe he just thought, "Blimey, I think I'm in here"
    • 4/5
      beautifully written and superbly descriptive.
    • 4/5
      The Electric Michelangelo is a beguiling book with a fascinating plot and a wonderfully eccentric cast of characters . It focuses on Cy (Cyril Parks) and chronicles most of his life from childhood to late middle age. Growing up, he helped his widowed mother, Reeda, with her boarding house full of consumptives taking the fabled soft air of Morecambe. Seemingly accidentally he falls into an apprenticeship with the manic, drunk and immensely talented local tattooer Eliot Riley whose death eventually enables him to set up as a tattoo artist in his own right.Over the course of approximately 60 years, he travels from Morecambe to Coney Island and back again, lives through two World Wars, falls in love twice and encounters pretty much the full gamut of humanity's strengths and weaknesses.On the whole, I enjoyed this book. It was a satisfying, intriguing read and well written. Mostly, it felt authentic. There were tiny little pinpricks of dissatisfaction, however. Firstly, the narrative voice initially feels too old and knowing for Cy. I was surprised to discover, a few paragraphs in, that these were intended to be the thoughts and reflections of a seven-year-old boy. Secondly, some of the names seemed a touch anachronistic. At one point the names of various sweethearts to be tattooed on sailors are recounted - Anita, Josephine and Clara. Josephine and Clara ring true, but Anita? Given that at this stage of the novel it is the 1920s, I find it hard to believe that there were many Anitas of courting age at the time! Thirdly and finally, the author's northern born and bred status notwithstanding, some of the language felt inauthentic. For example, she has 1920s Lancastrians referring to things or people as "old-timey". To my ear this is an American phrase (which I primarily associate with Bluegrass/Appalachian music). I would have thought "old-timers" to be a more likely usage.But still, these are minor quibbles. As I say, in general, I liked the book. It introduced me to a world with which I was hither-to unfamiliar. While I am still not keen on tattoos (and, if anything, this novel has made me even more disinclined to get one done!), I have a greater appreciation of tattooing as an art form and am better able to detect the beauty there. I would, therefore, highly recommend "The Electric Michelangelo" and intend to explore more of Sarah Hall's work.
    • 4/5
      A feeling of doom hangs over the Morecambe boarding house run by Cy Parks' widowed mother. Death stalks the TB patients who spend their holidays there and sometimes die in situ, while late at night in the off-season the Bayview Hotel becomes the site of illegal abortions performed by Mrs Parks and the mother of one of Cy's friends. And of course there is the sea, with the treacherous quicksands and fast-racing tide of Morecambe bay, ready to catch unwary tourists and foolhardy children, and great storms like the one with killed Cy's fisherman father. So I wasn't surprised that Cy ended up leaving town, and as he loved his home town I wasn't surprised either that he ended up in another seaside resort on the other side of the Atlantic.When Cy asked Paddy, the landlord of the Dog and Partridge, Cy's local pub, whether the world is a better place than Morecambe, he replied 'Well I believe it's bigger. And there are no doubt fewer donkeys', but in Coney Island Cy finds himself in a hellish version of Morecambe, in which Paddy's counterparts in Cy's new local, the Varga Oyster Bar, are the Siamese twins Mary and Valerie. This was Morecambe of international proportions and inconceivable wealth, it was Morecambe gone putrid and suffering without any of its former inhibitions, as if the Tory councillors had packed up their belongings and documents banning distasteful shows and left town, taking their collective prudish notions for ever with them and leaving the occult industries to sprout and run amok. Here there was far too much attention to detail, far too much gruesome investigation into what would titillate and far too much anarchy of demeanour, and it blew Cy away as if he's placed a gun to his head and squeezed the trigger. As if this truly was the nation's purgatory, where any prurient display was advocated, any misdemeanour was acquitted, any sin suspended before a hopelessly hung celestial jury. I'm very impressed by Sarah Hall's powers of description - Within the first 50 pages there were wonderful descriptions of the Bayview Hotel, the town of Morecambe, the burning of the pier, the quicksands, the effect of WWI on the townsfolk, as well as things that Cy himself didn't really understand as a small boy, such as the abortions and the visits of the suffragettes. It's strange that in a book so full of colour, of life and death, not much seems to happen. It's unusual for me to like books with so many descriptive passages and so little plot as much as I liked "The Electric Michelangelo", but I found the world of the fairgrounds and boardwalks fascinating. It did take me ages to read though - I started it on 10th May and finished it today.
    • 3/5
      This is a story of a man who tattoos people. He lives in Blackpool but moves to New York. From what I recall (it's a few years since I read it) he sets up a booth on Coney Island.
    • 4/5
      An interesting book focusing on the multidimensional aspects of tattooing and in particular, on the relationship between Cy and Grace. Hall's style is a refreshingly strange fusion of dark Victorian esthetics and modern directness. One of my favorite sections of the book is this scene with Cy and Grace, both of whom are completely covered in tattoos: "He knew if he drew Grace in towards him now, so that their skin met . . . [it] would be like touching a soft white effluent, like that quiet portion of the northern lights, the last, most obscurely hidden element of the atmospheric wonder, the humble white pulse of illumination almost lost behind the seeping blood of the sky. And his hands would move right through her" (278).

      This book is under discussion in the Tattooing in Literature group here in the Goodreads community. Feel free to join our group and share your thoughts about Hall's novel.
    • 4/5
      Sarah Hall begins her tale in the English seaside resort town of Morcame Bay, where young Cy Parks is raised by his single, feminist mother in a boarding house that caters to vacationers with tuberculosis. After her death, he is taken in by his mentor Eliot Riley, the unstable tattoo artist to whom he has been apprenticed. Soon, Cy becomes an expert at the trade. When Riley dies, Parks – calling himself The Electric Michelangelo -- relocates to Coney Island in the United States, where he meets an array of freaks and side-show characters who befriend him and love him as only his mother did before. The most marvelous of his new friends is Grace, the circus performer whose request is startling, marvelous and tragic. Hall’s writing in this 2004 novel is more complex and dense than in her more recent How to Paint a Dead Man. Her characters here are more tortured, her topics darker and more disturbing. Yet her skill shines through on every level – plot, character and voice. She has all the signs of being an exceptional literary talent on her way to greatness, and I can’t wait to get my hands on more of her work.