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Sway: A Novel | 
| Author: Zachary Lazar
Publisher: Little, Brown and Company
Category: Book
List Price: $23.99
Buy Used: $3.53
You Save: $20.46 (85%)
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Rating:  18 reviews
Sales Rank: 416950
Media: Hardcover
Edition: 1
Pages: 272
Number Of Items: 1
Shipping Weight (lbs): 0.9
Dimensions (in): 8.5 x 5.7 x 1.1
ISBN: 0316113093
Dewey Decimal Number: 813.54
EAN: 9780316113090
ASIN: 0316113093
Publication Date: January 7, 2008
Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days
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Product Description
Three dramatic and emblematic stories intertwine in Zachary Lazar's extraordinary new novel, SWAY--the early days of the Rolling Stones, including the romantic triangle of Brian Jones, Anita Pallenberg, and Keith Richards; the life of avant-garde filmmaker Kenneth Anger; and the community of Charles Manson and his followers. Lazar illuminates an hour in American history when rapture found its roots in idolatrous figures and led to unprovoked and inexplicable violence. Connecting all the stories in this novel is Bobby Beausoleil, a beautiful California boy who appeared in an Anger film and eventually joined the Manson "family." With great artistry, Lazar weaves scenes from these real lives together into a true but heightened reality, making superstars human, giving demons reality, and restoring mythic events to the scale of daily life.
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| Customer Reviews: Read 13 more reviews...
Terrific non-fiction novel May 31, 2009
I. Sondel (Tallahassee, FL United States)
What book do I suggest you take on vacation this summer? Well, if you're anything like me, you don't get much reading done on vacation. Still, I do have a recommendation: "Sway," a novel by Zachary Lazar.
So, what's it about? It culminates in 1969 after following events in the lives of avant-garde gay filmmaker Kenneth Anger (who wrote Hollywood Babylon), Manson family murderer Bobby Beausoleil and Rolling Stones founding band member Brian Jones. It's the story of three individuals on a collision course with history.
Lazar sketches compelling anecdotal portraits of each man. It's a talented storyteller who can leap from one thread to another, juxtaposing each episode with the skill of a master seamster. This is a non-fiction novel, thus we are treated to imagined conversations and voyeuristic observations featuring Manson, Mick Jagger, Keith Richards and Marianne Faithful.
Anger is the linchpin in three disparate narratives, interacting with Bobby as a friend, lover and director, and with Brian and The Stones as documentarian. Beausoleil is held sway by the manipulative Manson, Jones by his addictions and paranoia of being eclipsed by friends of superior talents and charms. Kenneth alone survives; a witness to violence, suicide and murder. "Sway" offers a bravura performance by Lazar.
much better than I expected April 11, 2009
maria dante (boston ma)
I bought this book because of a lingering fascination/nostalgia for the period, and because I couldn't resist the seemingly bizarre idea of a fictionalized cultural history based on the lives of real people--people I had read about, listened to, or imagined countless times during my own youth. At the same time, I was pretty sure it was going to be a lot of pretentious drivel, and that I'd toss the thing into my basement library (where all half-read books go to die) long before I got to the last page. Surprise! I consumed it in one day. The writing was spare, the characters were finely-drawn and alive, and, best of all, it wasn't the least bit sensationalist. I'd been sure the whole Manson angle would play out in fairly gruesome terms, and that I would probably toss the book at that point. Although there was some violence, it didn't come off as gratuitous. And the Manson bits were more or less a "frame" for the larger narrative about the Stones in their early years. The only thing that annoyed me--and it was a very small thing--was the repetition of that phrase (quoted in the editorial review above) about everyone under thirty thinking they were exceptional--an artist, a star, whatever. It was pretty zeitgeist-capturing the first time I read it, but he used it again, word for word, later in the book. If the repetition was meant to be incantatory, it missed the mark--it seemed like a phrase of which the author was too enamored, and the repetition made it seem merely clever. Still, I thought the book captured the self-indulgent pseudo-depth of the era really well. Better, in fact, than any other novel I've read. I'd give it four and a half stars if I could.
 Original idea, but... March 28, 2009
Tracy L. (USA)
This was such a great idea for a book. I had high expectations for it, but unfortunately, for me, the book fell somewhat flat.
I think my main problem is that the whole book seems to be so slowly paced, which is hard to understand since it's about such a dynamic, event-filled time in our history. It took me six days to get through this 255 page book.
I give the author a great deal of credit for having such an interesting, original idea, but it's not one that I could highly recommend.
Dreamlike and raw March 28, 2009
Valorie Tucker (VA, USA)
I honestly don't know what to make of Sway by Zachary Lazar. On one hand it is a somewhat fictional telling of the early The Rolling Stones and the Charles Manson murders, based on real life and about real people. On the other hand, it's a dreamlike sort of novel where every human emotion and action is given a significance that isn't typically true to real life. Purposefully, I think, Lazar wove his words into chaotic (almost) anti-poetry- beautiful because it is raw and aggressive- in order to put this special significance to things. The entire book has a surreal quality that makes it even more difficult to accept the reality of what is happening.
Now, none of this is bad. I quite like a book that reads like a fractured and distorted fairytale. I said I didn't know what to make of the book, not that I did not like it.
Sway, as I've said, takes two different stories and winds them together. Lazar recounts the rise of The Rolling Stones, some of his information falsified but some of it quite true (I`ve seen the picture of Mick in the Uncle Sam top hat and the Omega t-shirt), and the Charles Manson murders. These two isolated groups and the events included are connected by a thin thread that goes by the name Kenneth Anger. Anger is a struggling film maker whose avant-garde styles of imagery and symbolism make him less than idea for the mainstream, which is just where he seems satisfied to be.
From the way the book describes itself, I was thinking that the two stories would intertwine on a deeper level then they did, and this was a bit disappointing. I guess it was meant to be this way. I gave me to see how things, even great things that seem so grand and therefore isolated within their own distinct worlds, can touch and brush and never impact. How sometimes you just manage to miss something larger than simple life allows without even knowing it.
There are moments, though, that the book is starkly real and you no longer feel the invader of a dream. The characters cease to be actors or players on a grand stage and become actual people, no longer characters but objects of existence just as we all are. Flawed, confused, prone to mistakes, and sometimes empty. Sometimes acting without excuse or reason. Sometimes just inflicting. Brian Jones is an abusive mess who is so out of touch with his own needs that he is self-destructive, Bobby just ambles along and thoughtlessly does whatever he decides to do for no good reason, and Anger doesn't seem to fight for anything and only exists to make his films.
The anger and escalating chaos of the 60s and 70s is depicted nicely in Sway. Vietnam, militaristic groups, disenchantment with the government and society, and the rejection of the early 60s Summer of Love ideals brought about a new society and destroyed the former not with a whimper but a bang. In fact, many of them. There is a sense, even when reading nonfiction of the time, that America was ready to explode. Indeed, much of the world was. The Rolling Stones and Charles Manson both, in their own ways, embody this feeling. The Rolling Stones is the passion, the rebellion, the new face of youth and expression while Manson is just how bad it can get.
Though if Sway did anything, it made me like The Rolling Stones just a little more.
Lost In The Sixties March 25, 2009
grumpydan (Andover, NJ United States)
I just finished reading Sway by Zachary Lazar, and am a little lost. He takes three actual people from the 60s (Brian Jones, Charles Manson and Kenneth Anger) and intertwine the real life events of their lives to make this novel. I did get the feel of what life was like in that time, and `getting' to know the early Rolling Stones was fascinating but I didn't get the feel of what Lazar was attempting to do with the book.. He inserted a lot of actual events and then some fictional stuff too. The story was uneven. Did it even have an ending?
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