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| The Electric Michelangelo | 
 enlarge | Author: Sarah Hall
Publisher: Faber and Faber
Category: Book
List Price: $21.81
Buy New: $7.03
You Save: $14.78 (68%)
New (5) Used (5) from $6.79
Avg. Customer Rating:  14 reviews
Sales Rank: 1122412
Format: Bargain Price
Media: Paperback
Pages: 288
Shipping Weight (lbs): 0.8
Dimensions (in): 8.4 x 5.3 x 1
Dewey Decimal Number: 813
ASIN: B000V5YBX6
Publication Date: March 18, 2004
Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days
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Product Description
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. This P.S. edition features an extra 16 pages of insights into the book, including author interviews, recommended reading, and more.
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| Customer Reviews: Read 9 more reviews...
 Sometimes disturbing, but compelling and emotionally stirring March 30, 2006
20 out of 20 found this review helpful
I couldn't resist this 2005 novel when I heard it was about a tattoo artist. The fact that it was writen by Sara Hall, a Brit born in 1974 and a Booker Prize finalist with a fresh new voice in literature, made it even more appealing.
From the very beginning I was captivated. Ms. Hall paints pictures with words and stirs emotions. And most of the emotions she stirs are disturbing and sometimes bordering on the grotesque. The story is compelling too, beginning in the seaside town of Morecambe, England, where working class consumptives whose lungs were destroyed by the mills and the coal mines, often took their one-week vacation in the quest for good clean sea air. Indeed, Ms. Hall was raised a few towns away and her descriptions of a widow hotelkeeper and her young son Cy the early part of the 20th Century introduced me to a time and a place that I will never forget. I will also never forget the main character, Cy, who grows up in the town where he apprentices to a foul-mouthed hard-drinking tattoo artist with a garrulous nature and larger-than-life persona.
Later, our hero travels to America, where he sets up tattooing in Coney Island. It is the 1930s now, and Coney Island is in its heyday. Even though it was across the ocean from Cy's native Morecambe, it was a similar seaside resort catering to the appetites of a working class population looking for the outrageous and bizarre as a break from their own lives of struggle during the depression. Here, Cy meets Grace who does a horse act and even manages to sneak the horse into her Brooklyn apartment. She's a refugee from war-torn Europe, her background is a mystery and she, too, is larger than life. She wants an outrageous total body tattoo, and this act, with all its needles and inks and pain, is described in exquisite detail as an intimate connection between these two potential lovers. How it all plays out is not what I expected. There's an act of violence. There's an act of revenge. And then there are the years that pass.
Eventually, I was left with a feeling of discomfort as well as completion. And I was also left with the feeling that Sara Hall is an extremely talented writer and that we will hear a lot more about her in years to come. Naturally, The Electric Michelangelo is not for everyone. But if you like a novel with a fine writing style, in-depth complex characters and a sense of looking at weird and offbeat side of history, you'll love this book.
Special book about art, different in style July 29, 2005
12 out of 13 found this review helpful
Sarah Hall's book was one of the most unusual ones of the year. Written after Haweswater, it was a fantastic debut and deserves all the rich praise that it got. Frankly all the other books in the Booker last year had an excess of Henry James except for one of them. This one about youngster, Cy Parks, who gets seduced by an art and apprentices under a drunkard who still is one of the best tattoo artists, Eliot Riley. After that he moves to America, where he sets shop in Coney Island. The early part of the Coney Island is beautifully described here. The art never leaves the reader at any portion. It shows about the description of pain in the art of the needle. It also shows the different people Cy meets and the passions he feels and pain of separation. His relationship with Grace, a Jewish tight rope walker is one to brake ones heart. She requests a single tattoo on her back, a black rimmed green eye. In accepting the task, Cy commits himself to experiencing with unprecedented immediacy the conflict between his priestly sense of his artistic calling and the claims of the flesh he routinely handles with such privileged intimacy. The outcome of that conflict is neither simple nor decisive, but high aspiration and fleshly desire are tentatively reconciled at last in his retrospective acknowledgment that perhaps those difficult, exhilarating tattooing sessions "were the times he was making love to her after all". This is a unique novel about art, passion, detail, human feelings and a unusual phase of America that combines to give an elevated impression. It is one of the best in a while and should be given more praise than it got.
 (3.5) "I paint hearts. And I paint souls. That's what I do." October 29, 2005
12 out of 17 found this review helpful
Morecambe Bay is a seaside resort, where Cyril Parks' mother, Reeda, runs a consumptive's hotel. Cy's task is to collect the guests' waste, those who are there to recover their health before returning inland. The consumptives readily offer their bodily fluids to the boy, grateful for his pleasant ministrations. Actually, Cy's beside manner is decidedly impersonal, an extension of the services provided by the hotel. Reeda has run the Bayside Hotel since her husband's death in 1907, although she performs darker services for young women in the dark of night, relieving them of unwanted pregnancies. Cy is destined never to know the man, a captain lost at sea.
By the time of his mother's death in 1923, Cy is an apprentice to a local tattoo artist, Eliot Riley, a drunken reprobate who has the skills of a genius when performing his art, but is a harsh taskmaster to his young student. Gradually Cy learns the trade and when Eliot is beset by his equally hard-drinking enemies in the trade, Cy is ready to take over, finding his own talent, fascinated by the designs he draws on the willing flesh of customers. Eventually, Riley's death purchases Cy's freedom and he sails to America with a forged passport, soon to begin his life anew. In New York, Cy gravitates naturally to Coney Island, which he discovers is not unlike the seaside town of his youth. Establishing himself there, Cy becomes known for his work and takes the title, the Electric Michelangelo.
It is there that Cy meets Grace, a circus woman who lives in his building and plays chess at a local watering hole. As Cy inks in the images Grace requires to establish her niche in the circus, he gets close to this fascinating woman who is also his lover, his task ever more intimate as he colors her skin. But Grace remains tantalizingly separate, an enigma Cy cannot solve. A terrible event occurs, an incident he is helpless to anticipate or prevent, "a scene of unimaginable and accommodating violence".
Hall's research is rigorous, but the prose is often tedious, mostly unrelieved narrative with little dialog to relieve the pages. Dickensian in detail but strangely passionless, the characters struggle for survival. Only the accents change; the humanity remains the same as Hall tells an unusual story, never flinching from the physical realities and occasional violence. By the end, Cy has achieved the promised emotional depth, certainly improved by his intense relationship with Grace. The art of tattooing is embellished by this novel, exposing the unique beauty created by the ink. A man of his times, Cy is defined by the experiences of his life, his brief shining moment as the Electric Michelangelo. Luan Gaines/ 2005.
Art as Life; Life as Art April 29, 2005
10 out of 10 found this review helpful
The Electric Michelangelo is at once a fascinating study of both character and career. Author Sarah Hall lovingly chronicles the life of tattoo artist Cyril Parks from childhood through later adult life. The novel is set on the norhthern coast of England and later moves to the bawdy atmosphere of Coney Island in Brooklyn, NY. That is where, in the late 1930's, Cyril Parks sets up his tattoo shop and begins his adventures in America.
He eventually meets a woman named Grace, who is a circus performer and also becomes a client of Cyril's. While growing up in England, Cy was primarily influenced by his independent mother, Reeda, as well as his violently disturbed tattooing instructor, Eliot Riley. In the character of Grace, Cyril discovers qualities of both his mother and of Riley. This is a very powerful point of the novel.
Sarah Hall writes some amazing prose, and she infuses humor throughout the story. At times philosophical and symbolic, The Electric Michelangelo has strong, very human characters, and it gives insight into the lives of its inhabitants through the unigue profession of tattooing. The book can be compared to some of the works by John Irving, where we find strong female characters, various points of irony, and offbeat humor surfacing along the way.
This is one of the most original novels I have read this year. Although it is largely narrative, I found myself drawn into the book more and more as the story developed. There was a quiet, unassuming way in which the themes and messages of the book were conveyed. Through Cyril's tattoo artistry, we are shown a unique way of thinking, living, and dealing with the world, based on his art and profession. There is no fluff here. This is a meaty perspective on the human condition using subject matter that I have encountered in no other work. Given the chance, The Electric Michelangelo will lead the reader on a magical, rewarding journey.
A Rare Gem December 18, 2005
10 out of 10 found this review helpful
This is without a doubt one of the finest novels I have ever read. The writing is pure heaven, the metaphors and similes are creative divinity--where does she get them? She is so highly gifted and so young that she can look forward to a wonderful career and you can be sure that I will follow her progress.
Yes the novel can be heavy going at times but the beauty of her story and her talent as a writer just kept me wanting more and I earmarked so many passages because they were the finest, among the best poetry that I have ever read, her imagination and facility with language is stunning, not to mention the level of research that she did.
A wonderful and rare performance--Bravo!
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