Frantic Transmissions to and from Los Angeles: An Accidental Memoir

You will not be able to stop reading this book. It is fascinating! Both good fascinating and ugly fascinating like a car wreck. The beauty captured in words about the her first winter in New York is dead-on. I know because I live there and that's exactly how beautiful upstate New York is during the cold, gray months. She captured the beauty of the snow on the trees and as well as the ugliness of living in L.A. slums. You just can't put the book down! It's amazing. The writing is even better than the story. Lyrical and delightful! A great read!

I lucked out two months back and acquired an uncorrected proof of "Frantic Transmissions to and From Los Angeles", and even though I was fairly familiar with her novels (especially the dreamy and harshly poetic re-imagination of Frida Kahlo in "Incantations of Frida K"), this nominal memoir of the place knocked me out, tied me up and left me pained and pleasured in ways only the best writing can manage. As with the best writing by Don DeLillo, she does a potently condensed job of assessing, summarizing and characterizing the shapeless sprawl that constitutes the City of Angels. Addressing herself often times in collective pronouns such as "you" and "we", she taps into what might be the dry , metaphysical desolation that inhabits the isolated communities, the neighborhoods abutting train tracks and the eroded processing plants, whole square miles of battlefield playgrounds and strip malls. Her writing is electric, brilliant, an ongoing metaphorical chain that unfolds like a rich, spiraling improvisations. Like DeLillo, and especially Norman Mailer in his glorious accounting of the architectural grandness and contradictions of odd American urban centers in "Miami and the Siege of Chicago", Braverman compares and contrasts and confronts the difficulty of defining an identity as an artist and person with a purpose within the the crushing isolation and rootlessness that is Los Angeles' sadly exclusive domain. Part essay, memoir, gilded satire and ecstatic tone poem, "Frantic Transmissions to and from Los Angles" is the most riveting non-fiction I've read in years, and it is an unqualified joy for the lover of masterful prose writing.