Beauty by Brian DAmato

Beauty Reviews

• 
  Kathryn

  Maybe you’d want to read this if you’d exhausted the works of Bret Easton Ellis and desperately wanted something less subtle and more racist, more anxious, more vulnerable. I’m not sure if the author was trying to be self-aware or if he is actually just a massive jerk, but the only thing that kept me going through the book was a desire for something truly awful to happen to the narrator. I guess if you have an education from Yale and nothing much to show for it then you may as well cram all the esoteric po-mo theory you know into a vaguely coherent novel instead of doing literally anything else with your life. It reads a little like a self-conscious/self-congratulatory exegesis one might churn out after graduating from undergraduate arts with a high grade point average and few career aspirations. The premise is interesting enough, but it gets totally absurd and flimsy by the end, and maybe that was intentional, because it barely managed to be shocking. Finished it in less than a day because I find dated social satire from the late '80s to be so pleasantly relatable.
• 
  Alex Ankarr

  One of my all-time three favourite books, just soooooo amazing. The blurb makes it sound a little like a horror novel, and it is in a way, but it's so much more than that.
• 
  Lou

  This story has a captivating and engrossing will also elements of the haunting and scary on beauty that would have you either reconsider facial surgery, for cosmetic reasons, or run to the phone to book an op. I love thew way the author has sculptured this main character a lover of beauty and an artist who loves to recreate the face. The story reels you in with the first person narrative of the voice of the character, he hypnotically takes you under his wing in a Humbert, from Lolita, like style. This was well researched a story of fiction, filled with references and musings on pre-Columbian art and culture, that could not be far from the truth, the real world we live today. Death becomes her fans would love this and The Fly come to think of it when considering the goings wrong side of cosmetic surgery featured within this tale. A real good story that leaves you with plenty of food for thought and chills in your spine.
  
  Before you run to the knife think twice after reading Beauty by Brian D’Amato
  
  

  “It’s just too disturbing for people. I mean, people can deal with knowing that you’ve had a lift, or whatever, but if they find out that your whole face isn’t really alive at all, it’s just plastic, they’re liable to get grossed out. 1 get grossed out by it myself sometimes.” They looked at me. “I mean, when I see the people I’ve done, sometimes it just flashes into my head that they aren’t really alive, and I get all weirded out by it.”
  
  “But this was going to be one of the strangest faces ever. It really was
  abstract. All the time I’d put in as an abstract artist was paying off in this
  figurative project. I was working on such a basic level, with the basic sign of human existence. What was it about eyes, nose, and mouth that was so important? Eyes, nose, and mouth are some sort of basic metaphor for the structure of the universe—or did I say this before?
  
  I felt I was going to be the last artist to relive that experience that Balzac
  was talking about, the experience of creating ideal facial beauty, in a meaningful way. I was going to be Leo, Mike, and Raph for the last time. I was the first to do what they did, in a twentieth-century way. A
  twenty-first-century way. Suddenly there was a reason for all the beauty lore I had internalized for so long and had then realised had no place in the art of the present. I’d made it a place.”
  
  “A mole.
  Of course. What would Marilyn or Madonna or Cindy Crawford be without their moles? Nothing, I thought. Or a lot less. It’s interesting that moles are called “beauty marks.” What was it about them that made them so alluring? Are they like a sign that you can approach the goddess?
  
  I spent a long time composing its position, but I finally decided the black spot would go nearly a centimeter above the left corner of her lip. A hair off to the left. The abstract element would round out her effect. It would make her unique and human and sexy and somehow pathetic. Because a mole is an intimation of death.”
  
  “Socrates says:
  Beauty is certainly a soft, smooth, slippery thing, and therefore of a nature which easily slips in and permeates our souls.
  
  I read a lot of Baudelaire. He had a darker take on the issue. He was good on the cruelty of beauty:
  I am beautiful mortals, as a dream in stone,
  My breasts kill each man in his turn, and they Were made to inspire in every poet his own Great love,
  as silent and eternal as clay.
  Because,
  to fascinate my love-slaves,
  I Have mirrors which make every object bright:
  My eyes, my giant eyes’ eternal light!
  
  The eyes thing again. Eyes really were the seat of beauty. Like the Elizabeth Taylor thing. Eyes, large eyes, doe-like eyes, eyes are so weird, they don’t look like anything else to do with bodies or fleshiness or anything, they’re round and abstract, and they come in strange colours, white and black and green.
  What was so magical about large eyes? Maybe ever are just magical in general and bigger eyes are more magical. Of course, bigger eyes make you look younger. But they’re also the windows of the soul, you know, so when you have big eyes, you’re intimate with everyone, because they can see into your soul, I’d been reading too much.”
  
  “I was elated, like I was on Xtasy. Imagine having the power to give people a second chance. To give them almost eternal youth. I could turn straw into gold. Something out of nothing. I could give beauty, fame, money, power—it was incredible. It was as though I were Ponce de Leon and I had discovered the Fountain of Youth. I was a God. And I was immortal, I was a shape-changer. A werewolf, a vampire, a skin-switcher. I could be anything I wanted to be, anyone at all.”
  
  “Minaz is my design. She’ll be the first in a race of cyborgs, half-human, half-technology Uber-beings. The new order of man. The dawn of a new age.”

  
  Review also @
  http://more2read.com/review/beauty-by-brian-damato/
• 
  Rachel Brown

  A creepy, pretentious, narcissistic artist/unlicensed plastic surgeon tries to create the perfectly beautiful woman. I don't think it's spoilery to say that he gets what's coming to him. A satire of American beauty culture, the 80s art scene in New York, misogyny, and the lifestyles of the idle rich, recounted by a seriously unreliable narrator.
  
  I am not big on social satire and much of it is now dated, but the prose style is to die for.
• 
  jedbird

  I read this back in 92 and recalled loving it, but I couldn't remember how it ended. Well, that's why this is 4* instead of 5*: there's no particular ending. Things happen, people grapple with consequences, yet it's unresolved, and it's an unsatisfying lack of resolution.
  
  But! Up until the disappointment of the ending, this story is a delight of aesthetic snobbery, 90s NYC nightlife, amateur plastic surgery, and pre-Columbian artifacts (with concomitant gruesome human sacrifice history). The unreliable narrator shows himself in glimpses, and I'm probably one of the few readers who actually liked him despite his undeniable sociopathy, because many of the things he cares about are things I care about.
  
  Appearance and aging concern everyone in the story, much as they concern people in the world now, so it seems contemporary despite practically no characters having cell phones. The names of real models are mentioned many, many times, and those date the story--except for the timeless Naomi Campbell!
  
  It's a strange mix of things, neither particularly mysterious nor blatantly horrific, though it most likely falls under those genres. I'm happy to have reread this :)
• 
  Victoria

  This was such a thought provoking book. Especially in today's current obsession with beauty, instagram fame, facebook likes, excessive narcissism, etc.
  I was enthralled from start to finish. This book will stay current against the decades that pass , although it is SO dated at the same time. I stifled laughs at mentions of public payphones etc- but the topic is completely relevant to our current obsession over "beauty" standards.
  I listened to this on audiobook and I would reread the actual book again in the future- as a refresher.
  I am thoroughly humbled by the message contained in this book. Kudos Mr D'amato!
• 
  Michael

  BD is fiercely intelligent, talented and strange. What a book. A New York artist obsessed with aesthetic perfection is improving women with a revolutionary new surgery from his apartment. Creating living art purely for vanity's sake. The narrator is unforgettable- not a nice guy. More like Patrick Bateman from "American Psycho" than anything else that comes to mind. Like it or not this is genius, and one of the most unique stories I've run across in a long time.
• 
  Garth Slater

  I read this, not because the title was speaking or even the back co er description, I read it because I had read another D’amato novel that I really loved. You have to admire an author who can write in first person, it’s a tough way to write and this came off splendidly. The work itself was pretty interesting.
• 
  Gretta

  This book is incredibly creepy, and really gets at the heart of a sexist and destructive beauty industry. That being said, it could have been about 75 pages shorter. The characters were clearly established quickly, and it was pretty clear where the book was going, I just wish it had gotten there a little more quickly.
• 
  Lemon.scented

  I'm not a huge fan of fiction but I liked it.
  It's about an artist who uses an FDA unapproved skin substitute to create totally new faces for women.
  
• 
  Keith

  Though many of the details of the early 1990's New York art scene were lost on me I found plenty humor and excellent writing. Worth the time if you can stand a pretentious twit for a narrator.
• 
  Dan

  This book is what happened when The Picture of Dorian Gray and American Psycho loved each other very much and decided to make a baby together.
• 
  Rajat Narula

  A novel concept of a complete change of one's face into another. However, written poorly.
• 
  Latonia

  The ending left me speechless. I was upset at first but than when you think about the book in its entirety it made me smile.
• 
  Amy Lignor

  A very interesting book, this story comes out of the blue and offers the reader something they didn’t expect. Although books have been written about the egotistical ‘jet set’ before, D’Amato sets his tale apart by not only offering action, suspense and a little gore, but also provides a very scary learning experience for anyone who’s still not sure what, “beauty is in the eye of the beholder,” really means.
  
  Present-day New York City is where the ‘richies’ live. Not only do they have enough money to buy and sell all their pretend friends, but they also believe that physical beauty is the end all and be all of their lives.
  
  Here in the Big Apple lives an artist/plastic surgeon who is not really a plastic surgeon at all. In fact, Jamie D’Angelo is a New York artist who is definitely preoccupied with the perfect face. In his odd wanderings and learning experiences, he has discovered a procedure that will absolutely and without a doubt make women beautiful…on the outside. This particular procedure is neither legal nor approved by the medical community, which means Jamie has to run his practice secretly.
  
  With a very expensive lifestyle, Jamie likes to ‘hob nob’ with the rich and famous and many of them have become his acquaintances. His main goal is to literally ‘build a face of great beauty’ so that he can be recognized by one and all as an absolute genius. When he finally fulfills his dream however, the experiment goes horribly wrong. Jamie’s fantasy of being the ‘King of Beauty’ will come to a seriously interesting pinnacle that no reader will ever forget.
  
  The author has done a terrific job with this book and many folks will read it for many different reasons. However, if your friend does happen to speak happily about ‘nip/tuck,’ and they don’t mean the old TV show, this book is most definitely one to hand out as a ‘must read.’ For all other suspense lovers, this IS a ‘must read’ for the simple fact that the story is extremely interesting and offers a plot and characters you’ll be talking about at the water cooler for months to come.
  
• 
  Brittnee

  I'm not sure how to describe my experience reading this book. Jarring and uncomfortable, yet intriguing? I felt a bit antsy the entire time. Like a train wreck- I really wanted to stop watching, but I needed to follow it through to the end. To know what happened. I couldn't wait for it to just be over, but somehow, not in a totally negative way.
  
  The narrator is an extreme narcissist with shades of obsessive compulsive behavior and possibly a little sociopathic thinking mixed in. For funsies, ya know. It was an uncomfortable mind to live in for 60 chapters.
  
  All in all, I found it interesting. It wasn't a "page turner "in the classic sense of the phrase. There wasn't a lot of suspense built up. But the end still managed to surprise me.
• 
  Crystal

  Technical rating: 2.5
  The description of this book said "a thriller." LIAR. This book was three parts New York art scene guide book and one part thriller.
  It followed an egotistical artist who was obsessed with beauty and spent most of the novel talking about what his perfect woman looked like by listing off actresses and models and how he would make them more beautiful. His obsession quickly gets him in a lot of legal trouble. But the "trouble happened in literally the last 100 pages of the book.
  
  If you are looking for a page turning thriller.... This isn't it.
  
  If you are looking for an inside on the New York art scene and how shallow and self centered they are..... Pick up this book!
• 
  Debra

  This book would be perfect for those who have studied art and the beauty industry. At times, there was so much name-dropping, I lost the thread of the story. The plot itself was very good and I enjoyed following the lead character, although he isn't very likeable (and not meant to be). He gets his just desserts in the end! A lot of philosophy is thrown in as food for thought. I'm glad I read it, and will try other books by this author, but I don't recommend this one for everyone.
• 
  Janet Whalen

  Strong first novel by author of In the Courts of the Sun and The Sacrifice Game. Explores our cultural obsession with facial beauty in insightful and unsettling ways. Protagonist devolves from a pretentious jerk to someone much scarier as the book progresses. Insider commentary about the superficiality of the art world, along with tantalising glimpses of the author's fascination with the Maya make this book well worth reading for fans of D'Amato's brilliant trilogy in progress.
• 
  Dr. Bee

  An interesting and horrific tale that taps into our obsession with beauty, and the lengths we will go to attain it.
  
  Published in 1992, some of the language is obviously dated, as technology has changed the landscape of our lives. That said, Brian D'Amato captures neurosis, compulsions, fear, and glamour well.
• 
  Kyrie

  Disturbingly artistic story. Jamie's personality freaks me out, but I still understand where he's coming from, and his strange mix of forward New Yorker and mentally unstable artist combine to create someone very real. On the whole, the book didn't change my life, but I enjoyed the perspective. Interesting, intellectual read.
• 
  Lisa Kidder

  Like no other book I've ever read. Slightly disturbing, yet captivating. Well researched level of detail and beautifully written. The unusual premise kept twisting all the way through to the bitter end.
• 
  Jennifer Bowman

  most perfect beauty is obtained by science and somehow this book convinces you that can exist, with consequences of course