Book title: Wolf of wall street
Genre: Crime thriller/memoir
Author: Jordan Belfort
Year of publication : 2009
Pagination: 216
The memoirs of an ex rogue stock broker,the wolf of wall street is a thriller ride,one of the kind that gives you a high up to the point where you are feeling slightly woozy but still enchanted.The story of the rise and fall of Jordan Belfort, the book time frame spans his humble beginnings in the lower reaches of the stock exchange, to his becoming one of it’s biggest players,his metamorphosis from a basically nice kid into a scheming,amoral, dubious stockbroker who swindles customers to the tune of hundreds of millons while maintaing a lavish, eye popping,licentious lifestyle colored by his raging drug addiction to his eventual fall into the net of the law and subsequent conviction and incarceration.Jolly ride.
Although the book is heralded as a cautionary tale by the author, it’s hard to come away from the book with any sense remotely resembling caution, just a guilty admiration of his daring crimes and one suspects this was the author’s original intent.To paint a picture of his heinous deeds in such a pretty manner that we are left with no judgement towards him but rather develop a sense of sympathy for him and as it were actually root for him,if this were so,he succeeded.He has pulled off another daring smokescreen scheme- his book gives such a darkly charming portrayal of him that it’s hard not to fall in love with him almost to the verge of applauding him as he pulls of scam after scam and only manage to weakly reprimand him if we can at all..
Another strength of the book is it language. The book thrives more on individual sentences and paragraphs-laced with irony and strong language as most of them are ,and evocating laughter with almost every paragraph,than on overall plot.This is not an indictment of the plot, just a nod towards the sentence structure-many sentences in the book resemble a well crafted plan,turned over and modified to perfection before being unleashed on the reader,so full of wit and humor are they.
On the overall, it’s an enjoyable ride, just don’t get too carried away.
Leave a Reply