The Disability Book Archive

[ID: A book cover. The background is solid white. Down the left side of the image, the face a young white male, with spiked blonde hair and blue eyes. The face is upside down. Down the right side of the image, Five yellow boxes, which spell out the title “Crazy” in individual, capital white letters. Above the boxes, the author’s name “Benjamin Lebert” in black writing. /end]

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Content Warning:

• Drug References- TBC
• Sexual Content- TBC
• Alcohol References- TBC

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Summary:

A smart, funny, poignant, very modern autobiographical coming-of-age novel, written when the author was sixteen years old. Like Catcher in the Rye, Crazy appeals to the teenager in us all.

Benni himself is partially paralyzed and a serial failure (he’s been kicked out of four boarding schools in his short life and has just entered his fifth). So he’s a little odd, but he’s cool and he finds other strange boys to hang with. Together they set out to experience what they can: girls, booze, sex, philosophy, drugs, sex, books, music, sex–pretty much everything whatever. And Benni lets us in on “the crazy life” he figures is the only way to deal with the crazy world.

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Notes:

This book was originally written in German. It was translated into English by Carol Brown Janeway.

I remember reading somewhere that the author does not claim this as an autobiographical text, but a lot of it is based on his personal childhood experiences i.e. boarding school, paralysis.

This is Lebert’s first novel, and was published when he was just 16 years old.

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Archivist Comments:

I look up every book that’s suggested to me, when it’s first suggested and then, for some reason, never make a note of it. So then when I come to adding them to the site, sometimes it’s a completely different version to the one I originally looked at. This is one of those times, and it is entirely my fault.

I can’t find much in terms of content warnings for this one, so I’m just going off what’s in the summary.

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