The tragedy is not that things are broken. The tragedy is that they are not mended again.
First published in 1948, shortly before racial segregatiThe tragedy is not that things are broken. The tragedy is that they are not mended again.
First published in 1948, shortly before racial segregation became official state policy in South Africa, Alan Paton's debut novel is a quiet, but powerful book, whose impact lingers on long after its last page is turned.
Much has been said about Cry, the Beloved Country, and although decades have passed since its initial publication the novel continues to be as moving and touching as it was when it first appeared. At its heart it is a tragedy - the tragedy of its protagonist, the Zulu priest Stephen Kumalo, who leaves his village and ventures to the metropolis of Johannesburg in search of his missing son, Absalom. Behind the personal story of pastor Kumalo lies the tragedy of post-colonial South Africa itself; with its beautiful, bountiful land locked away and kept in the hands of the white minority, forcing the majority black population to exploit what little resources they were allotted and in turn creating conditions for crime and exploitation to flourish. Any society established on unequal principles cannot be just and fair, and throughout the book we see example after example of that; however, we also see glimmers of hope and beauty beneath opression and decay.
Paton was a deeply religious man, and his Christian beliefs greatly influenced his writing; not only in his position against Apartheid, but also in his prose itself. Cry, the Beloved Country can be described as almost biblical in tone; Paton's prose has this ethereal, gospel-like quality to it, but its reader never feels like being preached to from a pulpit. The book strives to see the good in people, even those unfairly privileged, and does not shy away from noticing wrongs done by the oppressed. Paton seeks Christianity as a positive force and possibly the only way for things to change for the better, but at the same time cannot turn a blind eye to its teachings being ignored by those who pride themselves to be the bearers of civilization founded on its values. The truth is that our Christian civilization is riddled through and through with dilemma. We believe in the brotherhood of man,, remarks one of the characters in the novel, but we do not want it in South Africa. We believe that God endows men with diverse gifts, and that human life depends for its fullness on their employment and enjoyment, but we are afraid to explore this belief too deeply.
Much has been written about the book since its initial publication, and it is astonishing - and saddening - to see how relevant it is in our time. Cry, the Beloved Country is a deeply felt, profound novel written by a deeply sensitive and empathetic man, and one that I am glad I have read....more
Do you enjoy reading about celebrities? Do you scour all the news outlets for the latest gossip, browse social media in hopes of catching the latest cDo you enjoy reading about celebrities? Do you scour all the news outlets for the latest gossip, browse social media in hopes of catching the latest candid shot of your favorite star? If so, chances are you'll like this book; you might possibly even be able to overlook its many flaws and get some enjoyment out of it. If not, then it's a position that's better avoided - you'll probably end up actively disliking it.
As the title suggests, The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo is the story of the relationships the eponymous fictional star had over the span of her life; now, a retired recluse in her twilight years, she's willing to come out of her shell and spill the beans to a young journalist that she's personally selected for the task? Why, you might ask? There's a reason, but it's not very good - in fact, it's so bad it almost made the already mediocre experience of reading the book even worse.
The biggest flaw of the book is sadly the one that perpetuates throughout it from beginning to end; The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo is a case study of telling instead of showing. We are constantly told - via the novel's narrator, and other forms of additional material, such as newspaper clippings - about the protagonist's immense talent, yet we are never shown what exactly warrants such judgement. It's easy to invent a famous movie star and tell everybody of their incredible talent a career; it takes a little more skill to actually convince your readers to believe in them, and this is where the novel falls flat on its face.
Not that it does much better on other front. Despite being a contender for Goodreads' 2017 best historical fiction, it manages to evoke perilously little - if any - of the time and place it is supposed to portray; it is especially jarring, since it switches between two periods, and constantly fails to show the reader how little difference is there between both; character speak and behave in the exact same way across decades. To make it worse, none of the people in the book - including Evelyn herself - are particularly interesting; in fact, despite being the star of the show, Evelyn might be the worst of them all. You might be forgiven if you forgot that she's actually Cuban, since the author certainly did - the fact is brought up only a few times in the book, and only considered by Evelyn herself near the end of the book. Evelyn's ethnicity doesn't stop her from rising up at insane speed all the way to the top in Hollywood in the 1950's, and that's only because she is not really an immigrant with her own personality; she's just a dollar store Marilyn Monroe with a little more tan.
More could be said about the book - its reliance of truisms, token characters, its lack of subtlety and nuance, where complex issues are dumbed down and presented with all the elegance of a sledgehammer - but we shouldn't repeat the errors of this novel; sometimes the less said, the better. However, sadly, it seems to me that more often than not what I see as flaws in books like these are the exact reason for their popularity, however fleeting it may be; I doubt this book in particular will be remembered in 10 or 20 years time, but I have no doubt that it - and others like it - will continue to sell like hotcakes, at least for a while. Any news of a TV adaptation yet?...more
I disliked this book so much I initially wanted to not even finish it, but against my better judgement I persevered; now, having suffered all the way I disliked this book so much I initially wanted to not even finish it, but against my better judgement I persevered; now, having suffered all the way to the very end, please let my experience be your warning.
Assembly could be best described in one word: oblivious. The story - what little of it is there - is narrated by a young, successful protagonist, who feels as if all her accomplishments will never be fully appreciated, because she is racial minority in the UK, and despite being born there will always be perceived as an offspring of immigrants. Despite working extremely hard to get where she is, she still experiences racist remarks and feels that she will never truly be one of those she aspires to be.
The topic itself is very interesting and warrants serious and deep discussion, but this book is none of that. What it is is a screed that borders on solipsism - the narrator is so focused on the injustices she perceives coming at her from absolutely everywhere, that she remains fully oblivious to her own actions and their consequences; one cannot at the same time decry the racist, colonial past of the British Empire and how said past remains in contemporary British society even now, and at the same time move up in the upper classes of said society without some sort of disconnect, and it is the narrator's ignorance - or, if we're being kind enough, lack of recognition - of said disconnect that completely ruins any point that she might have been trying to make.
In fact, the narrator's alienation from those around her reminded me of an essay by George Monbiot that I highly recommend for everyone to read, titled Another Country. Monbiot's essay is also focuses on Britain, but its main points can be equally applied to most, if not all, of modern and developed societies: the rich, ruling elites of said societies have more in common with each other, rather than the country they happened to be born in; the elites live in disconnect from the civic life of societies they inhabit, often existing in what could only be described as a paralel reality; unbothered by whatever ills that plague an ordinary citizen, "in a world of its own, from which it can project power without understanding or even noticing the consequences. A removal from the life of the rest of the nation is no barrier to the desire to dominate it. In fact it appears to be associated with a powerful sense of entitlement." The narrator is so laser-focused on climbing the ranks of entitlement, that she doesn't even consider any other way of life - because for her there is no other way of living. You either are on the top, or nowhere at all.
This, together with the narrator's lack of awareness, becomes especially jarring near the end of the book: (view spoiler)[after being diagnosed with cancer, she decides to not undergo treatment, because....she cannot win against the cancer of racism, and her acquired wealth will always be "tainted". According to her, dying of cancer will serve as a "cleansing" - which is such an incredibly idiotic and selfish statement to make; there is nothing "cleansing" about cancer, and the narrator's decision to not undergo cancer treatment despite being enormously wealthy feels like a slap in the face for all cancer patients who cannot afford healthcare and are sentenced to death because of it - something the narrator doesn't even bother thinking about once. (hide spoiler)]
To sum it up: despite its short length, I cannot bear myself to recommend this book in any way; I found it to be a complete and total bore and waste of time. Do not be fooled by its short length; your time will be much better spent watching a film by Ken Loach, a British director who devoted his career to presenting pressing social issues in contemporary cinema. I, Daniel Blake and Sorry We Missed You are both much more imporant works than this book could ever hope to be....more
Warlight could have been a great book, but ultimately it left me disappointed. It did not help that it was longlisted for the prestigious Booker PrizeWarlight could have been a great book, but ultimately it left me disappointed. It did not help that it was longlisted for the prestigious Booker Prize in the year of its publication, which made me think - is it enough to just write a novel which claims to "explore" a certain subject, without any actual exploration being done and then call it a day and wait for prizes to follow?
If so, it's very sad, because it's the premise that drew me to Warlight in the first place. The novel begins in London in 1945, just after the end of the war. The narrator, Nathaniel, lives there with his sister Rachel and their parents, who one day unexpectedly declare that they have to travel abroad and leave them under care of their lodger, a mysterious man whom the children nickname "The Moth". And so begins a completely new life for the children - one full of shadows and mystery that will follow them into adulthood and which they will try to understand years after the events.
The novel's biggest problems is that it never takes advantage of this fascinating premise - soon after the introduction of its characters and the establishment of what would form the grounds for an eventual plot, Warlight commits one of literature's most egregious sins: it becomes incredibly boring. its characters never expand on the promise they gave us - especially The Moth - and I remain unconvinced as to why any reader would actually care about any of them. I understand the author's general aim with employing non-linear structure in this novel as wanting it to serve as a reflection of memory itself - especially splintered, shattered memories, that are often so difficult to put together and make sense of years later. I just don't think that these memories aren't very insightful and enlightening, and to make it worse they're not particularly interesting. It reminded me a lot of Transcription, but without that book's lightheartedness and humor. After all, it's meant to be a "serious" work, exploring "serious" subjects - so why does it never truly explore them, and leaves us with snippets of insight that are so often mistaken for profundity?
There are shades of good in Warlight, mostly in its prose, but the book remains an example of how sometimes good writing cannot carry a novel on its own - however, I am not surprised to see it longlisted for the Booker. After all, All the Light We Cannot See won the Pulitzer...
Tom Hazard might look like any 40 year old man, but he certainly isn't one - because of a rare and mysterious condition his aging process is extremelyTom Hazard might look like any 40 year old man, but he certainly isn't one - because of a rare and mysterious condition his aging process is extremely slow, and he's been alive for centuries. To his surprise, he soon discovers that there are others like him - and they are organized in a mysterious secret society, which might not be quite what it seems....
On paper, How To Stop Time sounds like an ideal weekend getaway of a novel, and it almost is - Matt Haig writes well, but in this case I feel that the potential of his premise overshadowed the actual story that he wanted to tell. My point is, that very little actually happens in this book; most of it consists of Tom either recollecting various events from his long life (which include namedropping multiple famous historical figures, with whom through some bizarre luck he had no problems getting acquainted), which somehow fail to converge into a cohesive whole. There's a lot of focus on romance in this book - one conditions put forward to Tom by the secret society is to never fall in love with anyone, which could provide for an interesting struggle - but that aspect of the novel is extremely underwhelming; Tom's relationships in this book are extremely basic and cut from every single rom-com cliche you could imagine, and they never develop any further than that.
To sum it up: this novel reminded me of First Fifteen Lives Of Harry August, which tackles a similar subject, but puts a much greater emphasis on secret, underground societies. While How To Stop Time doesn't share that book's pretentious prose style - thank God for that! - it unfortunately shares the same lack of a compelling story, and characterization that would make us want to read on if the plot itself doesn't. Sadly, while How To Stop Time is thankfully not very long and won't take too much of your time at all, it will not leave you with much either - one can only hope that the author's other novels are better than this one....more
I loved Laird Hunt's In the House in the Dark of the Woods - a strange, fascinating, and simply enchanting novel set in colonial America - and reaI loved Laird Hunt's In the House in the Dark of the Woods - a strange, fascinating, and simply enchanting novel set in colonial America - and really enjoyed his Neverhome, which impressed me with its narrative voice of a female Union soldier in the American Civil War, but found The Evening Road to be an (almost) complete miss.
Why? The book is inspired by a real event - the lynching of Thomas Shipp and Abram Smith, which in turn inspired the poet Abel Meeropol's poem Strange Fruit, made famous by Billie Holiday - but does absolutely nothing with it.
The novel is split into three different sections - the first one is narrated by Ottie Lee Henshaw, a small-town woman who ventures to see the lynching in the town of Marvel with her boss and husband. Ottie is a feisty, engaging character, and her adventures on the road is meant to show the reader how many white Americans perceived lynchings of Black Americans at the time: good entertainment. Under the pretext of enforcing justice and punishing criminal acts, whites were free to partake in mob violence, murder and mutilation of blacks. To say that this racist vigilantism was barbaric is in itself a wild understatement. Some lynching attracted hundreds, even thousands of spectators, and were documented by professional photographers - who later sold their photos as postcards, in case any of them wanted a souvenir of participation or witnessing in brutal murder. Photos weren't the only souvenir, though - it wasn't uncommon for spectators to try to grab anything that belonged to the victim, or even dismember their body for keepsakes. Can you imagine going through your great-grandfather's things and finding a withered, severed black finger?
The second section is narrated by Calla Destry, a young African-American. Calla's adoptive family tries to whisk her away to safety - but Calla rebels, and chooses to drive to the lynching herself instead. Her section is full of rage - she's furious at her family's fear, at barbaric, white perpetrators, at the sheer injustice of a society which first enslaved people like her, and after it was forced to break their chains declared them to be fair game for their former masters. Calla's a much more sympathetic character - for obvious reasons - and we find it easy to root for her.
Their stories are interesting on their own, but I never felt that any of them went anywhere in particular, and they both fail to come together in any meaningful way. That's not the end of the novel's structural problems, though - for some bizarre reason Hunt decided to employ a third narrator, a mentally disabled person briefly introduced earlier in the novel, to provide us with a quasi coda to the story we never truly saw develop, and to offer commentary on an event we never even witnessed. Huh?
However, the real problem with the book lies elsewhere: the book lacks any sort of bite. Sure, at the very end of the novel Hunt offers us crumbs of - delivered second-hand, but still - the horrors of lynching, but is very careful to not use any racial slurs. In a book about racial relations in the 1930;s. How does he accomplish that, you might ask? It's simple: He invents his own vocabulary. You will not see the word "nigger" appear once in this novel, even though it would have been uttered regularly by a racist populace. Instead, racial slurs in this book are replaced by ficional euphemisms based on...corn: "cornflowers" are black, "cornsilks" are white, "cornroots" are Native American (yes, really), and so on. The reader is not given any explanation as to why it is so; we are expected to accept this state of affairs as fact using our own powers of deduction.
I understand that "nigger" is a sensitive word and reading or hearing it can be upsetting to many people - but its complete omission in a novel set during the height of the Jim Crow era is completely immersion breaking and dilutes the horror of that time. Although no doubt paved by good intentions, the removal of said word has a completely unintended effect - it reminded me of various countries censoring video games and movies, where to appease the censors producers turned human blood green, or in some extreme cases turned human characters into robots. Much like the game censors, Hunt undermines his own point: by erasing the word "nigger" from history he erases the verbal part of racial violence, or at the very least downplays it, softens its blow. Can one write about racial violence and pretend that the one, singular world which remains one of the calling cards of all racists worldwide to this day does not exist? I don't think so, and this is why I found The Evening Road to be not only disappointing, but borderline disrespectful and exploitative. ...more
V.C. Andrews is best know for writing Flowers in the Attic, an overnight publishing sensation which brought her both notoriety and fame. Published in V.C. Andrews is best know for writing Flowers in the Attic, an overnight publishing sensation which brought her both notoriety and fame. Published in 1979, Flowers in the Attic captured an entire generations of readers with its completely outrageous and shocking story - it has to be read to be believed - and was so successful that it allowed Andrews to focus solely on her writing, which she did: Until her death in 1986, each year she published a new novel, which included several sequels to Flowers, two novels in a new series, and My Sweet Audrina, the only standalone novel published during her lifetime.
Much like its predecessors, My Sweet Audrina displays characteristics of a contemporary Gothic novel: the story takes place in a large, decaying mansion, full of mystery and secrets that our eponymous protagonist struggles to understand: "There was something strange about the house where I grew up", she states, There were shadows in the corners and whispers on the stairs and time was as irrelevant as honesty. Though how I knew that I couldn’t say."
The book's eponymous protagonist, Audrina Adare, feels that she is deliberately kept in the dark by her family, but she has no way of finding out the truth about herself. All she knows is that she had a sister once, who died tragically nine years before she was born in the woods surrounding her family's mansion, Whitefern. Because of her death, Audrina is forbidden to leave Whiteferen, and has never been to school. She is not even able to determine her own age or the age of anyone in the house; as each of the many clocks in the house tells a different time, and newspapers and magazines always arrive long after their publication date. Everyone in Audrina's family refuses to answer her questions clearly, leaving her in perpetual state of confusion.
Many readers took a dislike to Audrina, calling her naive or even stupid, and while the truth of the matter regarding her sister seems painfully obvious to us, it might not be so clear to someone essentially kept sheltered from the world and deprived of genuine human contact. Especially when (view spoiler)[ it is eventually revealed that there never was a first Audrina, and that it was Audrina herself who was violently raped in the Whitefern wood, which drove her to attempting suicide. Her own father subjected her to electroshock therapy to erase the rape from her memory, and when that failed, chose to gaslight her and keep her in a perpetual state of confusion, hoping that by doing so she'd eventually become the daughter he lost that day. (hide spoiler)]
This is a good story, and would be even better in the hands of a good writer; although in one of the interviews V.C. Andrews prided herself in telling good stories that people won't be able to put down, the novel is far, far too long, and after the intriguing opening chapters quickly devolves into repetitive schlock. Subplots that don't add anything to the main narrative get introduced, and interesting details that were teased at the beginning never get properly developed (such as the Audrina's father's obsession with the Civil War, which is mentioned in chapter 1 and never brought up again). One could easily skim half of the book, and wouldn't necessarily miss any important context.
However, the novel is interesting when seen in context of V.C. Andrews' own life. Having suffered a tragic fall that left her crippled and forced to use crutches and wheelchair for much of her life, she too remained a very private and I would think lonely person; she never married and apparently never even had any real relationships, and to the end of her days lived with her mother, who accompanied her everywhere. According to this article, her mother could not bear the neighbors seeing her crippled daughter, deliberately keeping her away from them, monitored her guests, did all of her shopping and rarely let her leave the house; when Virginia became famous, she accompanied her on her book tours, despite never reading her novels. While it is easy for us to make fun of Andrew's often stilted and cliched dialogue and purple prose, we cannot help but to some degree admire her imagination and creativity, considering that she wrote all these novels while essentially being forbidden from interacting with the world.
It is perhaps no surprise that 0ne can distinguish a running theme in all of her works: all of them feature female protagonists that feel trapped and helpless, and are often abused by those who were supposed to care for them. It is especially tragic at the end of My Sweet Audrina, where (view spoiler)[Audrina tries to leave Whitefern, but at the last moment feels compelled to stay by a force beyond her understanding; it takes one glance at her sister to crush her resolve and give in, pulling her right back into the only life that she always knew, forcing herself to make it work - as many times as it takes... (hide spoiler)]
it is even sadder when one considers that new books bearing her name are still published, despite her passing away almost 40 years ago; after her death her family hired a ghostwriter to finish her last projects, but it is obvious that there were only so many notes left, and that any new novels - including a completely unnecessary sequel to Audrina itself - are ghostwritten from scratch purely because her own hard work made her a household name, and those who were supposed to care about her most want to continue capitalizing on it. It seems that even in death V.C. Andrews cannot save herself from being exploited and used for someone else's gain - much like the sad and tragic protagonists of her fiction....more
The Pull of the Stars tricked me - I expected a novel set in Ireland during the 1918 influenza pandemic, which was (is?) eerily relevant at the time oThe Pull of the Stars tricked me - I expected a novel set in Ireland during the 1918 influenza pandemic, which was (is?) eerily relevant at the time of its publication in mid 2020, when the whole world was struggling with the outbreak of a new, deadly virus...
However, the almost the entire novel takes place in a single ward of a Dublin hospital, and deals with the stress and tribulations of a single maternity nurse. Julia Power, the novel's heroine and narrator, describes her work in great detail - if you want to learn about the struggle of pregnancy in the early 20th century with all its medical complications, this is definitely a book for you. Everything else is swept aside - the fascinating and complex subject of Irish struggle for independence is pushed to the background, and readers get only glimpses of Julia's life outside of the hospital. I understand that one of her leading characteristics was the bond that she felt with her job - thought that's too weak a word to describe it; the fusion she felt with her job would describe it better, and that it could be read as a commentary on the situation of women in general the early 20th century. However, it's also the book's biggest flaw - Julia barely exists outside of the role imposed on her by the author and the society, and other characters in the book are barely drawn. Therefore, the developments in Julia's personal situation at the end of the novel comes of as unexpected and out of place.
It would make sense that other subjects would barely be touched upon, if Julia's entire consciousness is devoted to helping her patients, but would it make for an interesting novel? In this case, sadly, I don't think so. As much as I wanted to enjoy it, I just can't recommend The Pull of the Stars, unless, of course, you just so happen to have an interest in early 20-th century midwifery. ...more
I was really excited to read this book, only to discover that it is not a biography, but a novel! Of course I realized my mistake after purchasing theI was really excited to read this book, only to discover that it is not a biography, but a novel! Of course I realized my mistake after purchasing the book, but instead of returning it I decided to give it a try anyway...the Lord hates a quitter!
The Red Daughter if a fictional retelling of the life of Svetlana Alliluyeva, the daughter of Joseph Stalin. Being born to one of the world's most known and brutal dictators certainly leads one to an interesting life, and the author's clearly a gifted prose stylist - so, where exactly lies the problem? For me, the entire enterprise of writing a novel featuring a real, historical character is almost always inherently exploitative: the author of said work cannot help but insert their own imagination, their own vision of the person they are describing, and having them speak with their own voice. In doing so, in my opinion, the real person disappears behind the facade set up by someone else; instead of being preserved and honored, their unique personalities dissolve in the currents of fiction.
Although this book is presented as a sequence of journals and letters kept and sent by Svetlana, it is clear that it's not her writing them, but the author; he also has her form a completely fictional relationship with a made-up character, which overshadows all other relationships that she had in real life - including, I dare to say, the one with her own father. What is the point of doing that, exactly? It does not reflect on her actual character, as it is not something that she has actually done. How does a fictionalized relationship help us understand a person that actually lived? In my opinion, it doesn't, and I fail to see the point of such endeavors.
As I mentioned, the author's prose is very readable and it is clear that he has talent - I am willing to read more of his work, proving they are entirely fictional. As for those wanting to understand and learn more about Svetlana Alliluyeva, I recommend reading an actual biography, and skipping this book alltogether....more
The quickest way to describe The Third Hotel would be disappointing; if you'd ask me to say a little more about it, I would say that it's wasted potenThe quickest way to describe The Third Hotel would be disappointing; if you'd ask me to say a little more about it, I would say that it's wasted potential. The blurbs promised me a lovechild of Kafka and Borges, a fever dream of a novel set in the the lush and exotic Havana, where the architecture of yesteryear decays slowly under the scorching sun...so, would you blame me for falling for them? Wouldn't we all?
Sadly, the novel itself is one of these books that are much more focused on wanting to appear clever, instead of actually accomplishing anything of real value - such as creating an interesting protagonist, transporting its reader into a completely new setting, and presenting them with a deep, rich story. Not all of these have to happen at the same time, but it is very helpful engagement-wise when at least one of them occurs in a novel; this one, provides us with neither.
As mentioned previously, the premise is great: the protagonist, Claire, comes to Cuba to attend a horror film festival - a trip originally planned by her late husband, who tragically died in a hit and run accident. After her arrival, though, she spots a man who looks exactly like him in a crowd...and decides to follow him.
I understand that the novel can be read as an exploration, or better, an allegory of grief, death and the impact of losing a loved one on a person's mental health, but for the life of me I couldn't care about the main character. It doesn't help that the story itself is paperthin, barely existent - the author cranked up the ambiguity level to 11, and the whole novel reads as if it was but an exercise in confusion and obfuscation. Is any of what happens real? Is all of it? Where is it going? Is it going anywhere at all?
And there's the rub - as I was nearing the end, I simply couldn't bring myself to care; and I don't think you will either. Sadly, it turned out to not be a case of a novel standing on the shoulders of giants, but one completely overshadowed by them. ...more
The past is a curious thing. It’s with you all the time, I suppose an hour never passes without your thinking of things that happened ten or twenty yeThe past is a curious thing. It’s with you all the time, I suppose an hour never passes without your thinking of things that happened ten or twenty years ago, and yet most of the time it’s got no reality, it’s just a set of facts that you’ve learned, like a lot of stuff in a history book. Then some chance sight or sound or smell, especially smell, sets you going, and the past doesn’t merely come back to you, you’re actually in the past.
While Coming Up for Air is nowhere near as well-known as 1984 or Animal Farm, It is a much more stripped down novel, and has has a much different, much more personal tone. Written between 1938 and 1939 in Morocco, where Orwell was recuperating from an illness, Coming Up for Air is very much a product of its time.; the time to come - the falling bombs, burned out cities, and millions of lives senselessly lost - and the time that has passed away, gone forever, a way of life that was just there and in one instant has been stripped away, stolen.
It is no surprise, then, that the best word to summarize Coming Up for Air would be nostalgia, the longing for that bygone era, real or imagined, where things were simpler, when everything made sense. The novel's protagonist and narrator, George Bowling, is a middle-aged insurance salesman, who despite living a relatively comfortable suburban life is deeply unhappy; his marriage isn't the happiest (putting it mildly), he doesn't seem to care that much for his two children, and he sees his job as nothing else but a form of enslavement to the capitalist system. We feel for George, even though he is not necessarily a sympathetic character; his careless dismissal of his family in general and complete disregard of his wife in particular (on whom he casually admits to cheating - more than once, too!) are certainly not noble characteristics. However, are they the result of his inner characteristics, or rather the fast-changing world that he was forced to inhabit?
Although Coming Up for Air has been published in 1939 and it's impossible to not see it in the context of that time period, it's astonishing how relatable George's frustrations are over 80 years later. How many of us feel at least a certain degree of unfulfillment - perhaps even disappointment - with our lives, with our mortgages and nine-to-fives? The entire novel is George's long and unrelenting struggle against the encroaching capitalist modernity, which little-by-little strips away facets of the old world in which he grew up in - in many cases literally. Ancient trees being torn down to make space for new, mass produced identical housing estates, green pastures turned into enclosed communities for the rich, restaurant chains killing small businesses and serving identical dreck, with the whole being shaped into a race track without a finish line, on which humans are expected to compete against each other and run faster and faster, with blinkers on their eyes, never looking back, only looking forward, towards that singular goal of making money, always more and more money.
George's - well, we can drop the act, since soon it becomes obvious that George is no one else but Orwell himself wearing a fatsuit - outlook on the matter is pretty clear: Say what you like—call it silly, childish, anything—but doesn't it make you puke sometimes to see what they're doing to England, with their bird-baths and their plaster gnomes, and their pixies and tin cans, where the beech woods used to be? Sentimental, you say? Anti-social? Oughtn't to prefer trees to men? I say it depends what trees and what men. Not that there's anything one can do about it, except to wish them the pox in their guts.
Modernity and progress always had as many proponents as they had detractors, but 80 years ago they at least offered a glimpse of hopeful emancipation for subdued masses living in near-feudal conditions, even if it often came as a heavy cost, both societal and environmental; think of communities uprooted from their rural way of living which had to migrate to big cities and adapt to living in rapidly industrializing societies. However, I do think that George - Orwell - would be even more critical if he were to witness the stage of modernity we arrived at today, with its few precious accomplishments - such as affordable housing, the right to regular work hours work-free days - are being denounced as obsolete, and precarious working conditions -even such extremes as 0-hour work contracts - becoming the new norm and sold to us as embodiment of personal choice and financial freedom. Despite enormous technological advances, healthy food choices that should be a staple of everyday diet are often becoming flat-out unaffordable, forcing millions of people to consume processed junk and dooming them to all-sorts of health risks and diseases. Even the very nostalgia for the past, which the two Georges feel so strongly, is being constantly repackaged and resold for profit - just look at the endless remakes of famous movies and reboots of well-known franchises, needless sequels and spin-offs.
As typical of Orwell, there's plenty of political commentary in this book - but I do think its real strength lies in its focus on George's personal, quixotic struggle against the forceful destruction of everything he knew and held dear, just as important in 2023 as it was in 1939. Perhaps even more so now than ever before. ...more
It's 1940, London. 18 year old Juliet Armstrong is approached by the MI5 with a job offer: she is to transcribe tapes of conversations between spies aIt's 1940, London. 18 year old Juliet Armstrong is approached by the MI5 with a job offer: she is to transcribe tapes of conversations between spies and various fifth columnist, whose sympathies lie with Germany. She accepts, because the job seems easy enough - but is it?
Although Transcription tackles a very serious subject, it at the same time full of subdued and typically British humor, and the two mix together very well - if anything, it helps to illustrate how hopelessly incompetent supporters of the "New Germany" were at the time in Britain, and how their attempts at showing support amounted to little more than daydreaming and wishful thinking. It comes at no surprise then that the plot is often lighthearted and comic, and the serious interludes come at just the right moments.
Despite all that, I can't help but wish that the book had more substance - I enjoyed it and can easily see it being adapted into a film, but it left me wanting to learn more about that period in that particular corner of the world. To sum it up - there's not much to not enjoy in Transcription, but I don't think it will make a lasting impression on you either. ...more
I did not particularly enjoy two of the novels by Kate Atkinson I've read before, Life After Life and Behind the Scenes at the Museum. I thought that I did not particularly enjoy two of the novels by Kate Atkinson I've read before, Life After Life and Behind the Scenes at the Museum. I thought that both books showed ambition and promise, but ultimately ended up being overly long and I ended up not really caring about either of them.
Which is why I approached this collection with some trepidation - who likes to be disappointed three times? - and I'm happy to say that I enjoyed it. Not all of the 12 stories contained within Not the End of the World are equally memorable or engaging, but I appreciated their whimsical quality and short length; none of them overstayed their welcome and exhausted my patience. Although each of them can be read separately, there are subtle links woven between the stories, and discovering them makes the reading experience all the more rewarding.
If there is a single unifying theme linking all the stories in the collection, its the focus on relationships between people - how they are formed, developed and kept, and how they eventually break down. From the friendship between Charlene and Trudi in the opening story, Charlene and Trudi Go Shopping, where both women talk about their wants and desires and seem to live perfectly normal lives in a world that's not quite right, through the experience of being a stranger in a new country in Transparent Fiction, where the American transplant to England discovers more than she could ever have expected, to what is probably my favorite story in the whole collection, the surprisingly touching Sheer Big Waste of Love, in which an orphaned man remembers his mother's effort to reconnect him with his father. Now an adult with his own family, he unexpectedly becomes involved with him again - and not in a way that he would have expected. The story is unexpectedly rich with nostalgia and poignancy, and full of bittersweet leave-taking. I thought that the length of all the other stories in the volume was just right, but this is the only one of them all which left me wanting more.
To sum up: if you enjoy short stories, especially those with a bit of a surreal side, there's a good chance that you'll enjoy this collection, too. And even if not all of them will be your exact cup of tea, well, it's not the end of the world - I think at least parts of them will stay on in your memory....more
Black Gum is a book which can be read in a single sitting, but also one that packs a whole lot of punch for its short length. It's emotional, it's intBlack Gum is a book which can be read in a single sitting, but also one that packs a whole lot of punch for its short length. It's emotional, it's intense and it's also raw, gritty and real - I could easily see the characters that populate its pages and even relate to them.
The book does not feature what could be described as a conventional plot; it follows the journey, or rather the downfall, of one young man, who knows that his life is falling apart, but does absolutely nothing to stop it. Even worse - he is perfectly aware that his choices not only not help him, but actively make the situation worse, and that the only consistency in his character is driving himself and those around him down. Still, despite all this, we cannot help but feel sympathetic towards him, and want him to succeed and turn his life around, against all odds. Will he, or won't he? You have to read the novel to find out, and I know I'll be reading more by this author....more
Laird Hunt's In the House in the Dark of the Woods was one of my favorite literary discoveries of 2018. It is a strange and mysterious novel, and one that I can easily recommend to anyone interested in contemporary weird fiction. It's a beautiful, atmospheric and unsettling book, which in my opinion did not get the recognition it deserved.
Neverhome is an earlier novel of his, very different from In the House... - it is a very different story, much more straightforwardly told, and the weirdness and dissonance of the latter book is completely absent here. Still, it was also a very pleasant surprise, and cemented my dedication to read all of the author's other works.
Neverhome is bonafide historical fiction, set in 1862, and its narrator is Ash Thompson, a female farmer from Indiana. Ash abandons her real name - Constance - and disguises herself as a man in order to join the army and support the Union cause in the Civil War that's ravaging the country. She is a person of strong character and body, compared to her gentle and physically weak husband, Bartholomew - in her words, she was made of wire, whereas he was made out of wood. So, it is he who stays to mind the farm, and she who ventures out into the world to fight the Confederacy and preserve the Republic.
There's much beauty to be found in the book. Hunt's prose is stunning, and I found myself rereading passages just to experience them again; Ash is an interesting narrator, whose no-nonsense reminded me of Mattie from True Grit, though the book as a whole is nowhere near as humorous; seeing her adapt to her new conditions, outwit her enemies and outsmart the circumstances was something I greatly enjoyed.
While I found the denouement to be expectable, for me Neverhome was about the journey, and not the destination; I enjoyed travelling along with Gallant Ash through war-torn America, and I think that you will as well....more
It is obvious from the opening sentence of Winter Under Water that the author possesses clear talent when it comes to crafting prose and a passion forIt is obvious from the opening sentence of Winter Under Water that the author possesses clear talent when it comes to crafting prose and a passion for his subject, but sadly, neither of these can save his book - it is simply not a compelling novel, and it pains me greatly to say this, as I very much wanted it to be one.
Set in the Polish city of Kraków, the ancient capital of the country and now a popular tourist trap, Winter Under Water is the story of a bizarre love triangle - of Joseph, an Englishman who falls in love with Marta, a Polish woman that he met in England, and then followed back into Poland. There's only one problem - Marta is married and has a young daughter...
It is clear to me that Hopkin has genuine passion for Polish culture, history and language, but as a native many things about it seemed off, and exaggerated for the purpose of enchanting the reader - reading his depiction of winter made me feel as if I was in the middle of Siberia, not in a large European country in the middle of the continent. Although the time period if never explicitly stated in the novel, it is meant to be early 2000's - and you'd never have guessed it from reading the novel; there are no cellphones, and computers and modern technology are almost nonexistent - if anything more modern than a steam engine was mentioned in this novel, I must have missed it - the weather is always grey and cold, buildings decayed and crumbling. The city is populated with many interesting characters of all nationalities, who are obviously based on the author's own personal encounters in the city, but they also beg the question: why not just write a travelog? I think the answer is clear - because writing a travelog doesn't allow one to exaggerate and make things up out of the whole cloth (unless, of course, the person writing said travelog thinks that they can get away with it) and writing fiction does. Most side characters in this book are too quirky, special and unique. I understand that it is their narrative role to make Joseph feel like a stranger in another country, but how could he not feel like one, when he never meets anyone who would treat him like a normal person? I think there might actually be a reason for them being this way...
...and said reason is, of course, our main characters being absolutely unremarkable and uninteresting, their relationship - if we can even call it one - being absolutely hamfisted into the narrative, as there is no plot to speak of otherwise.
Joseph leaves his country and follows married Marta to her own - but why? What makes her so special? We never know. Hopkin tells us how special she is, again and again, but never shows us what exactly is it that makes her special. Much of Marta's side of the story is presented in the form of her correspondence to Joseph - despite being a busy mother and researcher, she somehow finds the time to always write to him (just as she did before she came back to Poland, even if they have just met - if yo can believe that. I don't). Much of Marta's correspondence to Joseph is concerned with remarkable European women whose lives she's researching, which means that she's essentially infodumping poor Joseph with factoids regarding their lives for pages and pages on end. I don't think I'm exaggerating by saying that potential readers can skip not entire pages, but entire chapters of the book, and not miss out on anything. The fact that these two are having an affair can almost be excused, when Marta mentions her husband, who is one of the most lame male characters ever written in all of fiction. We never learn why Joseph and Marta love each other so much, and we certainly do not understand what made her marry this man in the first place - though, perhaps, her presentation of her husband as meek, submissive and uninteresting is her own way of justifying her own feelings and indecision regarding both men. Marta is torn by being divided between two men, but not too much. it seems. Or maybe I am just reading too much into poorly written characters and try to justify their existence with my interpretation...
As much as I appreciate the fact that the author is a clear Polonophile with demonstrable affection for this country, I cannot help but not see the fact that his book is flat-out boring, and despite several clever sentences offers very little substance. It is aimless, feels endless, and upon finishing it I felt as if actual weight was released from my shoulders - but it left me with no reward for the struggle I put in getting to the end....more
"He was laughing, chin up, and shaking his head. God the Father was exploding in his face with a glory of sunlight through painted glass, a glory that"He was laughing, chin up, and shaking his head. God the Father was exploding in his face with a glory of sunlight through painted glass, a glory that moved with his movements to consume and exalt Abraham and Isaac and then God again."
Dean Jocelin has been graced with a vision by God; he is to erect a monumental spire on top of his cathedral to honor Him. There is just one problem - the cathedral lacks foundations that could support such a massive structure, and building it will undoubtedly result in its collapse and ruin of the cathedral itself. Despite numerous warnings from the master builder, his crew and other people, Dean Jocelin refuses to abandon the project and stop the construction of the spire. For Jocelin, to question the sense of this project is to question the will of God Himself; if it is a folly, it is not his, but God's. To question is to surrender. He will not question.
The Spire is a multilayered novel of singular obsession and madness. Although Jocelin claims to sees the spire as only one mean to achieving his desired end - he wishes for it to astonish other people as well, and bring them closer to God - it eventually becomes impossible to ignore the influence it has on him and everything else. Some Critics found the spire to be a metaphor for Jocelin's suppressed sexual urges, but I like to think that he truly was aiming to construct a modern (well, medieval, if we take into account the time in which the book is set) Babel, a monument that could not only reach, but touch the heavens. Jocelin wields immense power - the master builder cannot refuse him, lest he be branded as a heretic and punished with death - but he wields it and he continues on with the work, as doomed as it might seem. He never asked men to do what was reasonable, he says, speaking of God. Men can do that themselves. No light reading, this book, but ultimately a worthwhile experience. ...more
Imagine, if you will, that you're a hitman. One of the best in the business, in fact; your skills with a sniper rifle have no equal. You've just been Imagine, if you will, that you're a hitman. One of the best in the business, in fact; your skills with a sniper rifle have no equal. You've just been hired by a mob,who is willing to pay you handsomely for assassinating a single target from afar. The best way to do it would be to find a good vantage point, perform the hit, and then vanish in your getaway vehicle, right? Wrong. Obviously, the best way to perform the job is to don a disguise and construct a fake identity, mingle with the local population for months, and only then actually do your job, bamboozling everyone in the process. Duh!
Billy Summers is better than The Institute, but The Institute is easily Stephen King's worst published novel, so that's not saying much. The sad thing is that it could have been a good novel, but it did not turn out to be one...once again. In it's best moments Billy Summers shows promise of greatness, but it never comes to pass; whatever hope it had quickly dies down and the best parts of the book turn out to be just okay. At its worst, it is just the latest example of the continuously deteriorating quality of King's recent work.
Fans of the mysterious and the uncanny and those who love the exploration of the thin border between the real and the unreal that Stephen King used to do so well have nothing to look for here. Billy Summers is another of King's forays into writing thrillers, which I think he's just not very good at. His characters are boring; his pacing is off; and his plots are just not entertaining or suspenseful. It's incredibly hard to come up with original, engaging ideas in a field which sees so much competition, or even successfully dress up old ones in new clothes. Frustratingly, Billy Summers doesn't manage to do either of these things.
In fact, this latest stage in his career reminds me of what happened to another popular author, who also wrote dark, disturbing books which straddled the border between reality and science fiction - Dean Koontz. Koontz was never the writer that King is - his prose is too often made ridiculous by his overuse of metaphors and similes. and his tendency to insert his personal beliefs into his writing eventually made me quit reading him altogether. His characters are cookie cutter, and all of his stories use the same tropes over and over, and his worlds are black and white: all his protagonists have traumatic pasts and are good and kind hearted, and his antagonists are absolutely evil. When the two come into conflict, can you guess who wins?
Having said all this, his fiction from the 1980's and early 1990's is full of genuinely interesting and engaging ideas. His plot concepts are genuinely great, and even if his delivery fails most of the time, this promise of greatness kept me coming back for more. Even though his plots are usually formulaic and his characters are always either good or bad, he had a great ability to mix the fantastic with the real, and make the two overlap in a way that I wished would be done more often. A good recent example of what I mean is the popular Netflix show Stranger Things . I always thought that Koontz was a great idea man, and that his books would benefit from being written by someone else, who would introduce more moral ambiguity into them and just write them better than he did.
And then something happened. Much like King, at a late point in his career - in his case the mid 2000's - Koontz started publishing thrillers almost exclusively. He wrote them before - most notably Intensity, which I thought was one of his best books - but now they seemed to be his main creative focus. He never completely abstained from the supernatural and the uncanny, but his books never regained the creativity they had in the 1980's and 1990's. As I read through his output, I remember thinking that his earlier, much darker books reflected the trauma that he went through in his early life, and that the outlandish, creative ideas helped him fight his own, personal demons. Perhaps at some point he realized that he has not only moved enough his past trauma, and it stopped being the main factor which drove and inspired his work up to that point; or perhaps he just became a hugely successful writer, who no longer had to heed the calls of his publishers demanding dark fiction with elements of horror, and could write whatever he wanted.
I mention all this because Billy Summers and Stephen King's recent attempts at writing similar fiction reminded me a lot of Koontz's transformation. Much of King's own personal life is reflected in his fiction; growing up in small town America, childhood hopes and traumas, the struggle with alcoholism and substance abuse. However, his recent work displays none of the charm and deep understanding of character that drove his earlier novels; perhaps he too has moved on from past traumas and they no longer haunt him as his muses? Or maybe he also is a household name, and no longer needs to listen to his publishers, because they will print anything with his name on it, as evidenced by the legion of adoring fans, who post multiple 5-star reviews full of animated GIFs meant to convey their love for its author?
Billy Summers started slow, became midlly engaging in the middle, but ultimately fizzled out at the end. To sum it up: as a character driven novel, Billy Summers fails, since none of its characters - main or otherwise - are particularly interesting. As a thriller, Billy Summers fails, because its plot is cartoonish and outlandish - thankfully, not as bad as The Institute, but we're reaching Dean Koontz level of improbable coincidences here, which is truly worrying. But most of all it fails as a Stephen King novel - aside from easter eggs alluding to his older novels, there's nothing special about this book, nothing which would make it stand out from the endless rows of generic thrillers that you can pick up at the airport or the train station before your trip and then forget afterwards. There's nothing here that sticks, that stays. Everything about this book is ultimately forgettable, and as I said it's yet another of the disappointing, latter-day King efforts.
As you'll know from the blurb, Billy Summers is a killer for hire, but only accepts the hit if his target is a truly bad guy. Unlike the protagonist of the TV show Dexter, whose vigilante crusade against criminals was ideologically motivated, Billy seems to only kill bad people for money. This was the perfect opportunity for King to create a complex and nuanced character, whose morality is neither here nor there - but he fails to do so completely, as Billy Summers is impossibly perfect and therefore perfectly boring. While Billy himself acknowledges in his mind that he is not a "good man", there is nothing to suggest otherwise - he has a heart of gold and goes out of his way for people he cares for, and as will be shown later, strangers. Billy is such a goody two shoes that if he wasn't a killer for hire, he'd probably be a saint, and King doesn't manage to find his way out of this absurdity. We are obviously meant to empathize with Billy, because he's given a very complex backstory - for the absurd purpose of maintaining months-long cover for his job (reminder: he never needed to develop any sort of relationship with his target, or even get physically close to him) he pretends to be a writer (yes, really) and writes a memoir, in which he describes his childhood spent in a foster home and later war experiences in Iraq. Many readers found Billy's backstory to be dull and distracting from the main plot, but I felt otherwise; for me, Billy's childhood is probably the best part of the whole novel, and the only one where I felt real emotion emerging between characters. However, he inevitably grows up, and the later part of his memoir - dealing with his experience as a soldier in Iraq - did not have the same impact on me; the childhood part could have easily been based on Stephen King's own experiences while growing up, or those of someone he knew; obviously he never fought in Iraq, and I doubt many of his close friends did. In the acknowledgments section he thanks Bing West for his book, No True Glory, an account of the battle of Fallujah. The difference between the two is that West is a combat veteran, who not only saw action in multiple conflicts, but spent weeks on the frontlines in Iraq and talked to dozens of people involved in that war, from ordinary soldiers to top-tier policymakers. West's interest was to preserve the account of this war for posterity; while reading King's obviously fictionalized account of Billy's time in Iraq, I couldn't help but feel that it felt cheap, almost exploitative. Actual soldiers went through experiences like these and worse, but their names will never get even an ounce of recognition that this book does; it felt a lot like stolen valor, which is a terrible thing.
I believe that the actual plot - the assasination, the famous last job - is a ruse, meant only to introduce the context for the real plot of the novel, which begins 1/3rd into the book. This is where I hoped Billy Summers would show its true face and strength; it didn't. The sad thing is that I can see many readers giving up on the book before the true plot even kicks in, because of how milquetoast and boring it's been up to this point.. Still, to discuss it would reveal the surprises of the story, so I'll hide them behind the spoiler tag:
(view spoiler)[ After successfully impersonating a writer and carrying out the hit, Billy discovers that his employer did not intend to pay him after all, and that he's the one being hunted now. Just then an unconscious young woman is unceremoniously dumped just in front of Billy's very secret safehouse by a group of young men, who have clearly raped her. Despite hiding from the authorities and the mob who ordered the job, Billy decides to literally risk his life and save the girl, who eventually wakes up and is understandably horrified; we learn her name, Alice.
This is where the book lost its chance at turning good and becoming memorable. As I mentioned before, it soon becomes obvious that Billy's relationship with Alice is the real focus of the novel, but the way it is formed and ultimately conducted is just bizarre. From Alice's convenient appearance at Billy's doorstep to her incredibly quick acceptance of him, throughout his initial physical reaction to her (I really could have done without reading about Billy's erection and how his boxers almost slipped at one time, which might have been intended as funny, but made me cringe), to Billy taking it upon himself to avenge her rape...by going to her rapists' house and raping him with a shiny object. Why would a killer on the run - and one of the best, mind - expose himself like that? And why would he choose to avenge sexual violence with more sexual violence, instead of just killing the perpetrator, which would surely make more sense - they could never hurt anyone ever again? Not to mention the fact that none of this is questioned by Alice, who approves of it and feels thankful to Billy.
It is worth mentioning that despite being violently raped (believe me, we learn exactly how violently, because Billy takes it upon himself to examine her), Alice never needs to go to a hospital. She takes the morning after pill, but the worry of potentially catching an STD never seems to cross her mind...or his.
The real kicker comes later, though. After Billy tracks down the man who set him up, he makes him reveal the name of the person who paid for his head - and after fighting and fatally injuring one his friends then trusts the word of said man and lets him go., leaving an even bigger trail behind himself. We learn that the real bad guy is a wealthy and influential media mogul, who wanted to eliminate his son, who blackmailed him...because the mogul is a secret pedophile.
What does Billy do? He decides to use Alice as bait in order to eliminate him. Alice, for whom we are led to believe he cares for, and for whom he went to such lengths for to save and "avenge". This is ridiculously stupid on multiple levels, not in the least because of ridiculously low chances of the actual plot working out, but also because of the absolute lack of resistance from Alice - who, let me say it again, has been violently raped not that long ago. Although Alice is showing signs of wanting to be independent and live her life again, she never questions Billy and is willing to follow him to the ends of the earth, no matter how stupid his ideas might be. We are led to believe that she loves him, despite hardly knowing him. The relationship between Billy and Alice would be much more interesting, if she occasionally challenged him, or if his feelings about her were more conflicted. However, up until the very end of the book she is never nothing more than his tool, and even the decisions and actions that she makes and takes herself are just means to fulfill his plan.
At some point it became obvious to me that Billy was going to die. How does this happen? In the most contrived way you could think of: the mother of a minor character he killed earlier shows up from nowhere and shoots him in the stomach, which leads to his slow death.
Personally, I think the book would be much stronger if Alice was the one character whom King would choose to kill off. Her death could teach Billy about the consequences of his own actions, and I think that the tragedy of him saving her life only to have her die because of his own doing would give him the reason to truly feel bad about himself, and be much more impactful. Instead, King has Alice finish Billy's memoirs (even in death his hold over her doesn't lessen) and "find her voice", which seemed forced and improbable. The violence and trauma that she went through - and what Billy's plan must have reminded her of - requires years of therapy to overcome, and Alice driving off into the metaphorical sunset must have felt like a slap to the face of actual rape victims, whose suffering I can't even imagine. Why is it completely forgotten and never brought up again?
In her reviews of King's novels, my friend Becky points out one recurring theme, and this time I paid attention to see if it'll appear in this one as well. And sure enough, it did: King's approach to fat people, or rather his bizarre demonizing of overweight and fat people. In this novel, a very bad character is fat, and attention is brought to the physical appearance and behavior of his fat body; one of the mobsters with whom Billy interacts is an overweight character named Giorgio Piglielli (yes, really), who is called George Pigs behind his back. It's not funny, but weird.
This book sadly includes all the missteps of recent Stephen King fiction - attempts at modern slang that don't quite work, young characters knowing and referencing music and movies from way beyond their era, weird approach to current technology (at one point Billy leaves some money for a friend he made to cover the cost of Netflix that he watched at their apartment, which made me wonder - does Stephen King know how Netflix operates?), and, of course, about a dozen references to Donald Trump - none of them positive. I understand that he's not a fan of Trump - I'm not as well - but at this point in time he seems to live rent-free in his head, which really took me out of the story. It's like listening to a bickering old uncle, who won't shut up about politics. Mentioning Trump about a dozen times isn't enough, as one unimportant character - I think it was a woman exposing a racist sentiment towards someone - is described as possessing "a very Trumpian prejudice". These criticisms aren't even constructive - they're just thrown there offhandedly, dismissively, boring this reader and adding absolutely nothing to the story; if I wanted to read actual political analysis, I'd pick Arlie Hochschild or Thomas Frank.
Ultimately, there's nothing in Billy Summers that would make me want to give it even a lukewarm recommendation; fans will probably enjoy nods to The Shining and other novels, but these Easter eggs reminded me of a happier, better time, where Stephen King used to set trends in contemporary popular fiction instead of simply following them, and poorly. Still, I have no doubt that this book of his - like all others - will sell incredibly well, and I can already see a movie or TV adaptation being announced. I'm still happy that he is there and he is publishing; but each time I pick up his recent book I'm less and less happy with what I read....more
It was not long after I joined Goodreads when he messaged me for the first time. He did not even have a profile picture; all that was to be seen were It was not long after I joined Goodreads when he messaged me for the first time. He did not even have a profile picture; all that was to be seen were his books and his name. He explained that he just joined the site, and we began to talk; soon we arranged to read our first book together.
I was his first friend here - I'm still happy about it -but soon he became a regular in our community of readers, and a popular one. Goodreads seemed to be a little more close-knit back then; I certainly was more active and interacted more regularly with people I met here, many of whom became and remain my friends. I'm happy to say that he was one of them; we began exchanging messages and he always had a kind word to say to me.
One of his favorite writers was Cormac McCarthy, and it was he who introduced me to his works. I remember us arguing endlessly whether The Road was a good novel; he pointed me in the direction of his earlier works, which I liked more. One of my favorite things to do was to tease him about McCarthy's dislike of punctuation. It became a running gag for us, and I did it for years, even after I grew to appreciate McCarthy and his style, and even find beauty in his writing.
The Crossing is the second book of McCarthy's trilogy of novels, and like its predecessor it takes place along the American-Mexican border. I read the first novel, All the Pretty Horses years ago, but only now got around to reading the second; I thought that there was all the time in the world for reading, talking and reminiscing. I took my time to read this book; I read it slowly, only a few pages every day, because it felt right. The Crossing is not a book to be rushed through; it is a book that benefits being read not on a page, but on a sentence level - bit by bit, word by word, letter by letter.
Storywise, The Crossing is a similar book All the Pretty Horses, but is a much slower, more somber and melancholic work. Even though All The Pretty Horses was also pretty bleak, it contained moments of humor and excitement, which are largely absent from The Crossing. What it does contain in multitudes are philosophical musings on the nature of life and man, a lot of untranslated Spanish (I think there was some in its predecessor, but here entire conversations are left untranslated - realism, I guess), and plenty of really emotional and beautiful descriptions of the American southwest, throughout which our protagonist, Billy Parham, travels on his three crossings across the border - between the U.S. and Mexico, but also between that what we can explain and that what we cannot.
With each of these three crossings Billy will change, and so will his relationship with the land and those who inhabit it. He begins the book as a boy; he will end it as a man, with all the burdens and sorrows associated with it. I felt kinship with Billy because I too have changed since I've read All the Pretty Horses all these years ago. In many ways I still am the person I was then, but in many others I'm not; it feels strange reading the words I wrote to review that book and observe how much time has passed.
In many ways - most notably in the vividness of its lyricism and deep affection for the land it describes - The Crossing is a beautiful book, but it can also be cruel and unforgiving, reminding us of our own mistakes and the fact that we cannot turn back time, and that the Earth turns on its axis irregardless of us and how we feel about it, and will continue to do so long after we'll be gone.
The problem with Stephen King's Later is not that it's awful - that'd be last year's The Institute, a book so bad it left me scratching my head how iThe problem with Stephen King's Later is not that it's awful - that'd be last year's The Institute, a book so bad it left me scratching my head how it even made it to publication - but that it's just not very good. It's passable at best, and substandard at worst. But most of all it's...forgettable.
I've been reading King for more than 20 years and it greatly pains me to say this, but for the last few his literary output was just... not so good, to put it mildly. Sadly, Later is no exception. The entire novel could be read in a day, if you have nothing better to do with your time - it took me three to finish it, and not because for lack of trying, but because I was just not engaged with the story and the characters. It was interesting, but just barely. I still think that King is a master of his craft, but in this book he failed to engage me with his prose as in the books which I read in my youth and re-read as an adult. The prose in Later is just bland - it serves to move the plot along, and there's hardly a phrase or sentence for us to hang on to. What's worse, in the book he fails victim to showing instead of telling - the main character reminds us that "this is a horror story" so frequently, that when the actual horror elements arrive they feel underwhelming and unnecessary.
I'm someone who can write an essay about my favorite King novel or short story, but there's just not much that one can talk about when it comes to Later. I don't mean to be insulting, but the whole book feels...uninspired and just unnecessary, almost as if it was commissioned by the publisher instead of submitted to one (speaking of publishers, I've no idea why this novel was published by Hard Case Crime - I don't think it fits their profile at all). However, the book shares the same flaw that most of King's recent novels do: its child/young adult protagonist is not convincing. Jamie, our narrator, is someone from the 1970's and 80's stuck in the 21st century - his narration doesn't feel authentic, and he doesn't sound like the generation he is supposed to belong to (cue the abundance of typical King colloquialisms, like "telefungus" as a stand-in for telephone). His mother, Tia, is a Struggling Single Mother in every sense of the word, and predictably so they have a very close relationship, which forms the main part of the book. I would have liked to read more of these characters, but they're never allowed to spring out of their shells and come alive.
I'm also a fan of writers referencing their own work in their fiction (sometimes King excells at), but I can't agree with how it was done here. (view spoiler)[ Jamie meets a professor, who just happens to know about the Ritual of Chüd, which he successfully uses to combat the evil spirit. It's not a genuine reference or connection to his masterwork, IT, but pure namedropping and fanservice - it cheapens the older book and feels almost insulting.) (hide spoiler)]
However, the book does have one thing going for it, which genuinely surprised me (albeit not in a good way). The ending. After all is said and done, there is one little thing left that comes so out of the left field that it left me actually making a face and audibly asking "What?": (view spoiler)[: Jamie finds out that Uncle Harry is not his Uncle, but his father, and wonders if that is why he possesses the unique ability that he has. The "twist" felt so unnecessary; in this case less would really be much more. (hide spoiler)]. Sadly, it did not save the book, but only made it worse. What happened to "show, don't tell?"
Later lacks the emotional impacts and engagement that Stephen King does like no one else when he's at his best; sadly, he's not at his best here. This felt almost like a YA book, with an idea that was done before - better (looking at you, M. Night Shyamalan) and, well, not that well (looking at you, Dean Koontz). And the saddest thing is that Constant Readers all over the world will probably gobble it up and give it 5 stars, as always, because the cover bears his name. I wish Stephen King would do a Richard Bachman 2.0. and start publishing books under another name again, to see if novels such as these would be accepted by publishers as willingly and sell as well as those under his own name. Somehow, I doubt that. And that's the saddest thing. ...more
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