maxine-faye

1 of 1 members found this review helpful.

• Rated 4 stars

“Readability: I went into this book prepared to dislike it: I do try not to pre-judge books negatively before I start to read them, but this I had two problems with immediately, just from a general knowledge of what the book was based on and how it was going to be told. The first issue was the obvious similarity of the subject matter to the Elisabeth Fritzl case, which was still incredibly fresh in everyone's mind when the book first came out. It's one of those defining media stories that I will remember forever because it was so huge at the time, and even though I've come to this book a year and change after its publication, that case was very much present throughout the time it took to read it. That kind of closeness between the real case and this fictional one left an unpleasant taste in my mouth - but then again, why shouldn't it? Fiction doesn't have to be a refuge from the horror of the reality, so while there is a still a strong air of exploitation - an author finding a deeply unpleasant situation that has hurt real people, and mining it for art - that doesn't mean that Donoghue has written a bad book. Whether she should have, and profited richly from it, is another question.

The second aspect of the book I was concerned about was the choice to have it narrated by a five-year-old. I don't avoid books with a young narrator, but I've rarely found one that isn't unrealistically precocious, or either reads much older or much younger than their years. Jack, however, is surprisingly authentic. Some of his language is unrealistic or jarring, but not terribly so, and on the whole he isn't presented as some kind of child genius with a pithy, emotional insight into very important things. Donoghue doesn't use him like that. What she does do is make him exactly as perplexed and self-obsessed as a child of that age would be, and while he can be vaguely charming and sweet he is mostly incredibly irritating - I was actually grinding my teeth at times wishing he could understand what was happening and that he'd think more about his mother, and that he'd grow a backbone already. 400 pages is an incredibly long time (although the book is quite quick reading generally) to spend with Jack, but then I tried to imagine how it must have been for his 'Ma', being only with him for five years in one room, kept prisoner by a horrid man, and my head just about exploded from how utterly awful it was.

In an odd way, really, my two worries about the book turned out to be true - the Fritzl case was incredibly close, and Jack was very irritating - but the effect was chilling and engrossing. This is a good book, if not a particularly nice one.

Impact: What I will always remember about this book is how relentlessly grim it was. It really is dark, and disturbing, and it twists my face into unpleasant shapes when I think about it. There is, I suppose, a glimmer of hope at the end, but it isn't happy and it has practically no light moments at all. I would probably recommend it to people, but only if they were fully prepared to read something truly dark.
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maxine-faye wrote this review Tuesday, September 6, 2011. ( reply | permalink )

• Rated 4 stars

“Readability: I started reading this in the morning of a day that potentially held many distractions - but within a couple of pages, this book had become the main distraction for the day and I dived back into it whenever I could, in order to finish it early that evening - and with a big grin on my face, too. Nicholls' writing is lovely: so easy to read but not dull or sparse with it, and filled with sparkling humour and great descriptions, which lend themselves very well to his big comedy set pieces. He also doesn't slouch when it comes to the quieter, sadder emotional moments, which are all the more moving next to the genuinely hilarious comedy. I already knew what was going to happen (I watched the film first, oops!) but I was completely sucked in from start to finish, and ran out to read more of his work as soon as possible.

Impact: I will always love this book, although my five star rating did fade to a four star after a couple of weeks. I still absolutely adore it, and it's one of those books I'll really remember the reading of, because it was such a gleeful delight, but it also isn't without its faults. The plot isn't particularly original, and while the writing and humour are charming enough for this not to be a problem most of the time, the continued love triangle - the only conceivable ending of which is telegraphed right from the start - is so obvious and annoying that it does start to grate. I found myself eye-rolling at Brian's continued obliviousness well before I reached the middle of the book. Despite this annoyance, though, what Nicholls managed to do that resonated with me so much was to capture the very real struggle Brian has with university: the gaping divide between what he wants it to be and what it ends up being; who he wants to be and who he actually is. He's such an average, normal, flawed character that even when he's really being, frankly, a dickhead, you can't help but root for him, and it's this sort of keen, honest observation of a character that reminded me a lot of Lucky Jim, one of my favourite books and another campus novel, and that will probably stay with me the most.

Adaptation: So, yes, I saw the film first and I am pre-disposed to like it in that I adore James McAvoy, but it really is a very good, funny film. It's not as good as the book, but it does the important comedic bits very well and everyone is perfectly cast, especially impossibly pretty Alice Eve as very accurately middle-class Alice. It does fall into the kind of annoying thing of making Brian much nicer and less flawed than he is in the novel, but on the whole it manages to capture most of the fun and spirit of the original.”

maxine-faye wrote this review Tuesday, August 30, 2011. ( reply | permalink )

• Rated 4 stars

“Readability: This is a book that should, in theory, be a dangerous risk for easily distracted readers like myself, made up as it is of six interconnected, interrupted narratives. I was sucked into each story very rapidly, then spat back out again into something new without a resolution to the current section's predecessor (countless people have described the structure of the novel better than I ever could, and the matryoshka doll description is absolutely the best: Mitchell pops his stories out in ever more intricate, beautiful detail, then ties them all back up neatly at the end), but not once did I consider, even briefly, giving up on this incredible novel. Each section is unbelievably well written and incredibly readable, and despite the range of distinctive genres here Mitchell manages to capture them all uniquely, yet with his own cleverness a linking thread throughout. What he does with language is fantastic, especially in the two 'future' sections of the books, where the dialogue and colloquialisms are a brilliant mix of plausibly familiar and exotically strange. It did take me longer to read this book than usual, but I'm marking that down to laziness on my part and an overload of long, absorbing books that make it impossible to get anything boringly practical done, like eating/sleeping/being-vaguely-sociable-at-the-bare-minimum-level/working. If it wasn't for the reluctant necessity of those things, I think I would quite happily have buried myself in this book and read it cover-to-cover greedily, and it has shot right to the top of my list of books I will encourage all of my friends to read.

Impact: What struck me most about this book was how much fun it was to read - I was genuinely delighted anew on every single page, and grinned throughout. I also kept talking about it to people, more so than normal, just because I was struck by how unique and fun the whole thing was. I could just imagine Mitchell having a really good time writing it, because it seemed so playful as regards tone and genre - historical and speculative fiction all in one book! The matryoshka metaphor works here too because the whole thing was a kind of wondrous, beautiful creation; language and style and ideas pulled apart and looked at, then pulled apart to reveal something else. But, yes, there is still the fact that I have given the book four stars, not five. If it was out of ten, I would give it nine, or nine-and-a-half, which would be much fairer, but I can't quite make myself click the fiver button. I actually feel horribly guilty about it, because this isn't just a good book, it's a great book, and I'd recommend it all over the place and would definitely re-read it. However, one element of the linked narratives bothered me somewhat, namely, the similar birthmarks. The stories were connected anyway by simpler, less magical ways, and that connection felt incredibly authorial in a way that the rest of the book didn't - despite the trappings of the genre switches and the oniony layers of fictional author of one style to fictional author of the next, and so on, Mitchell had still written a book that was engrossing enough for me to forget that it was a book, which is something that is becoming increasingly important to me when I'm reading. It's mostly a matter of personal taste, but while I'm reading a book, I like to forget that it was written - I want to feel completely immersed in a world without the constant nagging knowledge that it is fictional. After I've finished, I love to find out more about the author and to dissect a particularly good novel with friends, but I'm not a great fan of being jarred out of something so good by a subtle but strong reminder that this is a construction. Some books are tailored for exactly this kind of meta-fiction purpose, but for me it seemed a little bit out of place, or at least, not as skilfully handled as Mitchell had managed to be in every other aspect. It's entirely possible that I’m missing the whole point of what he was trying to do, or that I simply don't appreciate or understand it, but it did niggle at me somewhat. That isn't to say, though, that I didn't adore this book, and it has made me go out and purchase Mitchell's other books, and I hope he'll write many, many more.”

maxine-faye wrote this review Wednesday, August 31, 2011. ( reply | permalink )

• Rated 3 stars

“Readability: Oh, the first fifty pages of this book! I loved it! I was already giving it 5 stars in advance, because I was so in love with Oskar, the main character. I mean, I was aware that he was a kind of smorgasbord of things that should irritate me - precocious, quirky, eccentric - but he was so sweet, and funny, and tormented: I just wanted to hug him. I don't care if that makes me ridiculous or soft or sentimental: he was adorable, and I wanted to completely immerse myself in his story. So, writing-wise, Foers created this really beautiful, unique, captivating voice for this kid, and if the book had just stuck with him, and his perspective, I think I could have read it forever. The problem is, it doesn't. It switches between Oskar and his grandmother and grandfather, and while their voices are unique enough too, they're much less charming after Oskar, and their quirkiness and eccentricity on top of his is just too much, it made my head hurt. I did like the experimental stuff Foers threw in, the text numbers and the pages of squashed up writing - it's fun, it's new, it's playing with the limits of writing, and I completely approve - but all I wanted, while I was reading their bits, was to get back to Oskar. That made my reading experience hugely up and down, though I would say it was worth it for those sections of Oskar.

Impact: Well, I really loved Oskar, in case it wasn't obvious, and I think he'll be one of my most fondly remembered characters for quite a while. However, the entirety of the book never quite lived up to the promise of those first few pages and the engaging charm of its central character - possibly because every single aspect of the book seemed to be competing to be as unique and crazy and edgy as possible. Every character has something about them that is exaggeratedly unusual, to the point where they seem more engineered than real, and even my tolerance - affection, even - for quirkiness was strained. It's just all too much, and the further on I read the more detached I became from it all: I became more and more aware that I was reading a book, a construct of characters designed specifically by Foers, rather than losing myself entirely in the writing so that I didn’t notice it was writing at all. Looked at separately, some of the passages are incredibly moving: despite the malaise and over-saturation fatigue I could feel setting in, the way Foers uses a character to describe his reaction to the Dresden bombings is pretty powerful, and Oskar's grief is palpable throughout. But put together, they compete for attention and feel unreal, too contrived and manufactured purely to tug at the heartstrings. I haven't read Everything is Illuminated yet, though it's definitely still on my to-read list because Foers does seem to have talent and that book seems to have more favourable reviews than this one. I still love those first fifty pages, and I adore Oskar, but if it weren't for the fact that I fell so hard for him initially (and many, many people will have caught onto the manufactured quirkiness much quicker than me), my score would be far lower than it is. Those stars are for Oskar alone.”

maxine-faye wrote this review Tuesday, March 1, 2011. ( reply | permalink )

• Rated 2 stars

“Readability: I've only read this and Atonement by Ian McEwan, so I can't say whether his style in this is constant throughout all of his books, but so far I have found him quite difficult to read. He certainly writes beautifully, clearly and accurately, but I do find myself glazing over occasionally or having to go back and re-read large sections that I've been reading but not really following, if that makes sense: I know I've picked the words up off the page but I haven't really comprehended them as a sentence. I'm quite willing to admit this is probably a flaw in my make-up rather than the writing, but I do find that my brain doesn't quite gel with his writing. McEwan does have an uncanny knack for capturing in exquisite detail commonplace feelings that I recognise having felt but have never seen put into words before, and it's quite remarkable - but in large doses, I find that it becomes almost unbearably dull. In a book focusing on one man's Saturday alone, these moments of tedium are excruciatingly extended, punctuated by moments of vague excitement in the plot - but even these moments are muted by the exacting, monotonous, detailed prose. I haven't been put off trying more of McEwan's writing yet, but I will definitely be erring towards the slimmer of his volumes on my next visit to the bookshop.

Impact: The one thing about this kind of writing that demands so much of your attention is that I still remember the book quite clearly, and don't think I'll forget it quite soon, but I do think that is mostly down to the style and the necessary re-reading while reading that I had to do rather than the content. I was most stirred by the descriptions of neurosurgery and what that entailed - and I admit, my obsession with American medical drama probably had a lot to do with that - but Perowne, the main character, wasn't interesting to me in any other ways other than that. He had no individuality of tone: his thoughts and feelings, which dominate much of the book, had no real spark or impetus to them - it felt at times like reading a dissertation rather than getting an insight into a real human being. There was none of the fractured, tangential threads that I think make up a true representation of somebody's thoughts, and that left me slightly detached from what I was reading: it seemed unrealistic despite the minutiae of detail that characterised the whole text. In fact, the whole book was overshadowed by a lingering lack of realism - the brilliance of every single one of the Perownes, for instance: a leading brain surgeon, a talented musician, not one but two award-winning poets - you get the picture. The plot, such as it is, is a succession of contrivances - which I don't whole-heartedly object to, I think almost every novel has some element of that - that lead up to a final confrontation which never seems as perilous as it could be. I don't really care what happens to these characters because they're more constructs than real people, for one thing, and then there's this moment which I won't spoil for you here, but it's ridiculous: let's just say that McEwan seems to suggest that women might be better served carrying a book of poetry as a defensive weapon rather than something useful like pepper spray. I don't know. The book leaves me fairly cold: it shows a few different opinions on the world post 9/11, and there are a couple of moments that stood out, including an amusing encounter with Tony Blair - although there is little humour elsewhere in this novel - but I hardly found it earth-shattering. Well-crafted, but I have no idea for what purpose.”

maxine-faye wrote this review Friday, February 18, 2011. ( reply | permalink )

• Rated 2 stars

“Readability: Pretty much the most readable thing ever - it's not a big book anyway, and it's made up entirely of e-mails which breaks it up into tiny little sections of text, so it's literally the easiest thing to read ever. I read it in one day - I started it on the short train ride to work, read for about half an hour on my lunch break, and was finished before I was even halfway into the train journey home. I think it's also incredibly readable if you have ever worked in an office, specifically in an office doing a job that you don't necessarily detest but find to be pretty pointless, and Llewellyn captures that feeling absolutely in Martin's e-mails.

Impact: The trouble with such a brief, skimmable style, and with the e-mails stretching out over one single - albeit very important - day, is that the actual story has to pack some kind of major emotional wallop to - not quite compensate, but to offset in some way the sparseness of language and form. I'm not convinced that Eleven does this. Martin, the protagonist, suffers from no lack of acquaintances to e-mail in his boredom, and no lack of relationship issues of varying degrees with all of them - almost too many, to the point of ridiculousness, although Llewellyn does manage to convey his feelings quite effectively using a fairly limited form. When the inevitable event that marked the date of all those e-mails does occur, though, the whole thing starts to fall apart a little - which is possibly Llewellyn's intention: my attention becomes torn between my memories of that day and the footage of it that is burned on my brain, and the way it affects Martin and the issues he is facing. The climax of Martin's day seems strangely flat yet at the same time perversely melodramatic against that backdrop, and ultimately it left me rather cold. It is interesting, and some of the reactions in other e-mails are accurately callous and detached, but, whether due to the brevity of information we get about these characters and especially Martin, I'm not sure what to make of his final decision. The novel works best as a very realistic insight into the boredom and frustration of people in jobs they don't feel rewarded by, but it is less successful in dissecting the effect of large events on people more focused on small ones.”

maxine-faye wrote this review Thursday, February 17, 2011. ( reply | permalink )

• Rated 5 stars

“Readability: I find this book eminently readable - I've read it a few times now and it's always been one of those books than can suck me in so I finish it in one sitting, or at least get very annoyed that I have to stop to eat or sleep or work or talk to people that aren't Holden Caulfield. He's an example of really unique first-person narrative and a way of speaking that strikes me as incredibly realistic - probably even more so now than it was then: that way that a lot of teenagers and young people speak, repeating the same kind of words over and over, using favoured slang phrases. I still do it now, to be honest, and I'm doing all those responsible things now that I avoided entirely at school and at university. The language might not be perfect, and it might be repetitive and littered with swearing, but it's real, no doubt about it, for better or worse. The kind of stream-of-consciousness that Salinger uses here, with all its tangents and diversions, is, in my opinion, endlessly entertaining and completely immersive, but I'm sure that while it fascinates and exhilarates me personally, it can be grating and irritating for others.

Impact: For me personally, the impact of this book was huge. I first read it when I was about fourteen and it was probably the first book that made me sit up and realise just how much someone else's writing could speak to you. I wasn't even going through a lot of existential angst, or anything, but there was something about the weird mix of antipathy and idealism that makes up Holden Caulfield's psyche that I loved, and have loved, ever since. I re-read it every so often, not quite once a year but close, and if anything it becomes more relevant as I get older and see more things, and disappointment becomes that much sharper and delight becomes that much warmer. I don't know if my opinion will change in future years - I've heard a few people say they like it less, or that it is a book best appreciated if you read it when you are young rather than looking back on that transitory period between no responsibility and responsibility - but I hope not: I hope it always reminds me of starting to love literature and identifying with an incredibly vivid character. I get that a lot of people don't like Holden, that his self-obsessed, existential, frightened angst is dislikeable, even repulsive, but even then there's something there that's important, and it's a reaction to his desperate depression even if it's one of disgust and scorn. For me, I wouldn't want to be Holden Caulfield - who would? - but that doesn't mean I love him any less. He's smart, he's scared, he's failing, and he's funny - he pretty much killed me.”

maxine-faye wrote this review Thursday, February 17, 2011. ( reply | permalink )

1 of 1 members found this review helpful.

• Rated 2 stars

“Readability: For quite a long book, clocking in at around 480 pages, this was a very quick, easy read. The writing is clear and precise, if unadventurous, and the plot and dialogue are easy to take in and understand. The way the book is sectioned out into the perspectives of eight different people, all affected in some way by the eponymous incident, made it very simple for me to read one section on the train to work, and one section on the way home, then another section with dinner, and another before bed, and so on. It's not a particularly challenging read, which with characters like this - mostly despicable with few redeeming qualities - is possibly a good thing: I'm not sure I would have been able to get all the way to the end had the writing been more experimental or creative, the type where you sometimes have to re-read each sentence in order to fully understand appreciate the impact. I love those books, when they work, I really do, but this was not one of them and for me, that worked – but only because without it, the book might well have rendered itself unreadable.

Impact: After a possibly exaggerated build-up thanks to the publicity surrounding the amount of foul language and sexual behaviour in the book, the premise - the slap and its reverberations through the group - doesn't carry as much weight as I expected it to, given the emphasis placed upon it in articles, reviews, and the book jacket itself. While initially a shocking moment with huge potential, it quickly falls flat, and fizzles out as a storyline much earlier than I expected it to. There is the hint of a possible major repercussion to another story that has gone before, but it comes to an end in a similarly unsatisfying fashion. Ultimately, I was left a little confused by what Tsiolkas was trying to say. His characters are all pretty diabolical: all of the men are misogynistic, as I had expected from the reviews and articles on the book's "controversy", and the women vacillate between passivity and shrillness, doing very little to contradict the men's belief in their roles. I wasn't particularly offended by this depiction of suburban Aussie life; the casual racism and sexism was one of the few things that actually felt authentic about the book. It was the exaggeration of these traits that confused me: there was so much graphic sexual description and an almost comical amount of infidelity - and described in very flat, dull prose - that I barely had any reaction at all to each new crude imagining of whatever character I was reading about (save the occasional incredulous eye-roll of not again!). I then wondered if perhaps the point was to demonstrate the mundanity of all these characters, that their self-serving, harmful actions are all intrinsic to human nature, which is bleak but is at least some kind of statement. However, that sits uneasy next to the (unintentionally, I think) hilarious dialogue, which is at times ridiculously clichéd and sounds like the script for a bad soap opera - which, incidentally, one of the characters writes for! So, to cut a long waffle short, I don't know what I felt about the message of the book, if you like, but thanks to the simple, easy-to-read-quickly style (which wasn't really enough, given the scarcity of plot and interesting, realistic, varied characters), I'm not exactly doubled over in agony at the thought of a few hours wasted on reading it. That said, I'm not jumping for joy, either.”

maxine-faye wrote this review Wednesday, February 9, 2011. ( reply | permalink )

• Rated 4 stars

“Readability: For the first 100+ pages, this is a long, hard, slog of a book. The writing is rich and clear, and the descriptions, particularly of Mexico, are colourful and vivid, but there's nothing in the writing or the initial subject matter that did very much to suck me in, to entice me to read further. I only did so because I hate abandoning books and because, after loving Kingsolver's The Poisonwood Bible so much, I wanted this to get better. Luckily, it did: once Shepherd, the narrator, becomes an assistant cook in Diego Rivera's household, the novels springs to life. Shepherd, previously something of a staid, unknown quality, reveals more of himself and shows a dry wit that appealed to me very much. Kingsolver makes Kahlo into an unpredictable, vibrant, sharp-tongued personality who I want to know more about, although she is less successful in giving Rivera and Trotsky as much depth - Rivera gets very short shrift while Trotsky comes across as little more than a kindly uncle. The drama in this middle section is genuinely captivating, and it was at this point I became engrossed to the point of avoiding reading on the train so that I didn't risk missing my stop. Once the inevitable occurs, however, the novel's pace slows once more, and it becomes something of a slog once more, although with the benefit of knowing Shepherd better and caring about his future more, it is nowhere near the heavy page level of those first 100 pages. It is a book that requires time and dedication, though I would argue that the rewards are worth the effort.

Impact: I went into this book knowing very little about the Mexican Revolution and artist like Kahlo and Rivera - thanks to GCSE history I was slightly less embarrassingly in the dark about Russian history and Trotsky - and from that point of view, I learnt an awful lot and have a new appreciation for surrealist art. Emotionally, The Lacuna did not resonate with me in quite the same way as The Poisonwood Bible did: it is simply not as powerful a novel as that. I also felt as though the many situations that Shepherd finds himself in, as well as the many people he meets, all from real history, felt somewhat contrived as the close of the novel drew near and they all came together to result in what is, essentially, his downfall. That slightly lessened the impact of the novel for me, although I was struck by the damning judgement the book carried on the power of the press and the habit of the mass public to believe something they are told often enough. That judgement left me with a sour taste for quite some time, and was a powerful and valuable message. However, after such a long read, especially one that tapered to an end after an exciting middle, it was a message that lost some of its power by the time I came to the end.”

maxine-faye wrote this review Wednesday, February 2, 2011. ( reply | permalink )

• Rated 1 stars

“Readability: Off the charts easy to read; I finished this in a spare hour while my father watched yet another repeat of Poirot. This isn't necessarily a good thing, though - this book is about the Holocaust, one of the most horrendous events ever to occur in our history, and a throwaway hour in front of the fire seems ... empty, unsatisfying, possibly even disrespectful. The very word 'Auschwitz' makes me shiver, feel a little nauseous, darkens everything around me, but this book evoked none of that feeling: it was quick and easy, and those are the two things I feel Holocaust fiction should not be. However, if I was to step off my soapbox for just a second or two, I suppose I would admit that the clear, precise language (I'm reading the English translation from the Catalan, so I'm not judging the original work at all, which perhaps is much more powerful linguistically than the translation) is quite refreshing, and allows the story space to breathe rather than clogging it up with any heavy over-description or artistic flourishes.

Impact: The problem is, though, that there isn't really enough story, or at least any real emotional impact to the story, that would make it strong enough to survive without some interesting language. The premise for the book is full of potential: a Jewish luthier imprisoned in Auchwitz III - Monowitz, the labour camp, is ordered by a mercurial, brutal Kommandant to make him a violin, or else he will be handed over to the camp Doctor. I'm aware of the debate on how the Holocaust has become a minefield of emotion and story for writers, but my view as it stands is that while there is a huge amount of Holocaust fiction out there that is added to every day, it is a subject that when it is handled well, can be extremely, shockingly powerful. It is also one of those subjects that while the literary world may feel a little saturated by the sheer amount of writing it produces, it is an historical event which should never be forgotten, which is hugely important to our psyche, and a wealth of writing - both the good and the bad - is an inevitable side-effect of that. This book, however, fails to rise to the levels of the really good, affecting fiction relating to the topic. The premise may be good, but in the execution there is no sense of urgency or danger; I never felt involved in the story or in Daniel's situation. The whole thing feels flat, from his character and the ultimatum he is presented with to the description of the camp and its horrors. The only moments that stirred some genuine interest and emotion in me were the real copies of documents rescued from Auschwitz which Anglada has framed each of her chapters with, and the descriptions of how the violin is made. The former are affecting because they are real, and need no description to convey the horror behind their existence, and the latter seem to spring Daniel's character to life; his passion for his craft is visceral and exciting whereas in the rest of the book, his feelings are vaguely drawn or feel skipped over by Anglada. Aside from these brief interludes, however, The Auschwitz Violin was a huge disappointment for me - although at least it is a short enough book that I didn't regret spending time with it too much.”

maxine-faye wrote this review Friday, February 4, 2011. ( reply | permalink )