Olga Tokarcquk’s Flights won the Booker and the National Book Award and so I figured it had to be good. And it is? No, it is. But it’s strange. In form, mostly. It’s written as a series of fragmented chapters – some no more than a paragraph, others stretching for 20 or 30 pages – all circling one another thematically, but not necessarily, or usually, by plot or character. It’s an exercise in immersion and floating, I’d say, to let go of the usual anchors of the novel and to suspend yourself in something like a mass collection of postcards that you’ve been tasked with assembling into a cogent archive. Continue reading
Category Archives: Prize Winner
Trust Exercise: Weird, but/and ultimately boring
Susan Choi’s Trust Exercise is formally fun in that it plays around with narration and point of view, with authorial perspective, with time in ways that are surprising, and so, sort-of engaging. The trouble is, the plot and character aren’t compelling enough to stand behind the formal play, and so this reader was left debating whether it was worth marching on through another teenage dramatic scene (literally – the protagonists are teenagers in a drama program at a fancy arts high school; and figuratively – they are also in love and thwarted by pride and ego) in order to get to the next quirky formal element.
I decided two thirds of the way in that, no, it was not. So I can’t tell you if it has a sudden turnaround where all the hours of hand wringing longing for the lost lover is satisfied. I can tell you that there are some strange sex scenes (if that’s your thing), and uncomfortable moments of power imbalance between adults and children, and a pretty good adult recollection of how painful feeling are when you’re a teenager (which, being an adult recalling this period, I must say I am poorly equipped to comment on whether this is an accurate picture of how proper teenagers feel). So I don’t know, if your thing is weird formal elements and a kind of engaging, but not really, romance/gender plot, then… have at it.
Filed under Book I'll Forget I Read, Fiction, Prize Winner
Behind the Beautiful Forevers: Non-fiction? What?
So I haven’t read a non-fiction, non-parenting book in years. Actual years. (Which makes me feel a little sheepish for the grief I give people who don’t read a single novel in a year, or the scorn I (privately?) feel for those who shrug novels off as ‘just made up’. Not sheepish enough to change my view, obviously, as these non-novel people are clearly Bad). But I kept seeing Katherine Boo’s Behind the Beautiful Forevers: Life, Death and Hope in a Mumbai Undercity on best-of lists, and, more promisingly, described as ‘novelistic.’ So off I went and read it. Continue reading
Filed under Bestseller, New York Times Notable, Non-fiction, Prize Winner
Literary Vice 