People on Goodreads really like V.E. Schwab’s The Invisible Life of Addie Le Rue and so do all the readers that kept it on the bestseller list for ages. I do not. Heretic!
Sure it has some of the vibes of The Time Travellers Wife (which against my better judgement I loved) and a little bit of The Shadow of the Wind in that the devil features alongside used bookshops, but despite these cousins in delightful bath reads, this one is a dud.
Following Addie Le Rue after she makes an ill-advised deal with the devil for “freedom” but finds herself cursed to live forever without ever being remembered by anyone (making it impossible to do all sorts of practical things like earn money or have an apartment or write things down – all these petty annoyances catalogued over hundreds of dull pages), the novel is something of a romance when Addie meets the also-cursed Henry and falls in love (Henry’s curse is for anyone who meets him to fall in love with him – which doesn’t sound so bad if you ask me). Then we have to spend several hundred pages attentive to whether Addie will find a way to convince the devil who BY THE WAY has become her lover over the past three hundred years (which doesn’t seem nearly long enough for the eternal being of the dark, but quibbles) to let Henry go.
No, the most annoying part? Like all these sorts of epics – let’s call The Hundred Year Old Man syndrome – Addie finds herself in altogether too many improbable historically significant moments and meeting altogether too many historically significant people. I mean she’s only three hundred years old. There aren’t that many wars and revolutions and discoveries and Moments in 300 years and yet she finds herself in the middle of all of them. Literally hanging out at the cafes with Voltaire and then watching Franz Ferdinand get shot – though strangely quiet all through the Depression.
I know this is not a book premised on being believable, and surely there has to be a way to keep a reader engaged through 300 borning years of history that are otherwise just her waiting for her annual date with the devil and for her eventual meeting with Henry. But – stick with me – let me suggest then that this would be much better rewritten as a short story, or maybe a 200 page novel with a couple of choice historical scenes. As it is… bloated and boring.
And this reader wanted to like it for its faintly feminist whisper at the outset of a 17th century woman not wanting to marry and have children. But the of course, we couldn’t have this be a Good Romance without having her give it all up three hundred years later for a man – with bewitching green eyes and rumpled bedsheets. GROSS. (not that I have anything against green eyes, per se, but you get what I mean).
Oh – final point of complaint. It is the kind of writing that finds the only way to describe something is to describe it with three adjectives – always. Like the air is always moist, dank and dreary. And Henry is always charming, witty and kind. Enough!
Literary Vice 