Reviews tagging 'Terminal illness'

The Flame Alphabet by Ben Marcus

1 review

sapphicpenguin's review

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dark slow-paced
  • Loveable characters? No
This is a strange book. I can't say I enjoyed it, but I was swept up in it. Not an easy or fun read. Here are some thoughts:
  • The blurb is very misleading. It's not really about those things, although I don't know if I could write a better one. I would call it magical realism, first of all--I know it's sometimes a fine line, but this isn't sci fi to me (It tried to be, sometimes, and those were the least interesting moments). This isn't a thriller, it's just a sad story about a broken man who can't fix the world.
  • This book is written beautifully. It's very quotable, very highlight-able, very able to be taken out of context and enjoyed poetically. This almost saves it.
  • If the author were not Jewish, I would be very uncomfortable. Religion is not mentioned in the summary, but it is one of the main themes--not in a normal way, though. It's hard to explain. It isn't about religion, but religion is inherent in almost every plot point (until it kind of gets abandoned). It's a very strange choice, to make a story in which the in-world antisemitic conspiracy theories are true (What if Jews really are secretive people that creep around the woods and listen to secret broadcasts from fake leaders promoting distrust in authorities? What then? Well, I don't know what then, you tell me, book. You did that.). These characters seem to belong to a form of Judaism the author just made up. Most of the time, the author could have easily just created a fake religion and nothing would be different. There are some phrases that I couldn't quite take seriously--"Jew hole" is said way too many times, and "Hebrew balloon shrapnel" threw me for a loop. I have to admit, though, the few times where the Judaism actually does matter, and real Jewish myth/experience is referenced, it's beautiful. Again, the language almost saves it.
  • I only really liked the last 30 pages. I was very intrigued and excited at the beginning, but soon grew frustrated. The middle was almost incomprehensible, and I genuinely didn't care about the plot.
  • Minor spoiler, but there was no climax or conclusion, no solution to the main problem. There is a world falling apart and a character giving up. I quite liked the part where he gave up, but then I was completely uninterested in the main conflict and didn't care if it was resolved.
  • I don't relate to the main character. I don't think he's a good or interesting person. I understand this book has to be largely internal dialogue (it's kind of a plot point that people can't communicate), but I didn't understand him until the very end, and I still didn't like him. I honestly didn't care what happened to him. Sorry. Although religion is present in his life, he doesn't really believe anything, as far as I can tell. I don't know his values, besides a generic want to be with his family--although I don't know what he loves about them, or how he connects with them, just that they're important.
    He cheats on his wife matter-of-factly, with no prior thought process, and no guilt afterward, and then it doesn't come up again.
    The whole book is inner monologue, and I still don't feel like I could tell you anything about the main character.
  • Because of the (necessary) lack of communication between characters, the only person you really learn about is the narrator. I cared way more about the daughter than him, but I only had his assumptions about her. Perhaps this was a purposeful torture, to make me feel what he was feeling. Not really an unreliable narrator book per se, but it's fun to think about all the ways his annoying-man-ness definitely got his wife and daughter completely wrong. Anyway, there are zero sympathetic characters. None of them are good people. (This isn't an inherently negative thing, and could be done interestingly, but it was just kind of sad here.)
  • This book should have been a short story. There's so much I want to know, and so many gaps that I want to be filled in, but ultimately I think that's only because I'm given too much information, if that makes sense. If this were thirty or forty pages, left mysterious and present, I would be content.
  • I assume there's an allegory here. I don't care for it.
  • This is not a bad book, but I don't get it. That's really all.
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