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yurwity's review against another edition
2.0
Overall, I'd characterize my feeling toward this novel as "disconnected." Some of the characters, like Martin, I felt like I knew and understood well. Others blurred in and out of each other (Jerome and Charles, for much of the story) or weren't mentioned often enough for me to keep straight (Martin's siblings). They were a bunch of floating names. It would've helped me to have had a family tree or list of characters somewhere, especially for a story like this, focused on the family's life. During many chapters, I was not sure who was speaking (or why there was suddenly an "I" at all) until late into the chapter, and for others I'm still not sure who was narrating; there is no good reason for that.
Characters weren't the only thing that were all over the map for me. Stronger chronology would've helped me spend less time going, "Wait, what? Where am I?" I don't know that it even had to be told in chronological order (which it wasn't...), it just needed to be more clearly marked what was happening when. Partly I believe the author's intention with the "slipperiness" of time throughout the story and with the descriptions of photos was to demonstrate...moments. The way we are drawn back to memories and they replay over and over until they swallow us, until they morph and distort. The way the right (or wrong) kind of moments can expand into infinity even though they may last only an instant in real time. But in many, many scenes it was hard for me to tell where memory stopped and started and where the "now" of the scene was. I kept being startled by people walking into a scene, realizing that was happening in the speaker's memory at a different time.
On top of that, I found the pacing for the entire novel was too slow for my tastes. For example, did we really need to watch CJC build his father's coffin step-by-step? Couldn't that have been summarized? I realize that partly it's because this story was written during and about earlier days, but for me it added to the distance I felt to the novel as a whole. I mean, the entire last third of the story was one giant, lugubrious, never-ending funeral. Worse, for the grandfather especially, I didn't get information about their bonds to other characters until after they had died, which left me very indifferent to it all as a reader. I felt no loss, only the uncomfortable sensation of projecting my own remembered grief from my real life onto these characters. For Alpha's death...we were told she was going to die before she died! Total foreshadowing failure. It killed the element of shock and surprise when she finally did die and, again, made the entire thing drag on forever.
All that said, there were certain moments I enjoyed and identified with, along with some lovely bits of writing. I liked Jerome and Martin, and I related to Alpha. And Father what's-his-name (long and barely pronounceable.) I stuck through it for a reason. Partly I think what I disliked in this book were the parts that mirrored painful parts of my own life, and I guess that's a job well done.
Ultimately, I don't regret reading it. I feel like my mother might enjoy reading it, so I'll send it her way. However, I don't expect to reread it anytime soon.
Characters weren't the only thing that were all over the map for me. Stronger chronology would've helped me spend less time going, "Wait, what? Where am I?" I don't know that it even had to be told in chronological order (which it wasn't...), it just needed to be more clearly marked what was happening when. Partly I believe the author's intention with the "slipperiness" of time throughout the story and with the descriptions of photos was to demonstrate...moments. The way we are drawn back to memories and they replay over and over until they swallow us, until they morph and distort. The way the right (or wrong) kind of moments can expand into infinity even though they may last only an instant in real time. But in many, many scenes it was hard for me to tell where memory stopped and started and where the "now" of the scene was. I kept being startled by people walking into a scene, realizing that was happening in the speaker's memory at a different time.
On top of that, I found the pacing for the entire novel was too slow for my tastes. For example, did we really need to watch CJC build his father's coffin step-by-step? Couldn't that have been summarized? I realize that partly it's because this story was written during and about earlier days, but for me it added to the distance I felt to the novel as a whole. I mean, the entire last third of the story was one giant, lugubrious, never-ending funeral. Worse, for the grandfather especially, I didn't get information about their bonds to other characters until after they had died, which left me very indifferent to it all as a reader. I felt no loss, only the uncomfortable sensation of projecting my own remembered grief from my real life onto these characters. For Alpha's death...we were told she was going to die before she died! Total foreshadowing failure. It killed the element of shock and surprise when she finally did die and, again, made the entire thing drag on forever.
All that said, there were certain moments I enjoyed and identified with, along with some lovely bits of writing. I liked Jerome and Martin, and I related to Alpha. And Father what's-his-name (long and barely pronounceable.) I stuck through it for a reason. Partly I think what I disliked in this book were the parts that mirrored painful parts of my own life, and I guess that's a job well done.
Ultimately, I don't regret reading it. I feel like my mother might enjoy reading it, so I'll send it her way. However, I don't expect to reread it anytime soon.
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