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3.85 AVERAGE
3.85 AVERAGE
It definitely took awhile to get used to the prose, and even longer to get to the major plot points. However, you are rewarded once get past the first couple hundred pages.
adventurous
mysterious
medium-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
Plot
Strong character development:
Complicated
Loveable characters:
Yes
Diverse cast of characters:
Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus:
No
I was sad to be done! Not to say I thought this was the perfect book, but I really enjoyed it, AND recommended it to my dad, who's picky. I thought the way it was constructed was pretty ingenious, and loved how everything really came together. Not meeting the actual main characters for the first third of the book is a pretty interesting way to proceed, and finding out what actually occurred before finding out anything about why or how is a pretty interesting mode of storytelling. The problem, though, with reading such a unique book is of course that there won't be another one like this for me to read, and I'm not sure if this one will lend itself to a second read-through, as the way the plot unfolds to an unsuspecting reader is one of the best parts, like being a part of the story. All in all, pretty highly recommended.
adventurous
mysterious
slow-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
Plot
Strong character development:
Yes
Loveable characters:
Complicated
Diverse cast of characters:
Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus:
Yes
Content Warnings
Graphic: Addiction, Drug abuse, Drug use, Racial slurs, Racism, Violence
Moderate: Gun violence, Infidelity, Physical abuse, Toxic relationship, Suicide attempt, Pregnancy
A circuitous, yet rigid structure make this book novel, unconventional, and absolutely riveting. It helps that the prose absolutely stunning. In a nested, Russian Doll type structure (because I just finished watching that show), we get the setup for the book in the longest section of it: the beginning.
Every chapter in the start is from a different person giving details they know about the murder and circumstances only they are privy to, and believe to be true. Then each part jumps around in time and slowly reveals details, sometimes doubling back to help the reader out. Because it’s so intricate this is really needed too. When the first part summary was given by a character (seamlessly) I was thanking the lord.
What I loved about this is the adherence to the structure, which must have been very difficult to write. In addition to the word/page count restrictions, every character is mapped out astrologically from birth chart and then the astrology pertinent to the location, time, and year are factored into the character design and plot. Which means they trade characteristics as they “bump” into one another; influence each other in ways they’re often unaware of. And it means, if you pay attention and know astrology, you’re clued in on a meta level what will happen, as every chapter has a brief summary and the relevant astrological information, and the reference for each character is in the preface glossary for their own information.
Genius in of itself to be transparent with regards to astrology to the plotting of a book and the creation of characters. Readers usually want to not see the seams or the buttressing and the fiction, or the lies, to be as believable or “realistic” as possible. Yet this eschews that completely. We know the writing of this is structured and designed and practiced. Some reviewers, and people in general I know, don’t like the idea of “fate” because it means there is no free will. But that is simplistic and wrong, because fate IS a man made construction, should it exist.
The predestination occurs because we make those decisions. It doesn’t mean we don’t have a choice, it follows our act and the larger pattern emerges. This actually shows, if anything, that within the fiction characters can _break_ their fate. The exchange of qualities and attributes charts a new path. The importance is in people finding one another and breaking all manner of chains; seen or unseen, forged by man or otherwise.
Needless to say, conventional readers will hate this with a passion, I think. It is not particularly concerned with conveying an empirical truth to the reader regarding what happens. You can get the truth of some events, from a certain point of view. Others you have to infer. Still others, you must take on blind faith. Or, at least, take the blind faith of a character as true, because it is why they do The Thing that they do. Intrinsic to their own motivations and actions is the same faith the readers put in a construction like this novel. Like always, when form meets function I glow with joy for the thing, as I do this. And unconventional too. So much to admire about this.
For those that say it’s not concerned with character, I laugh! The only thing that matters in this entire book is the characters. They do exchange qualities and, in the end, it is only about souls that come together.
Every chapter in the start is from a different person giving details they know about the murder and circumstances only they are privy to, and believe to be true. Then each part jumps around in time and slowly reveals details, sometimes doubling back to help the reader out. Because it’s so intricate this is really needed too. When the first part summary was given by a character (seamlessly) I was thanking the lord.
What I loved about this is the adherence to the structure, which must have been very difficult to write. In addition to the word/page count restrictions, every character is mapped out astrologically from birth chart and then the astrology pertinent to the location, time, and year are factored into the character design and plot. Which means they trade characteristics as they “bump” into one another; influence each other in ways they’re often unaware of. And it means, if you pay attention and know astrology, you’re clued in on a meta level what will happen, as every chapter has a brief summary and the relevant astrological information, and the reference for each character is in the preface glossary for their own information.
Genius in of itself to be transparent with regards to astrology to the plotting of a book and the creation of characters. Readers usually want to not see the seams or the buttressing and the fiction, or the lies, to be as believable or “realistic” as possible. Yet this eschews that completely. We know the writing of this is structured and designed and practiced. Some reviewers, and people in general I know, don’t like the idea of “fate” because it means there is no free will. But that is simplistic and wrong, because fate IS a man made construction, should it exist.
The predestination occurs because we make those decisions. It doesn’t mean we don’t have a choice, it follows our act and the larger pattern emerges. This actually shows, if anything, that within the fiction characters can _break_ their fate. The exchange of qualities and attributes charts a new path. The importance is in people finding one another and breaking all manner of chains; seen or unseen, forged by man or otherwise.
Needless to say, conventional readers will hate this with a passion, I think. It is not particularly concerned with conveying an empirical truth to the reader regarding what happens. You can get the truth of some events, from a certain point of view. Others you have to infer. Still others, you must take on blind faith. Or, at least, take the blind faith of a character as true, because it is why they do The Thing that they do. Intrinsic to their own motivations and actions is the same faith the readers put in a construction like this novel. Like always, when form meets function I glow with joy for the thing, as I do this. And unconventional too. So much to admire about this.
For those that say it’s not concerned with character, I laugh! The only thing that matters in this entire book is the characters. They do exchange qualities and, in the end, it is only about souls that come together.
adventurous
challenging
mysterious
medium-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
A mix
Strong character development:
Yes
Loveable characters:
Complicated
Diverse cast of characters:
Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus:
Complicated
A book of crime, greed, drugs, love and vengeance during the New Zealand goldrush of the late 19th century told in the style of that time, really it's parodying that style to often delightful ends, and it's that style, along with beautifully writing and a strong sense of place that makes this book something special. Oh, and if you really know your astrology, wow is this the book for you!
“For although a man is judged by his actions, by what he has said and done, a man judges himself by what he is willing to do, by what he might have said, or might have done—a judgment that is necessarily hampered, not only by the scope and limits of his imagination, but by the ever-changing measure of his doubt and self-esteem.”
It is quotes like the above that elevates what otherwise is a western style soap opera (though uniquely New Zealand in ways). The digressions and thoughtful character details lend an undercurrent of something deeper, something more modern. While the surface-level plot weaves webs so twisted it is no wonder that it entraps so many characters. The pages actually fly by for such a large tome and the structure of the book does something really interesting, it is a heavily designed piece of literature that slowly builds and by degrees picks up speed by making the chapters/sections get progressively shorter. I greatly appreciate the intelligent design at work here - on that level it is exceedingly interesting.
“His manner showed a curious mixture of longing and enthusiasm, which is to say that his enthusiasms were always of a wistful sort, and his longings, always enthusiastic. He was delighted by things of an improbable or impractical nature, which he sought out with the open-hearted gladness of a child at play. When he spoke, he did so originally, and with an idealistic agony that was enough to make all but the most rigid of his critics smile; when he was silent, one had the sense, watching him, that his imagination was nevertheless usefully occupied, for he often sighed, or nodded, as though in agreement with an interlocutor whom no one else could see.”
What I didn't love - by design it leans heavily on tropes of the 19th century novel in ways that for me, while entertaining much of the time, grew a little tiresome. The reliance on so much coincidence was essential to the plot and on the parody she was working on, but it still took me out of the story at times. I guess in the end this is one of those tricky books to rate and review, because it such an admirable work and I really did enjoy the complexities of it, along with the richness of the writing itself but I don't think I fully gave myself over to LOVING the reading experience. It's a great work of fiction that I am glad to of read, but I am sure that I missed or underappreciated some of the brilliance of the matryoshka doll-esque structure, at least in part because I just don't care about astrology, and because of my disinterest I didn't give that element a whole lot of thought, but it's clearly very much part of the design, sooo... yeah, parts of this absolutely went over my head. What is nice though, is that it's many layers allows different readers to be able to read it at different levels, it's good enough to stand as just a good bit of historical mystery plotting even if you aren't going to commit to a close reading, but I imagine those who really take their time with this will get infinitely more out of it.
With that - may you always find your reading self in the rising good fortune of the fifth house, and/or in the aspect of the trine, or ... something - I really don't know... astrological good fortune to you and all that.
This definitely took me a while to get into it because the style of writing is very unusual. But once I got into it, I found myself growing more and more curious what on earth was going on... there was a real mystery and it was very complex.
How on earth this woman wrote this book I will never know. I do know she must be incredibly organized and detail oriented because ... wow. There is so much detail and it goes backwards and forwards in time and somehow she always keeps hold of her facts and things totally make sense in the end. It ALL fits together. And I'm not talking like this book is a 50 piece puzzle... this is one of those monster puzzles where they take a couple of 20000 piece puzzles out of the box and mix them together and don't let you look at the box to put it together of complexity kind of puzzle, puzzle. And still... it all fits together. Every nice little piece in place. I am glad I finished it just because I can sit here astonished at her feat of writing, honestly. The story was interesting, and the way it was told was very unusual but I feel like after reading that book I just watched an author who was performing for the Cirque du Soleil without the net. It was pretty impressive.
Definitely recommend it if you like historical novels, mysteries and unusual books that challenge you a bit. This is NOT an easy, sit back and take a bath mystery novel. It does require you to pay a bit of attention and follow the rather roaming narrative. You do get rewarded for this though...
How on earth this woman wrote this book I will never know. I do know she must be incredibly organized and detail oriented because ... wow. There is so much detail and it goes backwards and forwards in time and somehow she always keeps hold of her facts and things totally make sense in the end. It ALL fits together. And I'm not talking like this book is a 50 piece puzzle... this is one of those monster puzzles where they take a couple of 20000 piece puzzles out of the box and mix them together and don't let you look at the box to put it together of complexity kind of puzzle, puzzle. And still... it all fits together. Every nice little piece in place. I am glad I finished it just because I can sit here astonished at her feat of writing, honestly. The story was interesting, and the way it was told was very unusual but I feel like after reading that book I just watched an author who was performing for the Cirque du Soleil without the net. It was pretty impressive.
Definitely recommend it if you like historical novels, mysteries and unusual books that challenge you a bit. This is NOT an easy, sit back and take a bath mystery novel. It does require you to pay a bit of attention and follow the rather roaming narrative. You do get rewarded for this though...
adventurous
informative
mysterious
medium-paced
I'm not one to quit a book once I've started it. But I have to admit, I was a little tempted with this one.
Don't get me wrong - it's a good book. It's beautifully written, clever, with a diverse cast of well-realized characters. One of the most impressive things to me was in fact how well it handled its characters - often in a story with an ensemble cast as large as this one, it becomes very difficult for me to keep track of who is who and what they're doing. Yet in this story, whose telling is spread between some twenty points of view, I never had an issue with understanding who was talking and what they were contributing to the story. That clarity, in itself, is a major feat for a book of this size and ambition. The cast is even reasonably diverse for the setting, that is, 1800s gold rush in New Zealand. While most of the cast is white men, there are two women who are major players in the story, a Maori man, and two Chinese men as well, all of whom are presented as carefully, with detailed backstories and rich inner lives, as the rest of the cast.
The story told is full of intrigue and mystery. It begins with a young man named Walter Moody arriving to Hokitika, a gold rush town on New Zealand's west coast. He checks into a hotel and inadvertently interrupts, then acts as witness to, a council of twelve men who are implicated in a dead man's mysterious fortune of undeclared gold. Moody listens as the men tell their disparate tales and attempt to understand the origins of this fortune, who it belonged to, who has the right to claim it now, and how it will affect their own lives and ambitions. Woven into these narratives are family dramas, a mysterious widow, an ill-used whore, a missing miner, blackmail, betrayal, and revenge.
The zodiac plays a not insignificant role in the story, with each character being aligned with an astrological sign or planet, and each chapter beginning with a snapshot of the starchart of the characters involved. I'll admit, I payed little attention to this aspect of the book, but the fact that you can use the starcharts to predict the actions of the characters, and that the book's structure is apparently based on lunar phases, indicates a clever attention to detail that is nonetheless impressive.
Yet despite the cleverness of its construction, the intrigue of the plot, the diversity of the cast, and the lushness of its prose, I cannot really say I enjoyed The Luminaries. It felt at times overwrought, and some of its intricacies seemed to me too implausible to be taken seriously. Character motivations were sometimes unclear in a way that detracted from the experience, leaving me confused and annoyed. I also questioned the structure of the book, with the main resolution happening long before the book itself was concluded, leaving me wondering why I was still reading.
I say these things not to discourage anyone from reading The Luminaries, but merely to share my experience in reading it, which while not altogether favorable, must still acknowledge all that the book does well. It's no surprise to me that the author won the Booker Prize for this novel - it is, in its way, visionary, and certainly a triumph for the author. It just wasn't for me.
Don't get me wrong - it's a good book. It's beautifully written, clever, with a diverse cast of well-realized characters. One of the most impressive things to me was in fact how well it handled its characters - often in a story with an ensemble cast as large as this one, it becomes very difficult for me to keep track of who is who and what they're doing. Yet in this story, whose telling is spread between some twenty points of view, I never had an issue with understanding who was talking and what they were contributing to the story. That clarity, in itself, is a major feat for a book of this size and ambition. The cast is even reasonably diverse for the setting, that is, 1800s gold rush in New Zealand. While most of the cast is white men, there are two women who are major players in the story, a Maori man, and two Chinese men as well, all of whom are presented as carefully, with detailed backstories and rich inner lives, as the rest of the cast.
The story told is full of intrigue and mystery. It begins with a young man named Walter Moody arriving to Hokitika, a gold rush town on New Zealand's west coast. He checks into a hotel and inadvertently interrupts, then acts as witness to, a council of twelve men who are implicated in a dead man's mysterious fortune of undeclared gold. Moody listens as the men tell their disparate tales and attempt to understand the origins of this fortune, who it belonged to, who has the right to claim it now, and how it will affect their own lives and ambitions. Woven into these narratives are family dramas, a mysterious widow, an ill-used whore, a missing miner, blackmail, betrayal, and revenge.
The zodiac plays a not insignificant role in the story, with each character being aligned with an astrological sign or planet, and each chapter beginning with a snapshot of the starchart of the characters involved. I'll admit, I payed little attention to this aspect of the book, but the fact that you can use the starcharts to predict the actions of the characters, and that the book's structure is apparently based on lunar phases, indicates a clever attention to detail that is nonetheless impressive.
Yet despite the cleverness of its construction, the intrigue of the plot, the diversity of the cast, and the lushness of its prose, I cannot really say I enjoyed The Luminaries. It felt at times overwrought, and some of its intricacies seemed to me too implausible to be taken seriously. Character motivations were sometimes unclear in a way that detracted from the experience, leaving me confused and annoyed. I also questioned the structure of the book, with the main resolution happening long before the book itself was concluded, leaving me wondering why I was still reading.
I say these things not to discourage anyone from reading The Luminaries, but merely to share my experience in reading it, which while not altogether favorable, must still acknowledge all that the book does well. It's no surprise to me that the author won the Booker Prize for this novel - it is, in its way, visionary, and certainly a triumph for the author. It just wasn't for me.
mysterious
slow-paced
Diverse cast of characters:
Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus:
No
...an age of mirrors, tenacity, instinct, township, and hidden things.
I wasn’t too sure what to expect when I finally picked up this weighty tome. It had resided on my shelf for nearly four years, waiting patiently, and I for one am very pleased that I have finally given it my full attention.
You’ve probably heard of the ornate structure Catton crafted for her tale, juggling with astrology, dividing the book into twelve parts, each half of the previous one in length and made of decreasing number of chapters, from 12 to 1, to mirror the waning of the Moon, as well as the Golden Ratio (the Greek letter φ phi is used as a paragraph break throughout the novel). Each section is fronted by a star chart, tracing how the astral bodies converged in the skies over New Zealand, and used to stage the action over one year, the author anthropomorphising these Zodiac signs and planets into the main cast. You don’t need to be proficient in this topic to enjoy the book (I didn’t know a thing), far from it, but if you do, you’ll get another layer of understanding out of it and indeed hints on what is happening. Ultimately, does this convoluted structure work? Totally, but that is not the only reason. Had there been no substance, then the book wouldn’t have ‘worked’!
Putting the construction to the side, what remains? A hell of a story! Catton has penned one brilliant mystery that keeps shifting, juggling with our perceptions, turning everything upside down. Yes, you do have to pay attention, especially during the huge first part where characters and events are thrown at us from every side, but if you like to put all the pieces of a puzzle slowly together, keeping tabs of what is said and seen, then you’ll love this!
It is also more than just a conundrum to solve: you get a historical tale of the New Zealand of the middle 19th century with its many injustices. This is reflected in Catton’s writing style, recalling Dickens and Collins, with a rich language. Again, this may displease some readers, but once you become used to it, this is actually really easy to read and very compelling.
I must admit I loved all aspects of this book, both in its content and presentation, especially its predilection for circularity, and I don’t just mean the charts and turn of the planet Earth over one year. No, Catton has used this aspect everywhere (the more you look for it, the more you’ll find it), i.e. True feeling is always circular - either circular, or paradoxical - simply because its cause and its expression are two halves of the very same thing!, and all revelations are offered through circles and arcs, never straight lines!
I wasn’t too sure what to expect when I finally picked up this weighty tome. It had resided on my shelf for nearly four years, waiting patiently, and I for one am very pleased that I have finally given it my full attention.
You’ve probably heard of the ornate structure Catton crafted for her tale, juggling with astrology, dividing the book into twelve parts, each half of the previous one in length and made of decreasing number of chapters, from 12 to 1, to mirror the waning of the Moon, as well as the Golden Ratio (the Greek letter φ phi is used as a paragraph break throughout the novel). Each section is fronted by a star chart, tracing how the astral bodies converged in the skies over New Zealand, and used to stage the action over one year, the author anthropomorphising these Zodiac signs and planets into the main cast. You don’t need to be proficient in this topic to enjoy the book (I didn’t know a thing), far from it, but if you do, you’ll get another layer of understanding out of it and indeed hints on what is happening. Ultimately, does this convoluted structure work? Totally, but that is not the only reason. Had there been no substance, then the book wouldn’t have ‘worked’!
Putting the construction to the side, what remains? A hell of a story! Catton has penned one brilliant mystery that keeps shifting, juggling with our perceptions, turning everything upside down. Yes, you do have to pay attention, especially during the huge first part where characters and events are thrown at us from every side, but if you like to put all the pieces of a puzzle slowly together, keeping tabs of what is said and seen, then you’ll love this!
It is also more than just a conundrum to solve: you get a historical tale of the New Zealand of the middle 19th century with its many injustices. This is reflected in Catton’s writing style, recalling Dickens and Collins, with a rich language. Again, this may displease some readers, but once you become used to it, this is actually really easy to read and very compelling.
I must admit I loved all aspects of this book, both in its content and presentation, especially its predilection for circularity, and I don’t just mean the charts and turn of the planet Earth over one year. No, Catton has used this aspect everywhere (the more you look for it, the more you’ll find it), i.e. True feeling is always circular - either circular, or paradoxical - simply because its cause and its expression are two halves of the very same thing!, and all revelations are offered through circles and arcs, never straight lines!