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3.26 AVERAGE
3.26 AVERAGE
Excellent - made me want to re-read The Great Gatsby.
I just didn't feel that drawn in by this book. I know nothing about cricket, so maybe that is why, but I had a hard time feeling for any of the characters. I thought that O'Neill is a decent writer, some passages were very well written, but the story itself was a muted dud for me.
This was a really solid novel in what this morning I'm deciding should be called the "spiritual rejuvenation" genre. The basic premise is narrator Hans is stranded in NYC after 9/11, sans wife and baby, and needs to sort it out. He's helped in this by a weird Caribbean with big dreams and licit schemes.
It's a crackling good read, really, bouncing back and forth as it does between NYC, The Hague, and London, and as a bonus, Hans lives in the Dakota, so there's lots of detail about that. Not sure if those details left me satisfied or more eager to spend time there, but it was very cool.
A seemingly adult novel, by which I mean it's a little subtle, and a little ambiguous in the way it ends. Not a bristling page turner, but a thoughtful middle brow story that I found satisfying after a run of books that I found not so hot.
It's a crackling good read, really, bouncing back and forth as it does between NYC, The Hague, and London, and as a bonus, Hans lives in the Dakota, so there's lots of detail about that. Not sure if those details left me satisfied or more eager to spend time there, but it was very cool.
A seemingly adult novel, by which I mean it's a little subtle, and a little ambiguous in the way it ends. Not a bristling page turner, but a thoughtful middle brow story that I found satisfying after a run of books that I found not so hot.
I find myself quite ambivalent about this book.
Its filled with clever and pithy prose. Indeed, some passages really make you stop just to appreciate them with a wry smile or a nod. You really get the sense that O'Neill loves language and that makes for joy in reading. Hats off to him for wielding words so well.
And yet.
After a while I found myself wondering when the story was going to catch up with the prose. After a while longer, I started to suspect it wasn't ever going to and then started to wonder if, ultimately, that would matter. Well, it didn't and it did. That is, the story did not in fact catch up. It was just "OK." A mildly interesting slice of life, but without really saying anything. I'm sorry to say that the terrific turns of phrase weren't, in the end, sufficiently satisfying to make up for the story.
Reading this was like spending time at a party talking with a charming stranger who, after a while, you realize is more charm than substance. When you leave its not like you can say you didn't enjoy talking to him, but you still kind of wonder whether you really wasted your evening.
Incidentally, the descriptions of the City made me nostalgic for my years spent living in Brooklyn and Manhattan. *sigh*
Its filled with clever and pithy prose. Indeed, some passages really make you stop just to appreciate them with a wry smile or a nod. You really get the sense that O'Neill loves language and that makes for joy in reading. Hats off to him for wielding words so well.
And yet.
After a while I found myself wondering when the story was going to catch up with the prose. After a while longer, I started to suspect it wasn't ever going to and then started to wonder if, ultimately, that would matter. Well, it didn't and it did. That is, the story did not in fact catch up. It was just "OK." A mildly interesting slice of life, but without really saying anything. I'm sorry to say that the terrific turns of phrase weren't, in the end, sufficiently satisfying to make up for the story.
Reading this was like spending time at a party talking with a charming stranger who, after a while, you realize is more charm than substance. When you leave its not like you can say you didn't enjoy talking to him, but you still kind of wonder whether you really wasted your evening.
Incidentally, the descriptions of the City made me nostalgic for my years spent living in Brooklyn and Manhattan. *sigh*
Sometimes I thought the author couldn't decide if he was writing a drama or an a comedy
This wasn't as thought-provoking as I had been led to expect. While I enjoyed the setting (the New York of America's new immigrants--West Indians, South Asians, Russians), there was a bit too much of the magical black man stereotype going on for me.
This book, for me, was basically the reading equivalent of watching a cricket match. It might make sense to someone, but that someone is not me. If I wasn't reading this for book discussion, I definitely wouldn't have finished it.
Like other previous posters, I very possibly might've given up on this book except that I read it for a book club. As I carried on, I was waiting for some aha moment to either turn it around, or contextualize the first part of the book (I recently read 2666, and didn't really care for "The Part About the Critics" but I kept going and not only was I richly rewarded, but it was clear what Bolano was doing and how that section laid the groundwork for the rest of the book. Of course, very few can write like Bolano, but I digress).
I can't remember the last time I disliked a book this much.
I got incredibly tired of O'Neill's habit of just making lists in lieu of evocative description, which he even does in the dialogue of different individual characters. Even considering the omniscient narrator, and presuming that he is relating all the events and dialogue from his own memory/perspective, that's just lazy writing. He doesn't even manage to paint a picture of post-9/11 Manhattan and the boroughs, and for all that he goes on about cricket, I still don't feel that I have any better idea or feel for the game than I had before. It's pretty impressive really, albeit in a negative way.
Within the first few pages, it is clear that the narrator eventually gets back together with his wife, which I thought was nice until I got to know the characters. At a certain point I was wondering why on earth the wife would reunite with this tiresome man, until she was fleshed out as a character (very slightly, I won't even get started on how the women in this book are drawn) and revealed as the kind of paternalistic "liberal" ass that makes the rest of us who are liberals look bad.
I usually don't write lengthy reviews like this, so I guess I can at least credit this book with eliciting a strong reaction, even if that reaction is bilious hatred.
I leave you with this choice sentence describing a scene at the London Eye. I consider having read this my reward for making it through the entire book as it is on one of the last pages. Don't worry, it's not a spoiler. It is just so howlingly bad that I actually laughed out loud.
"Reunions in unfamiliar places have this effect, and maybe the great wheel itself is infectious: the stupendous circle, freighted with circumferential eggs, is a glorious spray of radiuses."
I can't remember the last time I disliked a book this much.
I got incredibly tired of O'Neill's habit of just making lists in lieu of evocative description, which he even does in the dialogue of different individual characters. Even considering the omniscient narrator, and presuming that he is relating all the events and dialogue from his own memory/perspective, that's just lazy writing. He doesn't even manage to paint a picture of post-9/11 Manhattan and the boroughs, and for all that he goes on about cricket, I still don't feel that I have any better idea or feel for the game than I had before. It's pretty impressive really, albeit in a negative way.
Within the first few pages, it is clear that the narrator eventually gets back together with his wife, which I thought was nice until I got to know the characters. At a certain point I was wondering why on earth the wife would reunite with this tiresome man, until she was fleshed out as a character (very slightly, I won't even get started on how the women in this book are drawn) and revealed as the kind of paternalistic "liberal" ass that makes the rest of us who are liberals look bad.
I usually don't write lengthy reviews like this, so I guess I can at least credit this book with eliciting a strong reaction, even if that reaction is bilious hatred.
I leave you with this choice sentence describing a scene at the London Eye. I consider having read this my reward for making it through the entire book as it is on one of the last pages. Don't worry, it's not a spoiler. It is just so howlingly bad that I actually laughed out loud.
"Reunions in unfamiliar places have this effect, and maybe the great wheel itself is infectious: the stupendous circle, freighted with circumferential eggs, is a glorious spray of radiuses."
Beautifully written (sometimes a little too much so) and full of surprising or well-crafted turns of phrase. But also pretty inert, dramatically speaking, and there were two too many scenes featuring a man looking at Google Earth on his laptop, to some symbolic portent, and that kind of stuff is nothing short of lame.
This book wasn't quite what I was expecting. O'Neill writes beautifully and his descriptive talent is clear. I felt that the plot sped up by the end of the book; I wonder if we missed out by him covering large swathes of time in just a few pages.