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3.26 AVERAGE
3.26 AVERAGE
beautiful prose and challenging structure. i hear the "echoes of great gatsby" the cover brags about so i think i want to read it again to fully absorb it!
This book snuck up on me and really hit me emotionally by the end. Beautiful writing.
A teeming novel -- a vivid portrait of NYC. James Wood calls it "one of the most remarkable post-colonial books I have ever read...", but aside from almost random citations of the cultures that give NYC its character, it hardly seems to be post-colonial at all in its vantage point and in its incisiveness. Its attentiveness to the mundane seems more self-indulgent than doing justice to a post-9/11 world that many of us occupy but do not truly know in all of its particularities. For me, the novel was a series of missed opportunities, especially in the way cricket could have been used as a means of exploring lives beyond the Dutch Hans' upper-class marital malaise. A postcolonial rewriting of Gatsby? I don't think so.
There are those novels that knock your socks off from start to finish, that you can't put down. "Netherland" is not one of those books. Instead, it accomplishes its aims through a sort of slow burn method that by its conclusion haunts one to the core. Months after finishing the book, it's still with me, and I'm tempted to read it again with a discerning, aspiring writer's eye in the hope that I might figure out how exactly O'Neill pulled it off.
This is a difficult book to read. Another reviewer on Amazon commented that he gave up on it around the 90 page mark and I can fully understand why he did. It was about that point in the book where I was wondering if it was ever going to go anywhere. Ironically, it's the kind of book that you like more after you've read it, when looking back on it. Now that I finally have a sense of the story that he was trying to tell, I almost feel like reading it all over again. Almost.
There are two things that make Netherland hard going. The story meanders backwards and forwards in time, so you are always trying to piece it together and work out where you are at and how this section relates to the one that you were reading previously. Sometimes this happens in the middle of a conversation. It's annoying. The other is the language, which is occasionally stunningly beautiful, but often feels unnecessarily complicated.
There were parts of the story that really interested me. One of the two central threads is the narrator (Hans's) marriage. He and his wife break up for a time and eventually get back together (which is established early in the novel). The other is his relationship with a colorful character called Chuck Ramkisson. We find out on page 3 that Chuck is dead, but the story of his relationship with Hans gradually unfolds throughout the novel. Along the way there are a lot of musings about his boyhood in the Netherlands and about the game of cricket and some amusing interactions with people that he meets in New York and in London.
Ironically this is being hailed as a great American novel, but it was the sections in London that came most to life for me. I'm glad I read this book and I really enjoyed parts of it. But overall, I found it hard going.
There are two things that make Netherland hard going. The story meanders backwards and forwards in time, so you are always trying to piece it together and work out where you are at and how this section relates to the one that you were reading previously. Sometimes this happens in the middle of a conversation. It's annoying. The other is the language, which is occasionally stunningly beautiful, but often feels unnecessarily complicated.
There were parts of the story that really interested me. One of the two central threads is the narrator (Hans's) marriage. He and his wife break up for a time and eventually get back together (which is established early in the novel). The other is his relationship with a colorful character called Chuck Ramkisson. We find out on page 3 that Chuck is dead, but the story of his relationship with Hans gradually unfolds throughout the novel. Along the way there are a lot of musings about his boyhood in the Netherlands and about the game of cricket and some amusing interactions with people that he meets in New York and in London.
Ironically this is being hailed as a great American novel, but it was the sections in London that came most to life for me. I'm glad I read this book and I really enjoyed parts of it. But overall, I found it hard going.
This is a beatiful, haunting book. The tale of a Dutch/British expatriate in post-9/11 New York who wiles away his leisure time playing cricket with West Indians and South Asians, one of whom has Gatsbyesque ambitions. I "read" this in the audiobook version, and the dramatic reading and subtle inflections made it all the better.
Well, I know that this book is more than a book about cricket and it's history, and there is a part of me that appreciates the multi-layered narration technique, however overall this was not the book for me. Endless discussion of cricket made my eyes glaze over and the constant focus to remember which part of the story was being told became a bit much. Oddly enough though, I remained curious as to how the story would end.
This book was an interesting take on the typical immigrant in New York experience. It is shown partly through the lens of cricket, which I still know nothing about. I really liked the flow of it and the main character, though Chuck is the best. I would love to know if anyone else has read it and what they thought...
Soulful, direct, and occasionally laugh-out-loud funny, and for once it's a pseudo-memoir that's not about a college kid coming of age in Brooklyn. Instead, it's about a middle-aged Dutch man coming of age in... Manhattan. Still, progress. Not a life-changer, but a good read (especially if you are interested in the metaphysical aspects of cricket, and sports in general).