Reviews - O ensaio | The StoryGraph

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318 reviews for:

O ensaio

Eleanor Catton

3.54 AVERAGE

erinfoose's review against another edition

3.5

challenging emotional reflective slow-paced

Plot or Character Driven: Character

Strong character development: Complicated

Loveable characters: Complicated

Diverse cast of characters: No

Flaws of characters a main focus: Yes

dukegregory's review against another edition

3.0

I appreciate this quite a bit. Insane structure with an insane sense of style. Wonderfully idiosyncratic. Catton clearly brought her idiosyncracies to the nineteenth-century mode in The Luminaries in an even more endearingly pleasing manner. I found the middle of this to sort of crumble. It felt plodding, even though Catton does not necessarily repeat herself nor slow down. The beginning 30% is my favorite (although seeing how the two plot threads converge is quite satisfying). Life is play, but it's also a play within a play as performed by horny teenagers envisioning themselves in ways they do not match. Catton writes a novel about an affair between teacher and student, which is not really about the affair but does concern itself with perceptions of sexuality versus projections of it. Adolescence, as Catton depicts it, becomes more a projected memory of adult pasts rather than honest considerations of teenage maturity and otherwise. Cool book that I do not love but respect. Makes me even more excited for her new novel, Birnam Wood (how has it been a decade since the Luminaries), to come out next Tuesday!!!!

birdwatching's review against another edition

3.0

"You were asking yourself masks or faces."
"Yes," the Head of Movement said, and sighed. "I used to believe in faces. All my life I believed in faces. I think I might have finally changed my mind."

It is fitting that this book was written as part of a Writer's Workshop at the start of Eleanor Catton's (already much awarded) career, because the book is very much focused on identity formation: what it means to move out into the footlights of the adult world ("all the world's a stage" etc) and the loss of innocence that Catton seems to believe this entails. The book is very much experimental, with two overlapping narratives, and a non-linear structure that you have to work hard at to make head or tails of. I didn't work hard at all, being a lazy reader. I could never make sense of what was happening when, but in the end I decided that it didn't matter - the very point of the novel seemed to be the fine line between the real and the imagined.

The Rehearsal footlights the 'stage' of burgeoning identity: the end of adolescence, and the postures and masks we adopt to find our place in the world and among others. It is interesting conceptually, but the fact that it, itself, is in the mode of performance, trying always to impress you, means that reading it you are never afforded the chance to immerse in the world of the story. It is all surface, all mirror, all greasepaint. You watch from the audience and in watching participate, but can never know fully as the audience if there is anything real going on, as the Fourth Wall is never knocked down. As such for me this could only ever be an intellectually intriguing book as opposed to an enjoyable one. I see it being set in English Literature courses, but I don't see myself ever going back to it for fun. As a whole it is a great "rehearsal" as it were for a more fully realised, and meaningful, story. I did appreciate the final page - very well turned on its heel - and Eleanor Catton has a clever mind and smooth writing tone, with some brilliant sentences. I only wish it would have had a little more soul.