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3.09 AVERAGE
3.09 AVERAGE
Le pongo tres estrellas porque no sé muy bien si me ha gustado o es una caca. Ha habido ratos que me han interesado muchísimo los personajes y lo que pasa, otros tramos de la historia parece todo un despropósito en el que no entiendes cómo el argumento cambia tanto y cambia así... Creo que hay personajes muy malgastados y con poca exploración de lo que es el aspecto del jugador, para acabar desembocando en una especie de libro de terror claustrofóbico. Todo muy marciano, la verdad.
An international backgammon hustler with a benign tumor in his brain bumps into a high school acquaintance at a club in Singapore. So where the hell is that going to go. I had no idea, but enjoyed the ride.
This book is going to be published again with the title "The blot", but I cannot really understand why as it is far from being one of the best books written by Lethem, to be precise I read it because I had to, but I would never read it again. The characters are superficial and it was impossible for me to understand half of the reason why they did something, the other half reason I disagreed with. Only thing that this book left me is the desire to learn Backgammon.
Non capisco il perché, ma tra un paio di settimane questo libro verrá ripubblicato con il titolo "The blot", pur non essendo il migliore tra i libri di Lethem, anzi; per quanto mi riguarda io dovevo leggerlo, ma non lo rifarei mai. I personaggi mi sono sembrati piuttosto superficiali ed é stato impossibile per me capire, almeno la metá delle volte, perché facevano delle cose, quando lo capivo invece, di solito non ero d'accordo. L'unica cosa che mi ha lasciato questo libro, é il desiderio di imparare a giocare a Backgammon.
THANKS TO NETGALLEY FOR THE PREVIEW!
Non capisco il perché, ma tra un paio di settimane questo libro verrá ripubblicato con il titolo "The blot", pur non essendo il migliore tra i libri di Lethem, anzi; per quanto mi riguarda io dovevo leggerlo, ma non lo rifarei mai. I personaggi mi sono sembrati piuttosto superficiali ed é stato impossibile per me capire, almeno la metá delle volte, perché facevano delle cose, quando lo capivo invece, di solito non ero d'accordo. L'unica cosa che mi ha lasciato questo libro, é il desiderio di imparare a giocare a Backgammon.
THANKS TO NETGALLEY FOR THE PREVIEW!
I read a lot of Lethem books a while back and considered him one of my fave novelists, but somehow stopped reading new books after "You Don't Love Me Yet." I was interested to see what he's doing now, and when I picked this up, it sort of met my expectations, in the sense that this is a very Lethem look at the world: erudite without being academic or pedantic, except when he means to take the piss out of a character by making them spout jargon, and worldly-cosmopolitan, existing at a kind of level of abstraction to emotional concerns that puts everything that happens at a kind of ironic distance. It makes you wonder-- it made me wonder-- what this book was "about," in Lethem terms, what is he after here and I think maybe this is his take on medicine, how it structures our experience, not just in terms of the holistic sense of our bodies but also culturally in terms of how medical care is paid for and who and what you find when you enter that economy. If I were more engaged with this novel than I was, I'd probably be able to make a connection between the gambling in this book, the way backgammon, we are regularly told, balances chance against skill. The connections would be easy enough to make.
But in the end, I kind of didn't care too much. I was sort of engaged by the specter of the high school friend resurfacing and needing you to interact with them-- I read this over the holidays and at my mother's house, after all- but the book didn't seem especially interested in that thread.
It was OK, but not the book to make me tear through another three or four Lethem books starting tomorrow.
But in the end, I kind of didn't care too much. I was sort of engaged by the specter of the high school friend resurfacing and needing you to interact with them-- I read this over the holidays and at my mother's house, after all- but the book didn't seem especially interested in that thread.
It was OK, but not the book to make me tear through another three or four Lethem books starting tomorrow.
It's not a bad book, per se, it's just not a great one. I love picaresque kind of stories, with gamblers, wanderers, etc., so I figured I'd give it a go. Sad-sack protagonist Bruno hardly musters the energy to care about anything in the world, though, and I gotta hand it to Lethem, that comes through so strongly that you'll find yourself feeling that way about all the characters in his book, too. Perhaps if you've lived in Berkeley you'll enjoy the local mise-en-scene, otherwise...unless you're a Letheme completist, you may want to spend your time and money elsewhere.
Jonathan Letham has an incredibly fertile imagination, and an incredible way with words. I've read his other books, and I make a point out of reading his new ones when they come out. In this one, the hero, Alexander Bruno, plays backgammon professionally, but his world falls apart when he is diagnosed with a growth behind his face. The book is about the process of Bruno reassembling a life for himself, in incredibly odd ways. The characters are unusual and distinct, and Lethem describes their inner worlds in compelling and humorous ways. I look forward to his next book.
A generally compelling read but man, the sentence-level writing in this thing has got to be some career-worst stuff for Lethem. Wretched, incomprehensible metaphors; smug gum-smacking similes; paragraphs constructed by God knows what logic; overly repeated words and other sloppy failures of copy editing; I could go on. The plot is almost 100% ludicrous, too, but that bothered me slightly less, although it's worth noting that a premise which here takes up almost 300 pages would likely be no more than an aside in a Pynchon novel.
UPDATE, Feb. 7 '17: After a month of stewing in my mental crockpot I've come to a firm conclusion: this book fucking sucks. I hereby drop my Official Goodreads Rating to the long-rumored, rarely-deployed, much-feared McGaughey One-Star.
UPDATE, Feb. 7 '17: After a month of stewing in my mental crockpot I've come to a firm conclusion: this book fucking sucks. I hereby drop my Official Goodreads Rating to the long-rumored, rarely-deployed, much-feared McGaughey One-Star.
I'm a fan of Lethem's work, so I'm biased. I love the way he can take the familiar and then bend it around and then head into some rather strange territory. The characters are fun to follow, but I have to admit that there were few of them that I found likable. But this is a perfect example of a story where you don't have to have someone to root for. Great fun with a comic flare.