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ericfheiman's review against another edition
4.0
Certainly one of the more unique and bizarre novels I've read in a long while. Anthony's main accomplishment here is to fully inhabit the psyche of a mute Hungarian dwarf that sells meat from the back of his abandoned school bus home and longs for the affections of a local benevolent doctor who treats him. The flip tone of the parallel historical narrative sometimes grates, but considering the idiosyncratic nature of the story and point of view, I was surprised by how much the book stuck with me emotionally.
cj_dumas's review against another edition
mysterious
slow-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? Character
- Strong character development? It's complicated
- Loveable characters? It's complicated
- Diverse cast of characters? No
- Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes
4.5
This book is weird af. This is what the metamorphosis wishes it could be.
pearloz's review against another edition
4.0
Loved this book. Legitimately strange story about a somewhat-believable outsider. It never gave in to pity though it could have and it never became maudlin though you could see other writers taking that path. I loved the ending, too.
abbeyreads13's review against another edition
4.0
3.5 rounded up*** The writing is fantastic, peculiar main character with an interesting premise … I was rather committed to the atmosphere & Rovar’s POV. But the ending is a bit of a letdown.
moirastone's review against another edition
3.0
Hahahahahaha!
Hee!
HAHAHAHA!
Oh, wow.
Oh god that is dark.
Oof.
HA!
Heh.
...
Why am I crying?
Hee!
HAHAHAHA!
Oh, wow.
Oh god that is dark.
Oof.
HA!
Heh.
...
Why am I crying?
aliciaaaah's review against another edition
3.0
I loved the style and the weirdness of this - but thought it seemed like there was something missing. The ending felt abrupt.
ashpociadlo's review against another edition
- Plot- or character-driven? A mix
- Strong character development? Yes
- Loveable characters? Yes
- Diverse cast of characters? Yes
- Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes
5.0
jmcphers's review against another edition
3.0
This book is published by McSweeney's, a publisher known for their ability to find quirky talent and fearlessly publish even the truly bizarre. This book falls squarely in their fold: a sprawling, surreal Hungarian history mixed with the minutiae of the life of a hairy little man selling meat out of a bus. It's not the sort of premise that makes the average reader think "Heavens, how fascinating!" However, I am a sucker for quirky stories and this one quickly drew me in.
Anthony's writing is peppered with wonderful details and the prose--most of it written from the perspective of Rovar, the main character--is delightful and occasionally funny. We get to see his tiny little world repeatedly contrasted with the thousands of years of epic history that lead to his presence. About halfway through, we get very tired of him talking about the ailments and ugliness and malaise that plauge the Pfleigmans, but we will have no relief from this tirade.
The story holds a lot of promise, and Anthony is very good at creating awkwardly hilarious situations. It's not too much of a spoiler to say that you will learn some Sad Facts while reading this book, melancholy nuggets that the author tosses out casually that will make you think about things that have already happened much differently. Sometimes you will feel sorry for Rovar, and sometimes you won't like him very much. He's such an interesting character that he makes up for many of the book's shortcomings despite his whining.
I can't say that this book exceeded my expectations, but it met them solidly. Anthony is a talent and I bet she's got some great stuff coming.
Anthony's writing is peppered with wonderful details and the prose--most of it written from the perspective of Rovar, the main character--is delightful and occasionally funny. We get to see his tiny little world repeatedly contrasted with the thousands of years of epic history that lead to his presence. About halfway through, we get very tired of him talking about the ailments and ugliness and malaise that plauge the Pfleigmans, but we will have no relief from this tirade.
The story holds a lot of promise, and Anthony is very good at creating awkwardly hilarious situations. It's not too much of a spoiler to say that you will learn some Sad Facts while reading this book, melancholy nuggets that the author tosses out casually that will make you think about things that have already happened much differently. Sometimes you will feel sorry for Rovar, and sometimes you won't like him very much. He's such an interesting character that he makes up for many of the book's shortcomings despite his whining.
I can't say that this book exceeded my expectations, but it met them solidly. Anthony is a talent and I bet she's got some great stuff coming.
dougbrun's review against another edition
4.0
Earlier this summer I went to a book reading here in Maine where I live. The author, Jessica Anthony was local, and that always brings in a nice crowd. We have a lot of good writers in Maine. Of course there is Stephen King, up in Bangor, whom everyone knows; and there’s Phil Hoose, who just this week won the National Book Award. But there are a lot of writers around here who aren’t as well known, and many of them are very talented. I had not heard of Ms. Anthony, but I was obviously in the minority, for she seemed a favorite of the crowd the evening of her reading--and it was a crowd. She was a local favorite. Chris, the owner of the bookstore, introduced her, calling her brilliant and her book brilliant too. But Chris says this about a lot of the writers he introduces. They are either brilliant, or if not brilliant, their book can’t be put down. Sometimes it’s one or the other. Tonight, it was both--and the book was brilliant too, as I said. Ms. Anthony approached the podium and said hello to her many friends in the audience, talked briefly about the book, and began to read.
As she read, I was first struck by the quality of the writing. It was assured and confident. It had heft to it, like you want from good writing, like the difference between a sauce reduced from ingredients on the stove and a one poured from the jar. This writing seemed measured and lovingly created. Good writing catches my eye, or I should say ear, like nothing else. Like pornography, it is difficult to describe, but I know it when I see--hear--it. This was good writing like that. But it was the story that truly hooked me. The Convalescent is the story of Rovar Ákos Pfliegman. Here is Rovar giving a brief description of himself: “I’m barely human. I’m a hairy little Hungarian pulp. An incongruous mass of skin and blood and hair. I am a sorry gathering of organs. That is all.” See what I mean?
Rovar lives in an abandoned broken-down bus in a field on the banks of the Queenconococheecook River in Northern Virginia, from which is sells meat. He is a butcher who hails from a long tradition of butchers--and he is the last of the line. He is a species unto himself. He is diminutive, midget-like, and has a leg which drags behind him. His skin peels off in flakes. He is mute and writes, when he infrequently feels like communicating, on a tablet. He only has one set of clothes, including the stained and foul pink Disneyland sweatshirt he always wears. He is bearded and unkept. He is, by any measure, repugnant. Indeed, even his name--”It is a Hungarian name. It’s pronounced RO-vahr. It means ‘insect’”--brands him. He lives his life with general equanimity despite it all, seeking only one solace, Dr. Monica, the local pediatrician. She sees Rovar every Tuesday, against the wishes of her staff, amidst the stares and gawking of the patients, “the Sick or Diseased children,” who fill the Doctor’s reception area. She treats his skin, massages his trachea, alters his diet, counsels him. She tries to do what doctors do: heal. But Rovar is beyond healing, something we have sensed from the outset. Rovar is hardly human, enough human to lend plausibility, but lacking thereof in a magical way. As the novel progresses his condition deteriorates. He hallucinates, grows paranoid and generally decays. Or so we think. But this story is not just any story. It is a story laced with super heros, and giants, great rivers born streaming from birthing women and humans who perhaps aren’t.
Ms. Anthony said in an interview, that she usually does “not write strict realism; but nor do I consider myself a magic realist--I think I sort of float between the two, in some murky, absurd realm. Let’s call it Absurdorealism.” There is the experience, while reading The Convalescent, of being like an insect, airborne and tasting one flower then the next, one sensation following on the heels of another. Everything makes sense, then not, then you wonder: Is this absurd, or literal? It is great fun. It is not a coincidence I use the flying insect metaphor. Insects are in evidence here. Rovar keeps one as a pet in a can and feeds it bits of rotten food. As a young boy, or more properly, as a young Pfliegman, Rovar as he “lies in bed watching a fly hurtling around the edges of the window screen...wishes he were an insect. If he were an insect, he thinks, he would be invisible. O, to be a fly, a flea, he thinks, observing the small things about his room. The things that insects observe. The curl of paint on the window ledge. The jagged fray of the blanket. The sound of bees throwing themselves at the window screen. He pinches his arms and watches the hairs rise up. He presses his fingers on the his eyeballs until globes of light appear behind the eyelids, each taking the triangular shape of the wings of a butterfly--” If only Gregor Samsa had had so much desire, rather than dread.
Perhaps this reader’s delight was most in evidence in the chapters tracing Rovar’s ancestry, or rather the “Evolution of the Pfliegmans.” Interlaced with the straight-absurd narration of Rovar, we are treated to an absurdorealism walk through the history of Eastern Europe, cave-man to present. It is simply wondrous. Here is an example, from early on. Rovar is asked by Dr. Monica to open up, to communicate, as best he is able, using his writing table, to “write what I feel.” And so the Pfliegman mythology unfurls:
Although it is difficult for me to write how I feel, I can tell you how Aranka felt as she lay on her side in front of a fire amidst the pungent, simmering remains of Enni Hús. She felt thirst, but there was no water. She felt the weight of isolation, of inevitability: this child would take her, or she would take the child. She gazed up at the uneven flaps of the tent, listening to the purring sounds of a hundred dozing Pfliegmans--she was savagely alone. Most Plfliegman fetuses, she knew, did not survive birth. As though they could sense it, as though they could see their whole lousy future before they even had a chance to live it, they hoped for better luck in the next conception and gave up in the womb. If they managed to be born, the babies were often so small they looked like little blue fish. Babies born off-color, with elongated heads, mealy skin. Feet that hung inward in hackneyed flippers. An aura of general malaise.
This book, like a great myth, can be read on many levels. It can read as a tracing of existential nausea, a modern farce, a tract on the consequences of modern living, a quasi-adolescent coming-of-age fantasy memoir. It could be all this, none of it, or something else entirely. Mostly it is fun and witty and sharp. I would say how excited I am by this new voice of Jessica Anthony, but like Rovar, I sense the voice is an old-soul, not new at all, but one that has sprung afresh from an ancient mist.
As she read, I was first struck by the quality of the writing. It was assured and confident. It had heft to it, like you want from good writing, like the difference between a sauce reduced from ingredients on the stove and a one poured from the jar. This writing seemed measured and lovingly created. Good writing catches my eye, or I should say ear, like nothing else. Like pornography, it is difficult to describe, but I know it when I see--hear--it. This was good writing like that. But it was the story that truly hooked me. The Convalescent is the story of Rovar Ákos Pfliegman. Here is Rovar giving a brief description of himself: “I’m barely human. I’m a hairy little Hungarian pulp. An incongruous mass of skin and blood and hair. I am a sorry gathering of organs. That is all.” See what I mean?
Rovar lives in an abandoned broken-down bus in a field on the banks of the Queenconococheecook River in Northern Virginia, from which is sells meat. He is a butcher who hails from a long tradition of butchers--and he is the last of the line. He is a species unto himself. He is diminutive, midget-like, and has a leg which drags behind him. His skin peels off in flakes. He is mute and writes, when he infrequently feels like communicating, on a tablet. He only has one set of clothes, including the stained and foul pink Disneyland sweatshirt he always wears. He is bearded and unkept. He is, by any measure, repugnant. Indeed, even his name--”It is a Hungarian name. It’s pronounced RO-vahr. It means ‘insect’”--brands him. He lives his life with general equanimity despite it all, seeking only one solace, Dr. Monica, the local pediatrician. She sees Rovar every Tuesday, against the wishes of her staff, amidst the stares and gawking of the patients, “the Sick or Diseased children,” who fill the Doctor’s reception area. She treats his skin, massages his trachea, alters his diet, counsels him. She tries to do what doctors do: heal. But Rovar is beyond healing, something we have sensed from the outset. Rovar is hardly human, enough human to lend plausibility, but lacking thereof in a magical way. As the novel progresses his condition deteriorates. He hallucinates, grows paranoid and generally decays. Or so we think. But this story is not just any story. It is a story laced with super heros, and giants, great rivers born streaming from birthing women and humans who perhaps aren’t.
Ms. Anthony said in an interview, that she usually does “not write strict realism; but nor do I consider myself a magic realist--I think I sort of float between the two, in some murky, absurd realm. Let’s call it Absurdorealism.” There is the experience, while reading The Convalescent, of being like an insect, airborne and tasting one flower then the next, one sensation following on the heels of another. Everything makes sense, then not, then you wonder: Is this absurd, or literal? It is great fun. It is not a coincidence I use the flying insect metaphor. Insects are in evidence here. Rovar keeps one as a pet in a can and feeds it bits of rotten food. As a young boy, or more properly, as a young Pfliegman, Rovar as he “lies in bed watching a fly hurtling around the edges of the window screen...wishes he were an insect. If he were an insect, he thinks, he would be invisible. O, to be a fly, a flea, he thinks, observing the small things about his room. The things that insects observe. The curl of paint on the window ledge. The jagged fray of the blanket. The sound of bees throwing themselves at the window screen. He pinches his arms and watches the hairs rise up. He presses his fingers on the his eyeballs until globes of light appear behind the eyelids, each taking the triangular shape of the wings of a butterfly--” If only Gregor Samsa had had so much desire, rather than dread.
Perhaps this reader’s delight was most in evidence in the chapters tracing Rovar’s ancestry, or rather the “Evolution of the Pfliegmans.” Interlaced with the straight-absurd narration of Rovar, we are treated to an absurdorealism walk through the history of Eastern Europe, cave-man to present. It is simply wondrous. Here is an example, from early on. Rovar is asked by Dr. Monica to open up, to communicate, as best he is able, using his writing table, to “write what I feel.” And so the Pfliegman mythology unfurls:
Although it is difficult for me to write how I feel, I can tell you how Aranka felt as she lay on her side in front of a fire amidst the pungent, simmering remains of Enni Hús. She felt thirst, but there was no water. She felt the weight of isolation, of inevitability: this child would take her, or she would take the child. She gazed up at the uneven flaps of the tent, listening to the purring sounds of a hundred dozing Pfliegmans--she was savagely alone. Most Plfliegman fetuses, she knew, did not survive birth. As though they could sense it, as though they could see their whole lousy future before they even had a chance to live it, they hoped for better luck in the next conception and gave up in the womb. If they managed to be born, the babies were often so small they looked like little blue fish. Babies born off-color, with elongated heads, mealy skin. Feet that hung inward in hackneyed flippers. An aura of general malaise.
This book, like a great myth, can be read on many levels. It can read as a tracing of existential nausea, a modern farce, a tract on the consequences of modern living, a quasi-adolescent coming-of-age fantasy memoir. It could be all this, none of it, or something else entirely. Mostly it is fun and witty and sharp. I would say how excited I am by this new voice of Jessica Anthony, but like Rovar, I sense the voice is an old-soul, not new at all, but one that has sprung afresh from an ancient mist.