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jeanetterenee's review
UPDATE: November 29, 2011
Turns out this book really was based on the author's transgressions. The Will Silver character is Maksik himself.
http://jezebel.com/5863188/how-a-teachers-alleged-student-affair-became-his-acclaimed-novel
With this new development, I'm going to leave the book without a rating. Here is my original four-star review:
Bleak but mighty impressive.
Teacher worship. Is there anything more universal or more potentially devastating? At the International School of France, Will Silver is a beloved teacher with two especially worshipful students. One is a female, Marie, who worships him sexually and fantasizes future domestic bliss with him. The other is a male, Gilad, who worships Silver as the pinnacle of intellectual and moral uprightness, and fantasizes about being singled out by his teacher as special.
Silver teaches high-minded philosophical principles in his classes, and his teenaged students naively expect him to be the embodiment of those principles. Of course, he's just a man. Sometimes weak, sometimes strong, admirable in some ways and despicable in others.
Silver is also very much in need of sexual release, which turns out to be his downfall.
Don't act so surprised. That's never happened before, right? Somehow it's more disappointing when Silver falls from grace, because he's not the initiator and he just lets it all happen without so much as a whimper.
And after ten years of teaching, is he really naive enough to think that high school students don't spill all to their friends? Which leaves you wondering---does he really care if it all goes down the drain? Is he deliberately self-destructing?
There are echoes here of Dead Poets Society and The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie. A beloved, unconventional teacher gets too chummy with the students and is eventually betrayed by one of them, leaving the rest of the students feeling betrayed by the teacher.
Adoration from young people is intoxicating and hard to resist, as is the possibility of shaping young minds and lives. Reading an all-too-believable story like this one just makes me more appreciative of those instructors I had who knew where to draw the line between themselves and their students, and were perhaps less popular for doing so.
The title, You Deserve Nothing, sounds bleak, and it is. It alludes to the argument that what you get in life is not necessarily based on merit. The good things we do today do not ensure that we will have good experiences in the future. Good and bad things that happen to us are not always a matter of deserving or having earned them.
Turns out this book really was based on the author's transgressions. The Will Silver character is Maksik himself.
http://jezebel.com/5863188/how-a-teachers-alleged-student-affair-became-his-acclaimed-novel
With this new development, I'm going to leave the book without a rating. Here is my original four-star review:
Bleak but mighty impressive.
Teacher worship. Is there anything more universal or more potentially devastating? At the International School of France, Will Silver is a beloved teacher with two especially worshipful students. One is a female, Marie, who worships him sexually and fantasizes future domestic bliss with him. The other is a male, Gilad, who worships Silver as the pinnacle of intellectual and moral uprightness, and fantasizes about being singled out by his teacher as special.
Silver teaches high-minded philosophical principles in his classes, and his teenaged students naively expect him to be the embodiment of those principles. Of course, he's just a man. Sometimes weak, sometimes strong, admirable in some ways and despicable in others.
Silver is also very much in need of sexual release, which turns out to be his downfall.
Don't act so surprised. That's never happened before, right? Somehow it's more disappointing when Silver falls from grace, because he's not the initiator and he just lets it all happen without so much as a whimper.
And after ten years of teaching, is he really naive enough to think that high school students don't spill all to their friends? Which leaves you wondering---does he really care if it all goes down the drain? Is he deliberately self-destructing?
There are echoes here of Dead Poets Society and The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie. A beloved, unconventional teacher gets too chummy with the students and is eventually betrayed by one of them, leaving the rest of the students feeling betrayed by the teacher.
Adoration from young people is intoxicating and hard to resist, as is the possibility of shaping young minds and lives. Reading an all-too-believable story like this one just makes me more appreciative of those instructors I had who knew where to draw the line between themselves and their students, and were perhaps less popular for doing so.
The title, You Deserve Nothing, sounds bleak, and it is. It alludes to the argument that what you get in life is not necessarily based on merit. The good things we do today do not ensure that we will have good experiences in the future. Good and bad things that happen to us are not always a matter of deserving or having earned them.
nadyne's review against another edition
5.0
Some reviews:
Farm Lane Books Blog: http://www.farmlanebooks.co.uk/2011/you-deserve-nothing-alexander-maksik/
Col Reads: http://colreads.blogspot.be/2013/07/you-deserve-nothing-by-alexander-maksik.html
Farm Lane Books Blog: http://www.farmlanebooks.co.uk/2011/you-deserve-nothing-alexander-maksik/
Col Reads: http://colreads.blogspot.be/2013/07/you-deserve-nothing-by-alexander-maksik.html
danielle_2910's review against another edition
3.0
3/5 - Considering this book is meant to be a moral story which questions the readers own beliefs and values based on the situation of a student/teacher relationship I felt that this book throughout was very biased of a certain view. The bias nature of the book through the lack of an alternative perspective of Will, the protagonist, caused me as the reader to feel a lack of agency to see him as anything other than through the eyes of people who worshipped him.
Not only this but, in my opinion, the first sex scene, which is the most graphic of all of them, was written using language that made it sound slightly vulgar, especially when taking into account that it is a student/teacher relationship.
Not only this but, in my opinion, the first sex scene, which is the most graphic of all of them, was written using language that made it sound slightly vulgar, especially when taking into account that it is a student/teacher relationship.
intothevolcano's review against another edition
3.0
I stick with my previous comments on this - I found Marie's P.O.V. to be really one-dimensional: she barely seemed like a character in her own right, never mind a realistic one. Nonetheless, there was some very "pretty" writing in this book, and at times I did find myself getting really involved in the world it showed - and these times were nearly always during Gilad's chapters. Although I think I would have enjoyed this novel a fraction more had I not read the Jezebel article (I couldn't stop pondering the fact/fiction division, something which usually doesn't bother me at all), I found myself caring about the minor story arcs a lot more than the supposed main plot.
tinapatina's review against another edition
4.0
Read this book as part of our Book Club and gotta admit I quite enjoy the book. The book club member are all teachers at an international school and of course it was shocking to read about it, since I believe a lot of us made comparison to our students and colleagues, but overall I found it a very interesting, the end was a bit disappointing cause I felt there was no closure. Though this book seems to be an autobiography of sorts from the author's experience! In that case, no wonder there's no closure! They guy carry on with his alive. I read one interview that mentioned he had actually stayed in touch with "Marie" while he read the book, but all contact had stopped after this was published.
audreyloopy's review
I confess, I read this book only because my curiosity was peaked by the article about it on Jezebel, and I wanted to be able to judge it for myself.
That said, it's sickening.
The tone somehow manages to strike a balance between self-loathing and unparalleled conceit, which is a pretty staggering achievement in its own perverse way. I am, of course, reading this work through the lens provided me, that the characters involved and goodly number of the events portrayed are real. What Maksik has done probably isn't that different from the path a lot of authors take to create a novel, but when drawing on your life experiences has you putting words in people's mouths and actions in their lives geared toward your self-aggrandizement, there's a term for that: Mary Sue. And given that the particular act he's Mary Sue-ing to the high heavens is an affair with a 17-year-old student, I can't muster up much more than some serious disgust. He even manages to interweave the tenets of existentialism into his narrative as a motif of apologism, as if being forced to take responsibility for his own actions dooms him to failure time and again and no one can expect any better from him.
The only remotely likable character is Gilad, but even when he seems to be shaking off his infatuation with the eminent Mr. Silver, Maksik cannot let him go. His narrative ends before his freedom is truly realized.
All in all, it's a masturbatory pity-party of a novel, and if it stopped there, it wouldn't be much worth the paper it's printed on. The fact that it is quite possibly a betrayal of a very intimate trust to boot makes it downright horrid. If your curiosity (like mine) gets the best of you, I urge you to get it from your public library, so at least someone in the wretched thing's chain of custody will benefit.
But for my money, I'd rather read Nabokov.
That said, it's sickening.
The tone somehow manages to strike a balance between self-loathing and unparalleled conceit, which is a pretty staggering achievement in its own perverse way. I am, of course, reading this work through the lens provided me, that the characters involved and goodly number of the events portrayed are real. What Maksik has done probably isn't that different from the path a lot of authors take to create a novel, but when drawing on your life experiences has you putting words in people's mouths and actions in their lives geared toward your self-aggrandizement, there's a term for that: Mary Sue. And given that the particular act he's Mary Sue-ing to the high heavens is an affair with a 17-year-old student, I can't muster up much more than some serious disgust. He even manages to interweave the tenets of existentialism into his narrative as a motif of apologism, as if being forced to take responsibility for his own actions dooms him to failure time and again and no one can expect any better from him.
The only remotely likable character is Gilad, but even when he seems to be shaking off his infatuation with the eminent Mr. Silver, Maksik cannot let him go. His narrative ends before his freedom is truly realized.
All in all, it's a masturbatory pity-party of a novel, and if it stopped there, it wouldn't be much worth the paper it's printed on. The fact that it is quite possibly a betrayal of a very intimate trust to boot makes it downright horrid. If your curiosity (like mine) gets the best of you, I urge you to get it from your public library, so at least someone in the wretched thing's chain of custody will benefit.
But for my money, I'd rather read Nabokov.
emmastia's review
2.0
Interesting book, a real page turner for the most part but ultimately falls a little flat. Makes me realize how hard it is to set a book in a high school.
theshrinkette's review
Yeah so I heard about this being the author's actual story where he got a teenager pregnant and she was forced to have an abortion, and then he has the gall to exploit her and the situation and publish this as a work of fiction. Yeah, no. Nope. Nada. DNF-ing.
mereadingbooks's review against another edition
1.0
Yes, I knew the story behind the book when I bought it. But I tried not to let it influence my reading too much and I am not going to spend too much time on the question if writing the book was morally wrong. The teacher-student-love-affair is not a new topic in literature / movies /etc. and I think it has lost most of its scandal potential. Just to be clear, I don’t think it is okay for a teacher to have an affair or any kind of inappropriate contact with his or her students. I just think that as a literary theme it has been done a lot. So, one should not have been expecting anything new or mind-blowing from this book. But somehow I did and accordingly I was disappointed.
Plot wise it is just this, a student falling in love (or lust, or whatever you want to call it) with a student. The novel explores the notion of teaching and the implications, contradictions, and duties of someone in the role of the teacher. It also gives us a coming-of-age story that shows how important those figures are during the formative teenage years.
The main character, teacher William Silver, is pathetic in his need to be loved and adored by his students. He seems to be only interested in human contact if his conversational counterpart is his inferior; if he can teach and be seen as intelligent and charming. When it comes to romantic relationships he is not interested in women his own age, who might be his intellectual equals. He runs from themhis ex-wife) or keeps them at a safe distance (co-worker and friend Mia) . This made reading the parts written from his point of view cringeworthy and created a lot of eye-rolling on my part.
There are two more narrative perspectives in this novel – two students of the international High School where Silver teaches. One is Gilad, a boy taking the advanced literature class Silver offers. We get to see how an impressionable mind and character reacts to that glamorous personality Silver is projecting as a teacher. Through this character it is possible to even see some good can come of it; that some students can be changed for the better. Gilad does consider is life and the decisions he has made and he changes course. He finds a friend (albeit another ambiguous character) and he learns to stand up to his violent father. However, through his eyes we also see how someone you put on a pedestal can fail; how your heroes are people too. By the way, I only noticed that Gilad was a boy when I was seventy pages into the book. Doesn’t really speak for the author’s skill in creating varying voices.
The other student whose perspective we get is Marie, the girl Silver has his secret affair with. Both, her and Silver’s narratives are unreliable. And we get both sides of their story without knowing who lies the most – because they both do, without question!
All three narrators and all secondary characters are kept simple and fairly shallow. Yes , there is development and progress in them, but still they seem like templates from a writers’ seminar. The story is in no way original and does not introduce anything new into the teacher-student plotline. You have it all – the instant attraction, the getting to know your body (including the first ever orgasm of the innocent girl), the pregnancy and abortion, the end of the affair by discovery, the doubts and fear of discovery on the part of the teacher, the seductive phone messages, the playing-hard-to-get… and so on and so on.
The novel is neither badly written nor badly structured; it just doesn’t offer a new or interesting perspective on the theme. And it probably did not help my reading experience that I watched Daydream Nation while I was halfway through the book; the movie’s plotline shares a lot of aspects with this novel.
Plot wise it is just this, a student falling in love (or lust, or whatever you want to call it) with a student. The novel explores the notion of teaching and the implications, contradictions, and duties of someone in the role of the teacher. It also gives us a coming-of-age story that shows how important those figures are during the formative teenage years.
The main character, teacher William Silver, is pathetic in his need to be loved and adored by his students. He seems to be only interested in human contact if his conversational counterpart is his inferior; if he can teach and be seen as intelligent and charming. When it comes to romantic relationships he is not interested in women his own age, who might be his intellectual equals. He runs from them
There are two more narrative perspectives in this novel – two students of the international High School where Silver teaches. One is Gilad, a boy taking the advanced literature class Silver offers. We get to see how an impressionable mind and character reacts to that glamorous personality Silver is projecting as a teacher. Through this character it is possible to even see some good can come of it; that some students can be changed for the better. Gilad does consider is life and the decisions he has made and he changes course. He finds a friend (albeit another ambiguous character) and he learns to stand up to his violent father. However, through his eyes we also see how someone you put on a pedestal can fail; how your heroes are people too. By the way, I only noticed that Gilad was a boy when I was seventy pages into the book. Doesn’t really speak for the author’s skill in creating varying voices.
The other student whose perspective we get is Marie, the girl Silver has his secret affair with. Both, her and Silver’s narratives are unreliable. And we get both sides of their story without knowing who lies the most – because they both do, without question!
All three narrators and all secondary characters are kept simple and fairly shallow. Yes , there is development and progress in them, but still they seem like templates from a writers’ seminar. The story is in no way original and does not introduce anything new into the teacher-student plotline. You have it all – the instant attraction, the getting to know your body (including the first ever orgasm of the innocent girl), the pregnancy and abortion, the end of the affair by discovery, the doubts and fear of discovery on the part of the teacher, the seductive phone messages, the playing-hard-to-get… and so on and so on.
The novel is neither badly written nor badly structured; it just doesn’t offer a new or interesting perspective on the theme. And it probably did not help my reading experience that I watched Daydream Nation while I was halfway through the book; the movie’s plotline shares a lot of aspects with this novel.
zachkuhn's review against another edition
5.0
If you take away the teacher-student affair, this novel has one of the most accurate depictions of the Teacher Experience I have ever read. Lovely and smart and sweet and terrifying and sad. One of the best first novels I have read in a long time.