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A review by aug3zimm
A Quiet Place by Seicho Matsumoto
3.0
A bit mixed on this book. It started out slowly but was pretty interesting - weirdly, I found the super-polite business and social exchanges really interesting. It was fairly obvious early on that the dude was going a bit nuts but initially I did question if maybe I wasn’t suspending disbelief enough to go along with the narrator. No, I wasn’t. So I wasn’t surprised with the path this took. Though I did think it would escalate a little slower. I was thinking Asai would break into Kubo’s house first.
But after the inevitable happened, the book took a bit of a turn for me. At first, I felt a bit tense and actually sharing the protagonist’s anxiety. But after a bit, I got bored and started counting remaining pages to see how quickly it would be over. It’s a bit ironic then that I found the conclusion a bit sudden. But I suppose it was the same as the first part - I expected one more, more moderate, step of escalation before the inevitable and it was a bit more jarring to not get it at the end.
Oh well. A quick but decent read. I’m not sorry to have read it but I wouldn’t necessarily recommend it unless you’ve got a day or two to kill or a particular fondness for Poe's "The Tell-Tale Heart".
But after the inevitable happened, the book took a bit of a turn for me. At first, I felt a bit tense and actually sharing the protagonist’s anxiety. But after a bit, I got bored and started counting remaining pages to see how quickly it would be over. It’s a bit ironic then that I found the conclusion a bit sudden. But I suppose it was the same as the first part - I expected one more, more moderate, step of escalation before the inevitable and it was a bit more jarring to not get it at the end.
Oh well. A quick but decent read. I’m not sorry to have read it but I wouldn’t necessarily recommend it unless you’ve got a day or two to kill or a particular fondness for Poe's "The Tell-Tale Heart".