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A review by onegin
Base Notes by Lara Elena Donnelly
dark
medium-paced
4.0
First of all, Donnelly's prose is delicious. The word choices are exquisite.
Secondly, there's something wrong with the narrator, and I love it. As the story progresses, the narrator kept crossing lines, and not in the order of legal severity, but of moral crime. Is murder okay, if the one you murdered is a bad person? Can you blackmail friends, if it ultimately leaves them better of? How about murder again? The novel raises these questions, and leaves satisfying answers - not as a lecture or a lesson, but as effects on the main character's life. In addition, the novel is a discussion about art under capitalism.
Some of the narration was a bit wonky (due to simultaneously doing an after the fact-retelling and yet keeping the tension and mystery up), but it was saved by the excellent characterisation. Like in Donnelly's other novels, the characters' feelings were complicated, messy, and in that way very human, and she portrays them masterfully.
Secondly, there's something wrong with the narrator, and I love it. As the story progresses, the narrator kept crossing lines, and not in the order of legal severity, but of moral crime. Is murder okay, if the one you murdered is a bad person? Can you blackmail friends, if it ultimately leaves them better of? How about murder again? The novel raises these questions, and leaves satisfying answers - not as a lecture or a lesson, but as effects on the main character's life. In addition, the novel is a discussion about art under capitalism.
Some of the narration was a bit wonky (due to simultaneously doing an after the fact-retelling and yet keeping the tension and mystery up), but it was saved by the excellent characterisation. Like in Donnelly's other novels, the characters' feelings were complicated, messy, and in that way very human, and she portrays them masterfully.