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A review by bookpossum
First Person by Richard Flanagan
3.0
Some people tell stories lightly, a trotter with a light sulky racing along behind. Others are like an elephant slowly dragging a train, but slowly the train moves. And then there are the truly great storytellers like Heidl. They ride you, and you gallop faster and faster, thinking only ever that is what you want and you are never aware - until it is too late, far too late - that on your back is a rider, that you are being ridden to your death, and that there is now no way of stopping the story becoming you.
This paragraph encapsulates for me what happens in the book as the narrator Kif gradually finds himself somehow taken over by the man whose autobiography he has been hired to ghostwrite.
I found the book difficult because for me the narrator was such an unsympathetic person - a boy who had shot animals and watched them die, later a young man (admittedly stressed by poverty) turning on his pregnant wife as if his situation is her fault.
So I can't say I enjoyed it, but I admired what Flanagan achieved. One thing made me curious: why did he refer to a bird which appears at a crucial moment in the story as a black jay? Perhaps the White-winged Chough is known in Tasmania by this alternative name.
This paragraph encapsulates for me what happens in the book as the narrator Kif gradually finds himself somehow taken over by the man whose autobiography he has been hired to ghostwrite.
I found the book difficult because for me the narrator was such an unsympathetic person - a boy who had shot animals and watched them die, later a young man (admittedly stressed by poverty) turning on his pregnant wife as if his situation is her fault.
So I can't say I enjoyed it, but I admired what Flanagan achieved. One thing made me curious: why did he refer to a bird which appears at a crucial moment in the story as a black jay? Perhaps the White-winged Chough is known in Tasmania by this alternative name.