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A review by randireth
Ordesa by Manuel Vilas
1.0
Well... this was unbearably boring...
It's not that it's badly written. In fact, the prose is, at times, really good. It's dry but poetic, it can make you think and it can make you laugh. The problem is that this man has very little to say. This novel should have been 100 pages long at most, not nearly 400! It becomes repetitive and annoying. We get it: you're miserable, your parent are dead, everyone dies and when it happens nothing remains, nothing matters. You didn't know your parents, and yet you feel like you're just like them.
The tone of it all is just the typical tone of the middle aged intellectual man that whines about his life, drinks too much, finds it impossible to remain faithful to his wife and has a somewhat misanthropic view of the world (but towards the end becomes a bit more hopeful). It's been done before and by far better writers. And it's incredibly frustrating to read about someone complaining about how poor they are when they seem to be thoroughly middle-class, and are even invited to lunch with the king and queen of Spain because they're such a fancy author. Furthermore, the narrator/protagonist/author's capacity for self reflection is non-existent. For instance, he concludes that all the problems he has with his sons as they grow up is just how all relationships between parents and children develop, it's destiny, a law of nature - it has nothing to do with his alcoholism or the fact that he cheated on their mother...
The poems at the end are just the same as the rest of the text, just with shorter lines.
It's not that it's badly written. In fact, the prose is, at times, really good. It's dry but poetic, it can make you think and it can make you laugh. The problem is that this man has very little to say. This novel should have been 100 pages long at most, not nearly 400! It becomes repetitive and annoying. We get it: you're miserable, your parent are dead, everyone dies and when it happens nothing remains, nothing matters. You didn't know your parents, and yet you feel like you're just like them.
The tone of it all is just the typical tone of the middle aged intellectual man that whines about his life, drinks too much, finds it impossible to remain faithful to his wife and has a somewhat misanthropic view of the world (but towards the end becomes a bit more hopeful). It's been done before and by far better writers. And it's incredibly frustrating to read about someone complaining about how poor they are when they seem to be thoroughly middle-class, and are even invited to lunch with the king and queen of Spain because they're such a fancy author. Furthermore, the narrator/protagonist/author's capacity for self reflection is non-existent. For instance, he concludes that all the problems he has with his sons as they grow up is just how all relationships between parents and children develop, it's destiny, a law of nature - it has nothing to do with his alcoholism or the fact that he cheated on their mother...
The poems at the end are just the same as the rest of the text, just with shorter lines.