A review by ioanastoica
Sleepers by Lorenzo Carcaterra

1.0

I feel almost bad giving this a one star review, because this is a true story, and the story is harrowing, tragic, and all the more chilling for having actually happened, but it was impossible for me to read this book: the style is absolutely banal, the language reads like a newspaper expose and holds not even an infinitesimal speck of inspiration, tension, or beauty. I would read Carcaterra's reminiscences if they were in the form of a longer New Yorker article, but cannot sit through an entire book. I don't usually read modern American memoirs, so maybe I'm not used to the style... the closest I've come to memoirs are works like Solzhenitsyn's Gulag Archipelago, and that is a masterpiece of philosophy and literature as well as a "true story".