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A review by ergative
The Chosen and the Beautiful by Nghi Vo
Did not finish book. Stopped at 30%.
Oh, dear. I like Ngho Vo's novellas so, so much, so I was hoping that she would do something here that would please me. But it was an uphill battle from the start, given how profoundly I dislike The Great Gatsby; and this was not a reimagining so much as a retelling of the same story , with the same characters, from a slightly different perspective, with elegant little adjustments to the world to add bits of beautiful magic.
The bits of beautiful magic were wonderful, and very effective. In The Great Gatsby, there's a moment towards the beginning when Nick enters Daisy and Tom's massive East Egg mansion and sees Daisy and Jordan sitting on divans, all light and airy and floaty, as if they'd been floating around the house and settled down to earth just before he entered. A nice image in the original, and Nghi Vo takes it and makes it literal: This book opens with Daisy and Jordan drinking a potion and literally floating around the mansion to see the house from a novel perspective--get it? get it? This book is TGG from a novel perspective. It's all very literary.
Unfortunately, it's all very literarily a retelling of The Great Gatsby, which is characterized by some nice descriptive turns of phrase that are utterly inadequate to rescue a tiresome, boring tale about tiresome, irritating people doing tiresome, stupid things. Likewise, this book has some lovely images, but it has a lot more long, boring passages of people having tiresome reflections about life and society; and I just don't care enough about either the characters or their views on society to follow them on this journey. It's very tiresome.
If you like TGG, you'll probably enjoy this book: it does all sorts of clever Discourses with the source material, and the writing style is quite similar. Nghi Vo is an excellent writer. But if you don't like TGG (like me), you'll probably find this book too similar to the source material in all the ways that made TGG disagreeable for even Nghi Vo's elegant touch to rescue it.
The bits of beautiful magic were wonderful, and very effective. In The Great Gatsby, there's a moment towards the beginning when Nick enters Daisy and Tom's massive East Egg mansion and sees Daisy and Jordan sitting on divans, all light and airy and floaty, as if they'd been floating around the house and settled down to earth just before he entered. A nice image in the original, and Nghi Vo takes it and makes it literal: This book opens with Daisy and Jordan drinking a potion and literally floating around the mansion to see the house from a novel perspective--get it? get it? This book is TGG from a novel perspective. It's all very literary.
Unfortunately, it's all very literarily a retelling of The Great Gatsby, which is characterized by some nice descriptive turns of phrase that are utterly inadequate to rescue a tiresome, boring tale about tiresome, irritating people doing tiresome, stupid things. Likewise, this book has some lovely images, but it has a lot more long, boring passages of people having tiresome reflections about life and society; and I just don't care enough about either the characters or their views on society to follow them on this journey. It's very tiresome.
If you like TGG, you'll probably enjoy this book: it does all sorts of clever Discourses with the source material, and the writing style is quite similar. Nghi Vo is an excellent writer. But if you don't like TGG (like me), you'll probably find this book too similar to the source material in all the ways that made TGG disagreeable for even Nghi Vo's elegant touch to rescue it.