tylermcgaughey 's review for:

The MANIAC by Benjamín Labatut

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DNF at 55%. Initially I was pretty stoked on the "what if Bolaño wrote Oppenheimer" conceit, but as it went on I became increasingly convinced that Labatut didn't quite have the juice to pull off his attempted polyphony of narrators. They all eventually sounded like they had the same voice, a voice I came to find pretty tiresome, a drone without end amen. Another example for my ever-growing thesis that Most Novels Should Be Under 200 Pages Or Over 500 Pages.