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A review by gwendle_vs_literature
Fog by Miguel de Unamuno
medium-paced
3.5
I discovered that this book exists when a conversation meandered in such a direction that it lead me to wonder whether the movie Stranger Than Fiction was based on a book. It wasn’t, but apparently it was inspired by Miguel de Unamuno’s Niebla (variously translated as “Fog” or “Mist”) which is often credited as being the first work of Magical Realism, and with which it shares its central conceit; a man discovers that he is a character in a work of fiction, and the writer is going to kill him.
This is a dense text, a little bit difficult to get through — like other modernist texts it’s a bit dense with some stream of consciousness, and like other absurdist texts it’s a little all over the place, dragging it’s heels through the inconsequential, and then finding itself at major plot points with very little indication of how it arrived there. Much of the humour falls a little flat more than a century after it was written, but the same is true of almost everything. And reading a work in translation tends to add another layer of obfuscation since cultural and linguistic differences (even of contemporary works, let alone works from 100+ years ago) something is always lost.
It’s an okay story, and apparently a highly influential one, so I’m glad I read it — but I struggled to enjoy it. If I revisit it in a few years (which I likely will given the trouble I went through to get my hands on a copy in English translation) I might like it more.
This is a dense text, a little bit difficult to get through — like other modernist texts it’s a bit dense with some stream of consciousness, and like other absurdist texts it’s a little all over the place, dragging it’s heels through the inconsequential, and then finding itself at major plot points with very little indication of how it arrived there. Much of the humour falls a little flat more than a century after it was written, but the same is true of almost everything. And reading a work in translation tends to add another layer of obfuscation since cultural and linguistic differences (even of contemporary works, let alone works from 100+ years ago) something is always lost.
It’s an okay story, and apparently a highly influential one, so I’m glad I read it — but I struggled to enjoy it. If I revisit it in a few years (which I likely will given the trouble I went through to get my hands on a copy in English translation) I might like it more.