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A review by cheryl1213
Waiting for Sunrise by William Boyd
2.0
There's a lot going on in this novel (provided to me by the folks at Harper), which opens with Lysander Rief's time in Vienna in 1913. Rief is a British actor who has come to Vienna to tackle a sexual problem with the help of a Freudian analyst. During his stay, he meets and has an intense affair with Hettie Bull. It is Hettie's false claim of rape that leaves Rief in debt to the English government and sets up his subsequent involvement investigating a case of wartime espionage, the plot that forms the basis of much of the story. Family, love affairs, and the psychological concept of "parallelism" cross frequently into the tale.
I feel like I missed something here. I simply did not enjoy Boyd's writing style. It felt very cold and detached and I never developed any involvement into the story. Boyd seems to have many devoted fans but I just can't count myself as one of them. It felt like he threw too much into the book and that detracted from my experience. I was most interested in the psychoanalysis plot line but that compromised a fairly small portion of the story. I found the plot convoluted and I had trouble keeping all the players straight. I seem to be in the minority among early readers, although it may be that other advance copies went to Boyd devotees. For me, two stars.
I feel like I missed something here. I simply did not enjoy Boyd's writing style. It felt very cold and detached and I never developed any involvement into the story. Boyd seems to have many devoted fans but I just can't count myself as one of them. It felt like he threw too much into the book and that detracted from my experience. I was most interested in the psychoanalysis plot line but that compromised a fairly small portion of the story. I found the plot convoluted and I had trouble keeping all the players straight. I seem to be in the minority among early readers, although it may be that other advance copies went to Boyd devotees. For me, two stars.