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A review by zjunjunia
The New Confessions by William Boyd
5.0
My third Boyd and it just continues to reaffirm my fascination and appreciation of his writing. Reflecting back, I see his stories as a graph. Starting gently, with a small gradient as he helps introduce the character. And what is quite interesting is many of those aspects and stories from the protagonist's childhood foreshadow the behaviour and results in the future. The curve, however, starts to get steeper and reaches one of its turning points. And then there are a couple more of those. A major plot shit and then us getting used to it to then once more be faced with a significant change. There is a distance-preserving homomorphism that maps this curve to the graph which charts the amount I read each night - an isometry. Because although I can start slow, I soon reach a point where I have to put the book down as I physically cannot keep my eyes open. I think this is what also makes Boyd such a great screenwriter though I am yet to see any of his work (planning to see the TV adaptation of Any Human Heart).
I digress and use inaccurate mathematical analogies (forgive me those who have studied some level of university mathematics). The story starts in Edinburgh, a city I love, spends time in Berlin and LA, places I am keen to visit, and gets deep into filmmaking across both World Wars. I had not heard of Rosseau before this but from what I understood, this story is inspired by Rosseau's life story which he captured in his autobiography, The Confessions. Thus the apt title, 'The New Confessions'. Yet it is not simply a modernisation but a clever story which not only acknowledges but makes the inspiration the central theme of the book as it follows our protagonist through the many years of him writing the film adaptation of The Confessions. The only wonderment I'm left with is whether our protagonist ever realises that his attraction to Rosseau's story was because he saw himself in it?
I digress and use inaccurate mathematical analogies (forgive me those who have studied some level of university mathematics). The story starts in Edinburgh, a city I love, spends time in Berlin and LA, places I am keen to visit, and gets deep into filmmaking across both World Wars. I had not heard of Rosseau before this but from what I understood, this story is inspired by Rosseau's life story which he captured in his autobiography, The Confessions. Thus the apt title, 'The New Confessions'. Yet it is not simply a modernisation but a clever story which not only acknowledges but makes the inspiration the central theme of the book as it follows our protagonist through the many years of him writing the film adaptation of The Confessions. The only wonderment I'm left with is whether our protagonist ever realises that his attraction to Rosseau's story was because he saw himself in it?