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A review by kyatic
Aristotle and Dante Discover the Secrets of the Universe by Benjamin Alire Sáenz
2.0
I thought I was going to really like this book. It had been lingering on my 'to read' shelf, along with all the other books that I was going to buy just as soon as my pay came in, for months, and I was so excited to read it.
Boy, was I disappointed. For so many reasons, this book just really, really didn't do it for me.
First of all, the dialogue was atrocious. It was really stilted and artificial. And hey, I don't usually have a problem with that; novels are works of fiction, constructs, and I don't mind setting aside realism for stylistics. I do have a problem with it, however, when this comes at a detriment to the novel. The most prevalent dialogue no-no in this book was the constant unnecessary repetition. Every three pages or so, a character would say something to another character and the character would repeat it. For example (paraphrasing the surrounding verbs but the speech is ad verbatim):
'"It's too bad," I said.
"Too bad," said Suzy.
"Too bad," said Gina.
Too bad.'
At first, I thought it was just the narrator who spoke like this, and that it was maybe just an interesting dialectal quirk. Maybe it said something about the nature of his character, that he held onto other people's things and made them his own. And then I realised that it wasn't just him. Every character did it. Every single one. All the time. It got to the point where I just groaned out loud whenever I saw it happen.
Another issue was that the two main characters constantly refer to each other by name in speech when you just wouldn't. There was one moment when Ari says three lines of speech to Dante, and he uses his name in every single sentence. "_____, Dante." "______, Dante." "Dante, ________". The reason was that the writer didn't like using dialogue verbs, so he had to make it clear who was speaking. It just didn't work.
The third dialogue issue was that everyone spoke the same. Everyone. No-one had any interesting prosodic features. They all spoke in the same short, staccato sentences. Like this. All the time. Saying things that they thought were profound. But they weren't profound. And they used conjunctions at the start of it all*. And I'm not a grammar Nazi, really, but there comes a point where you just want to grab the author and shake him by the neck and say 'stop what you're doing, can't you see it's not working?
I'm not a huge YA fan. In my experience, most YA seems to be made up of improbably intelligent teenagers saying things that seem improbably smart on the surface, but mean jack shit when you look deeper. Ari comes out with this kind of thing. Stuff like 'I thought it might be a great thing to be the air', and 'maybe we just lived between hurting and healing', and 'the summer sun was not meant for boys like me. Boys like me belonged to the rain'. It irks me. Teenagers are not dumb. Teenagers don't need to be force-fed this faux-philosophical bullshit that doesn't mean anything. Teenagers can comprehend meaningful things, so why shove empty sentences like that down their throats? It's a common trend in YA - John Green is horribly guilty of it - and I don't know, maybe I'm just too far from my teenage years to appreciate it, but the whole thing seems masturbatory and patronising.
The narration was also poorly written. It's told in first person, and Ari, the narrator, is obviously supposed to emulate a (not so) typical teenage boy. This means that the author keeps using filler speak like 'yeah', 'really', 'like' in the narration, and it begins to grate after a while. Add that to the fact that the author doesn't seem to know how teenagers converse with each other - an actual quote from a letter written by one teenage boy to another is 'have you ever drunk a beer? Done pot? Let me know', which I think sounds like those meme Twitter accounts with names like @definitelynotacop - and it makes for an incredibly inauthentic text.
And hey, like I said - I don't mind inauthentic. Give me constructs. Give me style in abundance, just so long as there's substance to back it up, and I really thought that substance was lacking in this one, despite the fact that it basically stood up and shouted 'hey, read me, I'm about the meaning of life'.
But like I said, maybe I've just outgrown YA. It's a shame; I was a teenager before YA really came into its own as a genre, and I think I have to accept that I really did miss the boat on this one.
*yes, I was intentionally imitating the book at this point, so don't murder me!
Boy, was I disappointed. For so many reasons, this book just really, really didn't do it for me.
First of all, the dialogue was atrocious. It was really stilted and artificial. And hey, I don't usually have a problem with that; novels are works of fiction, constructs, and I don't mind setting aside realism for stylistics. I do have a problem with it, however, when this comes at a detriment to the novel. The most prevalent dialogue no-no in this book was the constant unnecessary repetition. Every three pages or so, a character would say something to another character and the character would repeat it. For example (paraphrasing the surrounding verbs but the speech is ad verbatim):
'"It's too bad," I said.
"Too bad," said Suzy.
"Too bad," said Gina.
Too bad.'
At first, I thought it was just the narrator who spoke like this, and that it was maybe just an interesting dialectal quirk. Maybe it said something about the nature of his character, that he held onto other people's things and made them his own. And then I realised that it wasn't just him. Every character did it. Every single one. All the time. It got to the point where I just groaned out loud whenever I saw it happen.
Another issue was that the two main characters constantly refer to each other by name in speech when you just wouldn't. There was one moment when Ari says three lines of speech to Dante, and he uses his name in every single sentence. "_____, Dante." "______, Dante." "Dante, ________". The reason was that the writer didn't like using dialogue verbs, so he had to make it clear who was speaking. It just didn't work.
The third dialogue issue was that everyone spoke the same. Everyone. No-one had any interesting prosodic features. They all spoke in the same short, staccato sentences. Like this. All the time. Saying things that they thought were profound. But they weren't profound. And they used conjunctions at the start of it all*. And I'm not a grammar Nazi, really, but there comes a point where you just want to grab the author and shake him by the neck and say 'stop what you're doing, can't you see it's not working?
I'm not a huge YA fan. In my experience, most YA seems to be made up of improbably intelligent teenagers saying things that seem improbably smart on the surface, but mean jack shit when you look deeper. Ari comes out with this kind of thing. Stuff like 'I thought it might be a great thing to be the air', and 'maybe we just lived between hurting and healing', and 'the summer sun was not meant for boys like me. Boys like me belonged to the rain'. It irks me. Teenagers are not dumb. Teenagers don't need to be force-fed this faux-philosophical bullshit that doesn't mean anything. Teenagers can comprehend meaningful things, so why shove empty sentences like that down their throats? It's a common trend in YA - John Green is horribly guilty of it - and I don't know, maybe I'm just too far from my teenage years to appreciate it, but the whole thing seems masturbatory and patronising.
The narration was also poorly written. It's told in first person, and Ari, the narrator, is obviously supposed to emulate a (not so) typical teenage boy. This means that the author keeps using filler speak like 'yeah', 'really', 'like' in the narration, and it begins to grate after a while. Add that to the fact that the author doesn't seem to know how teenagers converse with each other - an actual quote from a letter written by one teenage boy to another is 'have you ever drunk a beer? Done pot? Let me know', which I think sounds like those meme Twitter accounts with names like @definitelynotacop - and it makes for an incredibly inauthentic text.
And hey, like I said - I don't mind inauthentic. Give me constructs. Give me style in abundance, just so long as there's substance to back it up, and I really thought that substance was lacking in this one, despite the fact that it basically stood up and shouted 'hey, read me, I'm about the meaning of life'.
But like I said, maybe I've just outgrown YA. It's a shame; I was a teenager before YA really came into its own as a genre, and I think I have to accept that I really did miss the boat on this one.
*yes, I was intentionally imitating the book at this point, so don't murder me!