You need to sign in or sign up before continuing.
Scan barcode
A review by fearandtrembling
The Farm by Héctor Abad Faciolince
2.0
Surprisingly, this book was a drag. It has three interwoven narratives; three siblings think about their farm, and through their impressions and memories, the history of Colombia. Some interesting points about land ownership, capitalism, and political violence are bogged down by the individual siblings' bland bourgeois nostalgia. Problematic "opinions" about abortion, adoption, and homophobia among African-Americans are simply left unchallenged.
The prose is polished, graceful, lyrical. But it was so well-mannered and tedious. It was the final chapter that had any emotional heft; it puts into context modernisation & what people—whole societies—have lost in terms of their connection to nature. But 300+ pages to get to something moving doesn't make sense. In between, it felt self-indulgent, tepid; characters looping around the same solipsistic concerns. The structure didn't work for me.
However, please take my review with a grain of salt as I predict this book will be widely praised for being a sprawling saga and a modern "literary classic" about Latin America. It is part of that subgenre of literary fiction that gets rave reviews, the subgenre I'll refer to as, "The Pain and Anguish of the Middle Class: We Just Want to be Left Alone with Our Money and Property because The World Out There is Distasteful and Icky and Taking a Political Stand is Unsophisticated". It has received good blurbs from literary heavyweights and good advance reviews in Kirkus and Publishers Weekly. I'm sure it'll find its readers.
Thank you to the publisher for an advance reading copy via NetGalley.
The prose is polished, graceful, lyrical. But it was so well-mannered and tedious. It was the final chapter that had any emotional heft; it puts into context modernisation & what people—whole societies—have lost in terms of their connection to nature. But 300+ pages to get to something moving doesn't make sense. In between, it felt self-indulgent, tepid; characters looping around the same solipsistic concerns. The structure didn't work for me.
However, please take my review with a grain of salt as I predict this book will be widely praised for being a sprawling saga and a modern "literary classic" about Latin America. It is part of that subgenre of literary fiction that gets rave reviews, the subgenre I'll refer to as, "The Pain and Anguish of the Middle Class: We Just Want to be Left Alone with Our Money and Property because The World Out There is Distasteful and Icky and Taking a Political Stand is Unsophisticated". It has received good blurbs from literary heavyweights and good advance reviews in Kirkus and Publishers Weekly. I'm sure it'll find its readers.
Thank you to the publisher for an advance reading copy via NetGalley.