This novel tells of the effect the Nazis arrival in a small Ukrainian town will have on a handful of characters. Initially the author does a great jobThis novel tells of the effect the Nazis arrival in a small Ukrainian town will have on a handful of characters. Initially the author does a great job of showing us the maddeningly naïve attitude of everyone in the face of Hitler's puppets. The only wise character is a young Jewish boy who flees from his home with his small brother. A German engineer, despite his reservations about the Nazis, is more concerned about the quality of the road he's building. A young Ukrainian girl can only think about the boy she wants to marry and the Jewish father of the missing boys is angry at his son even when he's been rounded up with all the other town's Jews and locked in a factory. The novel is written in clean simple prose. It is exemplary in following the show don't tell mantra. Introspection is kept to a minimum as the necessity to act acquires ever more urgency. And the author does a fabulous job at getting you to care deeply about the young Jewish boy and his brother in their quest to escape the Nazis. ...more
Emily Fridlund has created a fabulously complex and original character to narrate this novel. Linda is fourteen. Parental inadequacies have left her iEmily Fridlund has created a fabulously complex and original character to narrate this novel. Linda is fourteen. Parental inadequacies have left her in a vortex of social and emotional dysfunctionalities. (An only child, she still lives in a home that was originally a hippy commune.) This makes her an unreliable and sometimes maddening narrator. It's not a novel for those who want to like the central characters. Linda at times is difficult to like. But isn't that true of most adolescent girls?! One example of her wrong-headed acts is when she encourages a teacher she suspects of being a prey to sexual desires for under-age girls. (It's without question the most sympathetic portrait of a paedophile I've ever read which, of course, is highly dangerous territory.) Her relationship with this teacher is a sub-plot of a novel and falls in nicely with one of the novel's central questions - "It's not what you do but what you think that matters." The main focus is on the family who move into a house across the lake. Linda is employed as a baby sitter. She develops a kind of crush on the young mother and feels a visceral hostility to the husband, an older man who is a Christian Scientist. When she first meets him she is holding an axe. It's a wonderfully creepy narrative. Early on, we discover there is to be a trial, a snippet of information Fridlund inserts into the text and then suspensefully lets hang for a long time. The complex character of Linda with all her shifting light and dark energies is so deftly created that even murder doesn't seem beyond her. It includes a very tender and moving depiction of an essentially good but utterly hapless father. And it's also a very beautifully written novel....more
I'm afraid it's a no from me. I might be a little less severe in my criticism if this hadn't been nominated for the Booker. But that fact heightened mI'm afraid it's a no from me. I might be a little less severe in my criticism if this hadn't been nominated for the Booker. But that fact heightened my expectation. I couldn't help feeling that if this can make the Booker shortlist you can make a case for almost any novel to be there. I felt she got the idea for writing this book after seeing that Guy Ritchie film with Brad Pitt. I guess it's a kind of Robin Hood fable but any deeper meaning it had escaped me. A notorious prize fighter builds his son and daughter a home in the woods where they receive no education and have no friends. The obvious catatonic unhappiness of the daughter was completely ignored; likewise the catastrophic failings of the father as a father. The son, who narrates the story, deploys prose that is half way between Cormac McCarthy and Virginia Woolf. Simple acts, like entering one room from another, are way overwritten. Most of the narrative tension is focused on a one-dimensional baddie as if had it not been for him the family would be living in some kind of rustic nirvana.
This was her first novel and I'm sure she'll write much better ones when she has something to say and finds her voice. But I found this a typical first novel, full of window dressing but lacking in depth. ...more
Admiration rather than love is what I felt for this. Eventually, I found myself thinking it was too long and would have been more powerful as a novellAdmiration rather than love is what I felt for this. Eventually, I found myself thinking it was too long and would have been more powerful as a novella. The narrative voice of Reservoir 13 is just about as dispassionate as a narrative voice can be. It's like we see what goes on in this English village from a drone hovering overhead whose recording apparatus finds the interactions of human beings no more significant than the weather and the activity of wildlife. It's almost Homeric in its unrelenting insistence on the bigger picture and the timeless realm of life. The novel might be called Life Goes On because that's what life does here. Nothing seems to matter much. It breaks many of the rules of the novel but reminds you why these rules are important. There's no main character; no one character is any more central than any of the others or even than the foxes, badgers, swallows and herons. Characters who offer little dramatic tension occupy as much space as characters whose story holds more interest. It's a democratic novel. Everyone in the village gets a voice, no matter how dreary or instantly forgettable that voice might be. It's also a novel that makes no attempt to resolve any of the conflicts it sets up. Everything just fizzles out, like the fireworks every New Year's Eve. Reservoir 13 is beautifully written and composed with admirable artistry but its message is rather bleak - the author seems to find the flight of a heron more beautiful than anything human beings are capable of.Give me the more tried and tested form of the novel any day. I want to feel forceful emotion when I read, not be made to feel how insignificant we all are and how little anything matters in the long run!...more
Some books accumulate merit points as they progress; others have a habit of losing them. I'm afraid this fell into the latter category for me. It's seSome books accumulate merit points as they progress; others have a habit of losing them. I'm afraid this fell into the latter category for me. It's set up really well. The narrator is a nerdy guy who goes around recording ambient noise. No one likes him. Until Carter, a cool rich boy, takes a shine to him. Carter doesn't have much time for the digital age. He collects old r&b records, the older and more obscure the better. Carter carries all the ancestral guilt for the base means by which his family has built its colossal fortune. One day the nerdy guy records some street singer singing a blues song neither of them recognise. They upload it onto the internet and resurrect a vengeful ghost.
I was really enjoying this. I liked its esoteric quality and I was intrigued by the mystery it sets up. But when he introduces the twist the writing got a little too melodramatic and pretentious for my liking. The author has a bash at evoking a split personality in the manner of Fight Club and American Psycho but for me never pulled it off. I liked it when it occupied a small canvas; the minute it went out into a bigger world I often found myself rolling my eyes....more
Though I’m usually up for a game of Cluedo if I turn on the TV and there’s a whodunnit on I immediately change the channel. I’m not sure why since I’vThough I’m usually up for a game of Cluedo if I turn on the TV and there’s a whodunnit on I immediately change the channel. I’m not sure why since I’ve never read a whodunnit novel or watched a whodunnit series. It’s an instinctive thing. So I thought the time had come to investigate my instinctive indifference. This version of the genre attracted me because of the meta fiction angle – the story within the story structure.
An easy way of evaluating any novel is to compare the time consumed reading it and the nourishment received. I’m afraid I can’t say this emerged from this test with a very high rating. It’s entertaining but it’s also very very long. About the size of Anna Karenina, in fact.
I quite enjoyed the first narrative but began to get a bit bored and irritated when I had to go through the whole thing again. Paul Auster’s 4321 showed me retelling the same story in a different literary dimension is a difficult trick to pull off. For me, Horowitz only half pulled it off. The second narrative did interest me but I had soon lost interest in the puzzles of the first narrative. Soon I realised I didn’t much care who had killed Sir Magnus Pye. The final straw was when the narrator wants me to read a long excerpt from a fictional author’s novel and compare it with an extract from an unpublished author’s manuscript for signs of plagiarism. I skipped it. Once I’ve skipped even a sentence in a novel I’m reading it triggers a willingness, even an eagerness to skip whole passages. But then I have little interest in sleuthing. In some ways whodunnits are like crossword puzzles – too welded and tidy for my liking. Lots of clues are coded into the text using anagrams and allusions to famous whodunnit authors. Again of little interest to me, I’m afraid. And, of course, red herrings abound. There were some interesting musings on the nature of the whodunnit genre, most of all regarding its status as light entertainment rather than serious literature. One problem I had, is that in whodunnits people seem to murder their victims for essentially flimsy and implausible reasons. As if I murdered my window cleaner because he always deliberately missed two of my windows. All this said I reckon if you love whodunnits you’ll love this because essentially it’s very well constructed. And I did find it fascinating as a concept, perhaps unique to whodunnits, how to some extent the detective does your reading for you. However I think I will be sticking to the occasional game of Cluedo and continuing to ignore every crossword puzzle I come across....more
A coming of age story about a Dutch boy in WW2 who narrates his own story. This began well and I enjoyed the first half. The problems began when the wA coming of age story about a Dutch boy in WW2 who narrates his own story. This began well and I enjoyed the first half. The problems began when the war began and the writing took on a histrionic tone and the drama a forced artificial feel. The narrator really began irritating me with his immature megalomania and unrelenting intensity of expression. Every other sentence had the literary equivalent of cymbals crashing in it. Then there’s the fact that he makes so many idiotic decisions that I lost patience with him. Also the initial cast of characters who interested me all soon vanish and our narrator is acting in a kind of vacuum for much of the novel which meant there was little opportunity for subtle character development. Instead we get a rather heavy-handed blitzkrieg of horror, anguish and pain. I never really understood why he made any of the major decisions he made – why he chose to fight with the Nazis or why he suddenly decided to stop fighting for them. Did it never occur to him that the Nazis started the war and invaded his country? Instead he blames the Allies. This stance might be credible for a village bumpkin but surely not for someone well educated. I often had problems suspending disbelief. Often I was picturing the writer at his desk instead of the story he was telling.
All in all a bit too much like a fanciful boy’s adventure story for me, lacking the artistry or sophistication or subtlety of All the Light to which it’s compared....more
Sometimes when writing a review I'm torn between expressing my personal opinion of the book I've read and trying to imagine how others will feel aboutSometimes when writing a review I'm torn between expressing my personal opinion of the book I've read and trying to imagine how others will feel about the book. In other words I don't want to recommend a book others won't like! This is a book I loved reading but suspect others will struggle with. Because the narrative threads are at times obscure and difficult to reconcile.
Forest Dark is a very Jewish novel. Krauss has already shown she's a writer one of whose strengths and weaknesses is a desire to charm her readers. Often here it's as if Krauss is writing expressly for Jewish approval. So, though this is a far less self-consciously charming novel than History of Love ,she is again deploying charm as a tool. She is writing for and imagining the response of a specific audience. Or that's how it often felt.
The entire novel is set in Israel. Early on, the author confides that she is having problems writing and in many respects this is a novel about the processes of composing a novel, the virtual world between the writer and her fiction. The third person narrative about a rich successful Jewish businessman in the grip of an existential crisis is, we assume, the novel, the author is struggling with. The first person narrator who is once named as Nicole is mired in a failing sterile marriage and visits Israel in pursuit of her novel. She adopts a confessional voice as if she is telling us the truth and nothing but the truth. Except her life soon becomes more fictional than that of her novel's protagonist. True things happen in the virtual world; deception is often the reality in the real world. The narrator is embroiled in a madcap conspiracy theory about Kafka which Krauss does a good job of convincing us might be true. Everyone in the novel, including Kafka, has a divided self and is engaged in a struggle to reconcile outer and inner worlds. This is cleverly dramatized towards the end when Epstein, the fictional character, finds himself on a film set, dressed, in the guise of an extra, as King David. Nothing is what it seems in Forest Dark and yet it is a relentless excavation of truth.
I wasn't entirely convinced it worked as a novel - but then, often, it is asking the question, what is a novel? Krauss remains stringently loyal throughout to her themes and her writing is often wonderful. She has lots of interest to say about life and in the end I loved reading it....more