Anna
So “Hild” is basically fan fiction about a Christian saint.
Although the plot is completely made up, the book is heavy on facts of life in seventh century, which is what makes it so impressive.
I loved the fact that the plot is driven by so many powerful and resourceful women.
I really wanted to give it 4 starts but there's a major plot hole that was very annoying—at some point the main character is told this great secret thing in a very thinly veiled way, which she then discusses with at least two people in a very thinly veiled way again, but later on in the plot she starts acting like she didn't know this secret thing and there's a part where she suddenly “realises” what the secret thing actually is. For a character who's supposed to be highly observant and intelligent, this is just completely unconvincing. Where were the editors?
There were so many tropes here that I liked.
Lepucki's vision of the post-collapse world is very similar to mine, although I had doubts about sustainability of the economy in which the Communities were supposed to prosper, given the lack of mass market and such. Where does all the money come from and how come it still has value? But hey, that's just me being picky.
I enjoyed reading this a lot.
Interesting enough, although quite dated in how it glazes over the entirety of online journalism with a single paragraph. Then again, the central theory of it still holds, no matter how irrelevant some of Lule's language might be when he talks of his field.
It was fun to be able to think of contemporary examples for each of the eternal myths that the book lists.
I don't think the author is a great fan of The New York Times.
I picked this up at a Heathrow bookstore hoping for a good holiday read and it didn't disappoint! I'm a bit weary of the ‘experimental fiction' format, but this book, with its iphone app, illustrations and browser screenshots, has actually turned out to be surprisingly smooth. All that extra material adds up to a truly immersive experience actually, and if you treat the iphone app as an approximation of google for the world of the book, it turns out all the more believable for it.
There's just so much good stuff here — crime, black magic, romance, loveable characters and loveable villains. It's a solid tome but I passed its halfway point on my short 2.5h flight, so as banal as it sounds, it is a real page-turner. The ending unspools with one twist after another, each trying to reclaim the narrative for a different genre (at some point it gets very meta, which was awesome). It's all tied up neatly at the end though.
It was a hugely satisfying read for which I have only one complaint, and that is: for a novel this cinematic — not only concerned with film making and story telling, but also obviously destined for the big screen — it paints its (obviously token) minority characters with the thickest possible brush. Those parts made me cringe so, so painfully. There's one episode in particular which is the Jar Jar Binks of Night Film, when the protagonists run into a clan of Chinese restaurateurs, then catch a ride with a Jamaican cab driver. None of those characters is given any depth and they all seem to be taken out of conservative comedy, in that instead of amusing you, they leave you annoyed — at the author. If this was supposed to be a statement on the stereotypical treatment of ethnic minorities in films (I really doubt it was), it backfired by taking some depth out of the whole story.
Wow, I have to say that this Knopf hardback might be one of the coolest I've had — everything from design and typesetting to how the paper feels is amazing. (/technical note)
Can't say I loved the content as much though. It's a great story, and the two male protagonists felt interesting and complicated. The Helen character seemed a little flat for the first few chapters, but about halfway through the book she started gaining more depth.
There's something strange about how Mengestu ignores setting. I'm not a fan of long and overly detailed descriptions, but I like to be able to ‘see' where a scene takes place, even if only vaguely. At times it felt like a book about Africa and the Midwest that was written by an author who'd never personally been to either (which of course is not the case here). There's something about Mengestu's style that just isn't quite my thing. I kept wishing for more dialogue as it's something that he does really well, but the book was full of introspections that felt a bit mundane.
Lee's prose is really beautiful and poetic. He made the novelty of narration by a collective ‘we' feel natural in the story; having said that though, the narration also felt inconsistent - at times its voice was recanting the story as if it was a folk tale, other times switching to omniscience, always keeping the reader at a distance from the main character. I'm not sure if this was intentional, but the ‘this is what we know of these events' voice vs ‘omniscient voice when convenient' felt a bit too much like slack editorial oversight.
The passivity of the main character is my main problem with the story. It was very hard to see just why other characters felt so much for Fan and wanted to further her despite her passivity. I expected this to be a typical quest narrative, but I'm not sure if this is an ingenious take on it with a message of the futility of trying too hard, or a failure to execute one of the simplest classical narratives in an engaging way (which is pretty had to pull off in a quest narrative! just ask any investigative journalist). Either way it didn't convince me, and large parts of the story felt completely redundant (although the quality of Lee's prose redeems them to some extent).
This is great and the erudition of the author is impressive. The logical problems and strategies he describes can really be applied to anything - and he shows that by applying them to all kinds of subjects, from computer science to biology and linguistics. The only reason why I couldn't finish reading it is that this book should really be completed in one sitting - I found that being distracted and going back to it, even to separate chapters, after a hiatus in reading would really interfere with my grasp on the author's train of thought. I hope to try again sometime though!
