Wassim
It's never a good sign when something that's barely two hundred pages feels like a slog. I liked the idea of a novel being told through several connected ghost stories, but after a relatively interesting start, it fell off very quickly and never recovered. The writing is pedestrian (sometimes insultingly so), the messaging is ham-fisted, but worse of all, it's just boring. There is no tension, there are no scares, the characters are flat with no development, and I found myself skimming by the end just to be done with it.
I'd like to see/read a better version of this, whether as a full novel or a short story, because it's a shame such an interesting idea got wasted with such mediocre execution.
Edit 3/27: I got a notification that someone had liked my review and was confused. Then I realized I'd completely forgotten I ever read this book
I'm not sure it's fair to give this an actual rating given its intended audience. I loved these books as a kid and wanted to revisit them over two decades later, but the writing is hard to stomach and full of every YA cliche imaginable (not to mention the characters suffer from all-too-common problem of “Adult doesn't know how to write teenagers”). It's a shame because this is a great concept, and in the right hands it could have been something that holds up into adulthood. Might read a couple more, but I might also just toss out my original idea of marathoning the entire series, even if they are short and easy to read.
I wanted to like this a lot more than I did, and while I was invested in the first few chapters, my interest quickly tailed off the further I got into the book. What should be a fascinating piece of historical fiction instead ends up being a boring slog through an unfocused narrative.
There's no cohesive story here; rather, you follow multiple characters throughout with some degree of overlap. This wouldn't be a problem if the characters were memorable, or at least, different to one another, but they're all bland and all speak and think in the exact same way, making it easy to forget who's who. I think it says a lot that I didn't find a single character compelling until Have You Seen, who only shows up in the final twenty or so pages (a novel about her joining Spanish soldiers during the war would have been better than what we got here).
Topping it all off is the MFA/workshop “voice” that plagues so much of modern fiction: forcing fragments and short, clipped sentences when something longer and flowing would have served the narrative better; a bizarre aversion to using conjunctions; dialogue that sounds like writing, not like people; an obsession with explaining everything to the reader, generally through “as-if” comparative clauses.
Here's one example:
The darkness dulls. The world emerges from the night. It is there before me, hinting at its expanse
This isn't bad, it's serviceable, but that's all it is. Here's a quick rewrite:
The darkness dulls and the world emerges before me from the night, hinting at its expanse
This won't be the last book I read with these issues (though I wish it was), and I can't, for the life of me, understand why so many writers insist on choking their prose and making it anonymous rather than taking risks, or at least, varying it up. Fragments and staccato writing have their place, but they're just one tool in the toolbox; it's a real shame that too many writers insist on using only two or three tools through their novels, leading to generic “voices” and real missed opportunities and disappointments, such as What We Tried to Bury.
I think I heard about this on the Life on Books podcast, and I thought it sounded it interesting, and on the surface, it should be: it's a novella told in unbroken narration (there are no chapters) whose timeline jumps without warning, in which the protagonist recounts her travels from Argentina to and across Europe, detailing the people she meets and jobs she's worked, all of which is set against a murder that she may or may not have played a role in.
While I wasn't expecting a thriller, the murder and its investigation seemed like an afterthought against the backdrop of the protagonist detailing her journeys. That's really it. Reading through, one can't escape the feeling that Dimópulos wrote this as introspective story, then decided to toss in a half-baked murder plot for extra texture. What's more, despite being less than one-hundred-forty pages, All My Goodbyes struggles to justify even being that long; had it been any longer, I most likely would have DNFed and moved on.
It doesn't help that the writing is often weak and repetitive. A couple of simple examples:
She, Julia, who was pure understanding, who was the patron saint of the mentally ill, who believed in explanations and the happiness of others.
This can easily be pared down without losing any of its effect:
Julia, patron saint of the mentally ill, who believed in explanations and the happiness of others.
If we're referring to someone as a “patron saint” who believes “in explanations and the happiness of others”, it's safe to assume they're “pure understanding” (or pure of heart, more broadly).
Another:
We're never still. Even rest is a kind of movement,” I told a man a few months ago, a man lying prostrate and still in his bedroom. An old, sick man. His hands and feet were useless to him.
I'm not sure what the intention here is; is it rhythm? Dramatic effect? Because all I see is bloat. But this is also an easy fix:
“We're never still. Even rest is a kind of movement,” I told an old man a few months ago, lying prostrate and still in his bedroom, his hands and feet useless.
There's no need to repeat “man” three times in the such a short space, and once that's solved, the rest of the passage is simple: since it's made clear from the off that he's an “old man”, we can remove the rest, and remove the mention of him being “sick”, since this excerpt already tells us that 1) he's old; 2) he's “lying prostrate and still”; 3) his hands and feet are useless. This communicates his health just as well as being explicitly told he's sick.
I don't know how much of this is down to translation, but even if that were the problem, a stronger translation still wouldn't fix the inherent issue of this just not being particularly interesting.
I wanted to like it more than I did, but frankly, it was a disappointment.
Somewhere in the multiverse is a book that balances the personality of Selling the Dream with the more in-depth research of Little Bosses Everywhere. After the interesting, but dry, nature of the latter, this book seemed much livelier at first, setting up for a fun read. Instead, the author's “teehee look how funny and sarcastic I am” white girl shtick got old, and grating, very quickly, in addition to generic and repetitive writing structure. I see from a few other reviews that apparently she hosts a podcast that's covered a lot of this material, and in that light, the poor writing makes sense: it reads like someone trying to simply translate the podcast into written form (and without ever having listened to it, I also got the impression that a ghost writer may have been paid to try and translate her personality to the page).
Between this and Little Bosses Everywhere, I'd still recommend the latter, though if you're a big fan of her podcast, or if you can overlook the repeated attempts at humor, this isn't the worst thing you'll read.
Sitting between a 3 and 3.5. Thought it started strong, despite the poor writing and apparent lack of editing, and I found Sara particularly endearing as the protagonist. The father's shtick got a little repetitive/grating after a while (though he does make for a good “love-to-hate” type of character for how over-the-top he is), none of the women outside of Sara seem to have any real agency or desire to fight for it, and I thought the novel rushed a little bit to get to the end. And while Sara does have her challenges at college, she seems to overcome them a little too conveniently just so the plot could move forward. It's ironic that, at roughly three-hundred pages, this book is both too long and hurried.
Viewing it purely as a work of fiction, it's mediocre, but as an insight into the lives of Jewish immigrants in the early twentieth century, especially for someone who isn't Jewish, I found it very interesting.
This is actually the first Palahniuk book I've read, and on this evidence, it might be my only one for a while. There are some good lessons in here and amusing anecdotes, but the writing style got old, repetitive and grating pretty quickly; more worryingly, it sounded generic. This isn't a bad book by any means, just nothing special either.
That said, the ending is excellent, and one well-worth hanging onto:
What if all of our anger and fear is unwarranted? What if world events are unfolding in perfect order to deliver us to a distant joy we can't conceive of at this time?Please consider that the next ending will be the happy one.
This is, undoubtedly, the worst book I've ever read.
The cover caught my eye at the local bookstore, and the premise sounded intriguing enough, but everything falls apart very quickly: the writing is laughably amateur, the characters have zero depth or development, and the entire story hinges on incredible coincidences (“Oh ho ho, how about that, the college student who found the blog in the first chapter happens to show up in the same hospital room as this other character investigating the murders later on to spill exposition that will help him!”), as well as what I think of as “mic drop” moments, instances where the reader is supposed to be “shocked” at the “twist” and you can feel the author clearly jerking himself off over his own perceived cleverness. There is no mystery to solve because Uketsu makes sure to explain every single goddamned thing in the book (multiple times, no less) before you get the chance. Not that you'd have been able to anyways: the “mystery” is so contrived, and so contingent upon convenience and leaps of logic, that even a tag-team of Poirot and Benoit Blanc would've given up and found a different line of work.
I refuse to believe anyone over the age of fifteen actually found this well-written, or complex, or deep, or anything other than the heap of garbage that is. I saw another comment mention that Uketsu wanted this book “to appeal to people who don't read”, and if we're evaluating it by that standard, then sure, this might be good if you're borderline illiterate and/or have never read anything beyond a picture book (and even then, Dr. Seuss and Richard Scarry have better prose and more depth than this bullshit).
At the very least, I now have a litmus test for whether to trust someone else's taste. What a godawful book.
I don't know if this is a translation issue or if the original prose was similarly lackluster, but what seemed intriguing ended up reading like someone's MFA capstone project. I finished this and promptly forgot about it to such an extent that I didn't realize I hadn't even logged it until nearly three months later
