Jak
Difficult read, very frustrating. Felt deliberately confusing at times. The book is purely just a transcript between two characters, with zero punctuation in McCarthy's usual style. While this can work for his other books, where there's actual narration, in a book that's purely just back-and-forth dialogue, it made it extremely easy to get mixed up with who was talking. I honestly didn't understand why he chose to do it this way. As a stylistic choice, it doesn't make any sense; there's a note at the very beginning explaining that this is a transcript of various voice recordings from interviews between a doctor and a patient, but in real life, even transcripts have various notes about non-spoken audio elements in the recording. This had none of that, it was PURELY dialogue, with various things like tone or 'off-screen' actions (like someone breaking down and crying) having to be inferred from extremely vague context clues. Also, I'm pretty sure the copy I was reading might've had a typo, in the sense that a certain piece of dialogue didn't have a line break in the proper spot, so it completely threw me for a loop about who-was-saying-what. Upon finishing, I also read some stuff that made it seem like I'm missing out by not reading the other companion novel, but with how frustrating this was to read, I don't have any desire to do so any time soon. Overall felt like a chore to read. However, I did enjoy some of the sections of dialogue, especially the bits about the nature of madness, and the various implications about the doctor's personal life that aren't directly stated.
Difficult read, very frustrating. Felt deliberately confusing at times. The book is purely just a transcript between two characters, with zero punctuation in McCarthy's usual style. While this can work for his other books, where there's actual narration, in a book that's purely just back-and-forth dialogue, it made it extremely easy to get mixed up with who was talking. I honestly didn't understand why he chose to do it this way. As a stylistic choice, it doesn't make any sense; there's a note at the very beginning explaining that this is a transcript of various voice recordings from interviews between a doctor and a patient, but in real life, even transcripts have various notes about non-spoken audio elements in the recording. This had none of that, it was PURELY dialogue, with various things like tone or 'off-screen' actions (like someone breaking down and crying) having to be inferred from extremely vague context clues. Also, I'm pretty sure the copy I was reading might've had a typo, in the sense that a certain piece of dialogue didn't have a line break in the proper spot, so it completely threw me for a loop about who-was-saying-what. Upon finishing, I also read some stuff that made it seem like I'm missing out by not reading the other companion novel, but with how frustrating this was to read, I don't have any desire to do so any time soon. Overall felt like a chore to read. However, I did enjoy some of the sections of dialogue, especially the bits about the nature of madness, and the various implications about the doctor's personal life that aren't directly stated.