The Chase

Oh, dear. I just did not enjoy anything about his novella and I know I'm supposed to. While there are moments here and there that almost remind me of Fran's Kafka's “The Trial,” “The Chase” ends up being really boring.

I forget where I heard of this title, but I do remember being attracted to the idea of the movements of Beethoven's “Eroica” being woven through the story.

While pages and pages of paragraphless prose worked in Joseph Conrad's “Heart of Darkness,” they do not work here. Certainly, being on the run is less than glamorous and would contain long stretches of extremely tedious and hungry times, but I don't really want to read about it. I can't know if the translation has any impact on the quality of this work when read in English.

Several reviewers compare this novella to Gabriel Garcia Marquez's work, to which I can find little comparison. This wasn't magical realism from what I e experienced of the genre.