Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close - A Micro Review

Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close by Jonathan Safran Foer

My rating: 2 of 5 stars


I can see why this book is divisive in the reviews. It's well written, but it's over the top. If it was just Oskar, it'd be okay I think, not great cause he's a pain a lot of the time, but better. It's the grandparents and their storylines that sink it for me. Thomas was interesting for a chapter, but I couldn't take him as a sustained character, and Grandma just needed to - I don't know what but ugh.

The idea is great, the people left behind dealing with the spaces in the landscapes of their lives. And there's some powerful writing in there. But overall, the characters and the total story, just don't carry it for mine.



View all my reviews

Bernhard Schlink's The Reader - A Micro-Review

The Reader by Bernhard Schlink

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


What to say about The Reader? Unsettling, thought-provoking, uncomfortable. They all come to mind as ways to describe it. It's also well written, compelling and convincing; while I know the line between truth and fiction is always blurred and especially so in historical fiction, there was a need to remind myself this is not autobiography. Not directly anyway.

But even now as I sit here, having finished it 12 hours ago, I don't know how to feel. But, that's the point isn't it? Schlink has thrown out the rule book on how to feel about such a sacrosanct subject. I do not know Hanna, cannot know her, the narrator in the end does not know her and he knew her better than anyone else. We don't know what she did, why she did what she did or anything else. Only that what she did was, by usual standards unconscionable. Should I even want to understand what can only be condemned?

There are no answers here. Only the questions, and are they not the same questions we must ask ourselves? Are not the same atrocities being enacted around the world on differing scales right now? Do we not ignore, allow, condone such acts? Should we seek to condemn wholesale, or do we try to understand?

The novel suggests that history seeks to build a bridge between the past and the present and the historian must therefore be an active participant in both. In telling of the past here, Schlink builds that bridge, and in crossing it to see the past the reader must confront questions of the present.



View all my reviews

26 Views of the Starburst World - A Micro Review

26 Views of the Starburst World: William Dawes at Sydney Cove 1788-1791 by Ross Gibson

My rating: 2 of 5 stars


I found this book frustrating as it swung from fascinating history with interesting musings to wild conjectural ramblings that had no basis and seemed to contradict some of the actual history. At the same time, it could just be a historical fiction novel written with the wild conjectures as a given, and then I'd think there was basis and accept things that could be fanciful, so I'm glad Gibson flagged his 'divinations'. On the other hand, he'd then make statements about Dawes with no reference to how he knew such things about him, were they conjecture or based on what few accounts he had to draw on? I may never know.



View all my reviews