Which I absolutely hate.
I'm only reading it because I promised someone I would. Which reminds me, I had better stop making such stoopid promises.
Because the book irritated the hell out of me.
Granted, the writing was quite prosey and lovely and fluid and descriptive and beautiful. And the story was fantastically ethereal and surreal.
But it was bloody pointless.
There are books who touch you and make you cry or hate or just make you sad; there are those who make you laugh; there are those who give you insights into different worlds - past, future, present and far away, or merely merely non-existent; there are books who allow you to live vicariously through another; and there are books who are mindlessly entertaining; and there are others who are min-numbingly boring but at least informative. But you come away with something, however remote, however miniscule.
But this book did nothing for me. Absolutely nothing. It just irritated the hell out of me. Well, the finicky amongst you will argue that the book did provoke some kind of emotion, albeit merely irritation.
I will categorise this book as "Irritating" or otehrwise known as "I will never ever re-read. Ever". It won't even belong to the category of "I will want to read again if it's not so boring and/or tedious and/or irritating because it's informative/provocative/impresseive". And honestly, I don't have many books in that category.
Now I'm thinking of reading his Love in the Time of Cholera, just to find out whether it's the Nobel Prize winning author who is writing pointlessly, or merely this particular "daringly original works of the twentieth century" tome which is more pointless than pointless.
Maybe I'll feel less irritated. Or maybe it'll just give me 100 years of choleric diarrhoea.
2 comments:
:D
So would I be correct in assuming you didn't like the book then? I'm so sorry for recommending it! I for one found it absolutely gripping right up until I put it down three quarters of the way through and didn't pick it up again! (And yes, I was waiting for you!) I will finish it though just so that I can join you in your little blog-book club, and review it too! Though so far I find it, although admittedly, slightly pointless, touching, sincere and modest... And isn't that what most books lack nowadays? a touch of modesty? I rate it above The Da Vinci Code anyway. (How odd is that, just as I wondered whether or not I could compare it to Freakonomics, I glanced at the television, to see a local business owner called Steve Levitt being interviewed - Freakonomics was written by another chap called Steven Levitt!) All the same I doubt you'll like Love in the Time of Cholera, there's a line in there, in which I think Dr Juvenal Urbino says (One of the principal characters)“Always remember that the most important thing in a good marriage is not happiness, but stability.” And that in a way reflects the style in which the book is written, which builds up, very slowly, to a slightly disappointing climax.
After all, ultimately, literature is nothing but carpentry. With both you are working with reality, a material just as hard as wood.
Even the comics are way better than The Da Vinci Code.
And actually, I thought that one-liner from the Cholera book makes quite a lot of sense, as to what 100 Years doesn't seem to have.
And whatever do you mean by modesty?
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