Boy, am I ever having a problem finishing books lately! This one has almost grabbed me, and I've made it to within 50 pages of its 230-page end, but I...moreBoy, am I ever having a problem finishing books lately! This one has almost grabbed me, and I've made it to within 50 pages of its 230-page end, but I can't help noticing it's been almost grabbing me since I started it, with no increase in my interest since. Granted, it's hard to read when you've just fallen in love, with a woman with three rowdy sons, and moved house 1000kms, and when you're not absorbed in deep conversation or communion or trying to entertain or discipline children can hardly focus your thoughts for wondering and hoping and worrying about the future. BUT how glorious it would be to have a decent book to escape into now and then! And this too youthful, too loosely constructed, too ultimately mundane and unchallenging, ever-so-slightly tantalisingly dreamlike but in the final analysis cod-realist episodic novel is just not enough! At times - at times - it seems about to break its bonds and careen into unreality, but too quickly it's back behind the safety barrier, as if its author were afraid to break the mold he has selected for his fairly safe, fairly unoriginal and not very inspiring ruminations on Europe and civilisation between the two world wars. It's frustrating, because somewhere in here is the spark of something that could really come to life, rather than the cardboard shadowplay of talking heads - dense with ludicrous coincidences - that this monument to authorial indecision so often becomes. You want to know what it's like, try early Paul Auster with a slight bit more naturalness and less weirdness (and a lot more sociology, rudimentary as it is). It's almost interesting, but I can't help suspecting Szerb of wanting to pay the bills more than he wanted to get to the root of anything, despite the meaningful poses he has his cartoon characters striking in various picturesque locations throughout. The modernist Auster? That's a 3-star maximum, no matter how you cut it. Now for f**k's sake what can I read that will grab me?!(less)
In a way it's reassuring that trite, lazy, self-consciously 'literary' writing is not unique to our time. Aside from that reassurance, I got nothing f...moreIn a way it's reassuring that trite, lazy, self-consciously 'literary' writing is not unique to our time. Aside from that reassurance, I got nothing from this. Not even worth cutting to pieces. A fart in the wind. (less)
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