SarahJ's review of Last Orders
Last Orders by Graham Swift
The weird thing about this book is I must have started reading it once before and forget that. Either that or I was having major deja vu, which quite honestly could be the case. I knew so many details that I otherwise can't explain. Maybe I read a review when it was published?
Anyway, the book was enjoyable, but definitely didn't seem to me like a Booker Prize winner. (I preferred Seamus Deane's "Reading in the Dark," which was shortlisted the same year.) Life could be beautiful, but it isn't. Life could be beautiful, but we're corralled by our own personalities and limitations. So instead of making difficult changes, we look for pleasure/comfort in small things, routines, cigarettes, beer.
The switching of narrators/points of view made it more interesting than it would otherwise have been. An Irish friend of mine said she found the book very funny, but that went over my head, maybe because of the vernacular lower-class British dialect. I didn't have any trouble underst...more
Anyway, the book was enjoyable, but definitely didn't seem to me like a Booker Prize winner. (I preferred Seamus Deane's "Reading in the Dark," which was shortlisted the same year.) Life could be beautiful, but it isn't. Life could be beautiful, but we're corralled by our own personalities and limitations. So instead of making difficult changes, we look for pleasure/comfort in small things, routines, cigarettes, beer.
The switching of narrators/points of view made it more interesting than it would otherwise have been. An Irish friend of mine said she found the book very funny, but that went over my head, maybe because of the vernacular lower-class British dialect. I didn't have any trouble underst...more
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