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Just reread this and loved it all over again. Boyd's novels tend to follow the same framework, following a single man for a number of years, weaving him into interesting places and pieces of the 20th century. Here, the protagonist is Lysander Rief, a minor London stage actor who has gone on sabbatical to Vienna in 1913. He's there to seek a cure for a very private ailment of a sexual nature, and has heard that the nascent psychoanalytical movement might be just the ticket. The first third of the
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This is my second William Boyd book, and like Restless, the execution of what sounded like an interesting premise did not live up to the promise of a gripping read. The early chapters in Vienna got me excited to see how everything would unfold, but as things did unfold, it turned out there was not much to it. The references to parallelism and Freud didn’t really materialize into anything. The drama with Hetti Bull was ‘meh.’ The espionage was boring.
"What college were you in?" I asked him, not surprised to be not surprised that he'd been an Oxford undergraduate.
I like the "not surprised to be not surprised" part.
Lysander's kind of a naif, an oaf. But he likes walking.
This is entertaining but kind of messy/confusing and it's not entirely believable. (Aha! In fact, it has a lot to do with lies and parallelism.) It's vivid, has lots of street names and pretty landmarks, but I'm afraid it's pretty forgettable. I liked the Vienna section best, w ...more
I like the "not surprised to be not surprised" part.
Lysander's kind of a naif, an oaf. But he likes walking.
This is entertaining but kind of messy/confusing and it's not entirely believable. (Aha! In fact, it has a lot to do with lies and parallelism.) It's vivid, has lots of street names and pretty landmarks, but I'm afraid it's pretty forgettable. I liked the Vienna section best, w ...more
A little disjointed but entertaining.
This one suffers from a few too many ideas and not enough editing, which makes the whole book feel rather leaden and flat. The reveal at the end is too obvious, while other elements of the plot that are much more intriguing get summarily dropped with a 3-sentence writeup in the final chapters. Glimmers of promise, but ultimately frustrating.
Mar 20, 2012
silly_soup
marked it as to-read
Apr 19, 2012
C.
marked it as to-read
May 21, 2012
Chris Hammer
added it
Sep 24, 2012
Tim
marked it as to-read
Feb 06, 2020
Lisa of Hopewell
marked it as to-read
