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Diario di un killer sentimentale

Luis Sepúlveda,

Ilide Carmignani (Translator)

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Jan 02, 2015 Bogdan rated it liked it

Shelves: mundus-novus

Interesting but quite unusual short novel. As the title says, it is a kind of diary of a professional killer with sentimental involvment. It is interesting as this is usually portrayed in main stream movies/books of the genre very superficial. It is usually another complication/obstacle in the main character quest that most of the time has a happy end. In Luis Sepulveda short novel, the character is ravaged by this sentimental involvment and there is no happy end to it.

The book message can be su Interesting but quite unusual short novel. As the title says, it is a kind of diary of a professional killer with sentimental involvment. It is interesting as this is usually portrayed in main stream movies/books of the genre very superficial. It is usually another complication/obstacle in the main character quest that most of the time has a happy end. In Luis Sepulveda short novel, the character is ravaged by this sentimental involvment and there is no happy end to it.

The book message can be summarized as "professional killers are not allowed to have sentimental relationships, otherwise they cannot do that occupation". It is something that pop movies and books with professional killers have made it a kind of unwritten law. For me this was not extremely interesting, so I'll give it a 2 for premise.

Regarding the form, I liked the writing style, using a first person narrator that does a little of self mocking. It is also not loosing the reader in a stream of consciousness writing. I'll give it a 4 for form.

In terms of originality, there are a lot of other main stream works around professional killers, a lot of movies especially, but also other novels. This one is original in the sense that it is not romanticizing anything regarding this occupation, nor simplifying it and focusing on action scenes ineherent for this topic. So I will give it a 2 for the level of originality.

On the characters, as it is a short story, apart from the main character, the others are not too well detailed. But the author does a good job to present the inner dialogue of the professional killer. So I will give it a 3 for characters.

Regarding the complexity and difficulty, I didn't noticed to have too much complexity, the story being fairly clear and with a single thread. As it regards the difficulty, there are also few references to cultural topics and it is not, according to me, to hard to understand the message. Thus I will rate it with a 2 for complexity and difficulty.

In terms of credibility, I doubt there are people doing professional killer work that have a normal value system, as it is the case of the main character. It seems that the narrator is just a kind of intelectual that ended up being a professional killer, without the guilt or plainly ignoring the moral of his profession. So my rating for credibility is 1.

The last criteria is edition. This ebook was fairly well checked and I had almost no issues with the usual misspeled words. Apart from that, there are not too many other things I can say about it, so I'll give it a 3.

To summarize, this was an interesting read. I would like to read more of what Luis Sepulveda wrote before I can decide if I like it or not. All in all, my final rating for it is 2.43, which I will round it to 3 on Goodreads system.


+--------------------------+-----------------+
| Criteria | Rating |
+--------------------------+-----------------+
|Premise | 2 |
+--------------------------+-----------------+
|Form | 4 |
+--------------------------+-----------------+
|Originality | 2 |
+--------------------------+-----------------+
|Characters | 3 |
+--------------------------+-----------------+
|Difficulty/Complexity | 2 |
+--------------------------+-----------------+
|Credibility | 1 |
+--------------------------+-----------------+
|Edition | 3 |
+--------------------------+-----------------+
|Total | 2.43 |
+--------------------------+-----------------+

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