Findlaigh

Absolute Perfection

Revisado: 10-13-24

The charm of Muriel Sparks understated pre-feminist feminism shines by virtue of its subtlety and comedic elegance.

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The worst Louise Penny experience I've ever had...

Revisado: 09-29-24

Oh the tedium... the story itself is the true murder victim here. It's been long- drawn and quartered, its severed remains strewn across a dense forest of overwrought verbiage.
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Anyone interested in knowing what happens next must wade through acres of relentless and overwrought hyper descriptives in looped repetition.

Every morsel of food, every beverage consumed is detailed, as are the tables and chairs used. When the characters aren't eating they're thinking about food, talking about food or walking around with food. The visual, sensory, tactile and olfactory elements of every
scene are detailed in the graceless prose of travel brochures and restaurant menus...

I must point out, in the interest of fairness, that I might have found the ceaseless fillers less objectionable if someone had told the narrator how to pronounce the name of one of the central characters - basically calling her John instead of Jane with jarring repetition.

More jarring, though mercifully less repetitive, is his mispronunciation of 'Québécois'. The 's' must be silent to indicate plurality or nationhood. When the 's' is sounded, the word is a singular modifier, feminine form, meaning 'of Quebec', like the mispronounced and misgendered Jeanne (Jane)


Of course the narrator is not responsible for the manifold cultural and idiomatic offences against Québec's Two Solitudes.
I've been confused about cultural appropriation...Ms Penny has illumined me.

But who, in the name of all that is holy, decided on the form of this audiobook?
Shame on you.

There is nothing more damaging to the suspension of disbelief than assigning foreign nationalities to fictitious characters and placing them in scenes where, perversely, they are compelled to eschew their shared language and speak to each other in thickly accented English.

This production is a disaster.

A fine story, badly written. Where was the Editor?

A smug narration by someone who could read well and but could not act. Dialogue was rendered with very little nuance. People seemed to be snarling even when they were speaking kind words

I apologize for making a rant out of a review but this production pushed all my buttons. Though I suspect if the form had been worthy, the content would have been more palatable ....

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Original story, predictable outcome

Revisado: 09-23-24

(potential spoilers)
I'm confused about the author's intent. Was I supposed to know the antagonist's identity from the start?
There were no surprises here, no suspense, and certainly none of the promised twists and turns.

I read it as a slice of life novel though the second narrator's cringing style nearly made me pack it in...

The only mystery here is the absence of mystery.

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A Litany of Tropes...

Revisado: 04-23-23

I finished this reductive neo-feminist demi rant for one reason; hope.

The story's formulaic misandry is so cloying and claustrophobic that i allowed myself to believe it was allegorical, a self parody.

I hoped the story would arc away from the dense foliage of banality to a clearing where the cooler heads of animated woodland creatures prevail. The reader, teleported from the soot gritted riverbank sidewalks, stale stagnant acrimony g geitfrom from the admirablfrom the

the reader Beneath a canopy of azure skies, and chirp expansively the cautionary tale.

and query the madness, the divisiveness, the sheer perversion of the dark obfuscatory forest wherein women dwelled for millennia without agency or personhood....and darkness beckons yet again, and so swiftly it will come if we persist in saturating the literal and figurative landscape of
st saturating every inch of our lives - work, leisure, culture, and movie of the week - ugliness over virtue.

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An Appetizer Impersonating a Main Course

Revisado: 04-10-23

This is a short story stretched to novel length with predictable results

The mystical element is undeniably evocative but there's no structural support for the premise. The book is crowded with characters but they're diluted or distilled into caricatures, none of whom stand out as clear protagonists.

There's no discernable story arc, only a singular but unspectacular mystical event on repeat.
O Tedium. O Redux.

This is a clever bit of whimsy, allegorical short fiction; a novel story but not enough story to fill a novel.

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I am bathed in awed gratitude...

Revisado: 02-08-23

Richard Chaplin Ayoade is a charming young man who knows all the best English words and pronounces each of them with flawless precision. I suspect he's one of the dozen or so people under the age of fifty who understands the nuances of the semicolon.

This delightful micro opus brought me laughter and philosophich+al consternation; is the pervasive auto eroticism of the narrative sollipsistic or soul-searching? And what of all those hours in the bath? Is the protagonist seeking absolution through ablution?

But none of that matters (especially since I made it all up) What matters is my gratitude to Mr. Ayoade for liberating me from the lonely prison of my contempt for the widely and wildly revered Terence Malick, perpetrator of yard upon yard of drearily facile acid flashbacks disguised as movies.


It's awfully nice to discover common ground with someone i respect and would like to see naked.


There are some production quirks in the sound quality and pacing of this book. They're not intolerable but might have been had I paid full price. I feel somewhat disloyal, especially in light of my revelations, but while I absolutely recommend acquiring this book, I can't quite recommend acquiring this book at full price or credit. I absolutely endorse the content but there's a problem or two with the form ...

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The Lovely Lady and the Unlikeable Nobody

Revisado: 11-29-22

The fictional main character's disingenuous and irksome predictability, not to mention the self pitying chip she wears on her shabbily clad shoulder, were minor irritants I happily endured throughout the overlong prelude of her ascendancy because I assumed she would flourish into a person of admirable substance.

I don't think my assumption was particularly naive; writers of fictional biography who entrust the telling of the story entire to a fictional character are bound, like mythical matchmakers of threesomes, to create someone who not only complements the subject of the biography, but does so in coherence with public perception.

Just as we would expect a villain to be the fictional storyteller of a Mafia Don's life, or a crooked politician at the centre of crooked politician's rise and fall, it makes good sense for Princess Margaret's story to be told by a Lady in Waiting. But there's more to it than career credibly or verisimilitude, what we really need from our make believe insiders, be they knave or noblewoman, is to like them. And, if you'll indulge my unfortunate threesome analogy a final time, we need to feel they like the person whose story they're telling.

i might not have disliked the main character quite as much had the author chosen the First Person POV. There's nothing more baffling to me than the use of the Third Person when the narrative is entirely restricted to a single character. What's the point? Why create such distance between reader and storyteller? Had she used her own words, I might have found the Honourable Whatsername less hypocritical, censorious, prudish, snobby and unempathic.

The book isn't badly written, it's badly designed and rather wayward.

I abandoned it in the early sixties, when Princess Margaret meets Anthony Armstrong Jones.
The author's "take" on Margaret's behaviour at that time is, in my view, as disingenuous as it is disrespectful.

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Melodic, melancholic, and intensely personal

Revisado: 06-15-22

Julian Barnes is the Magus of first person storytelling and a revelator of human souls.

Anthony Webster reaches his sixties without knowing an awful lot about himself.

He's on friendly terms with his ex-wife of twenty years, but somewhat distanced from his daughter.

Barnes' PoV brilliance is a sleight of hand; while faithfully delivering Webster's exculpatory and naive 'face value' account, he infuses the narrative with subliminal snippets...

We don't have specifics, but nor do we have doubts about the failed marriage and the filial frigidity. Magic.

The story begins with a death notification - an inheritance from someone Webster met briefly,long ago.
He pursues the mystery behind the inheritance with enthusiasm - eager to revisit his youth, the truth, and become self-aware.


If you're interested in this book because you enjoyed the movie, and it certainly is a good movie, just know that the book is more sombre, more contemplative. It's Barnes, so you will chuckle, but some of the light hearted elements of the filmed version are licensed and not part of the book.

Simon Vance is a genius, and this is among his best work. I recommend book and movie. In that order.

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esto le resultó útil a 4 personas

Almost a WWII anthology...

Revisado: 02-20-22

Waugh is dead serious writer. His satire is sombre, his lightest jibes leave scars, and his quips have heft. He delivers subtext through peripheral characters and his protagonists are often unwordly, even artless.
On the page, a Waugh hero can almost be viewed as a sacrificial lamb; we care for them from the start and wish we could ring them up and say "look, this is a Waugh story, you're headed towards a life-altering loss of innocence, read some Schopenhauer or something before you leave the house..." But a Waugh character would only offer a few polite words of appreciation and gently recradle the phone. Imbued with optimism, faith in humanity, and unerring decency, a Waugh character sallies forth...

An audible Waugh character casts a more complex shadow, particularly in a first rate production. And these are first rate productions - absolutely stellar.

Audible Waugh characters at war, at least for me, do not delight. I could not engage, couldn't keep up with the characters, and everything seemed soaked in testosterone and cynicism. It's astonishing in a way - familiar and well loved words rendered too potent for comfort when heard.

...so the second half of this collection felt oppressive, claustrophobic, even turgid at times. I am setting it aside for now and I will try again.

If you're not keen on Waugh's war stories, or indeed any war stories, this might not be the collection for you.

For those who are, you won't find better....

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esto le resultó útil a 2 personas

Overington's brilliance is her restraint...

Revisado: 12-15-21

...And vice versa.

I'm not terribly interested in criminology or crime reporting, but I am grimly and endlessly fascinated by the flawed social machinery which manufactures criminals and victims, often interchangeably, and always with impunity.

Overington writes inside the blurred margins where everyone is to blame and no one is accountable.

Through shifting and cyclical POV, she creates an elegant literary democracy and eschews traditional black and white portraiture in the service of this democracy.

Forget that other franchise, the shades of grey offered here are perplexing, elegant and unerringly genuine.

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