Walter

Other People’s Dreams Can Be So Dull

Revisado: 09-15-22

With apologies to the author, this book is the worst. It’s a dreamy postmodernist farrago of buzzy notions that in fact make no sense and are dull upon listening. The text feels like it was composed with Mad Libs. This kind of phony meditative gobbledygook was awful when it first appeared - 40 or 50 years ago! - so it’s impossible to explain the positive review in a recent TLS that prompted my purchase. Ugh.

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One Question

Revisado: 06-07-22

Great start contrasting intellectual college reading with commonplace mating concerns, but I don’t understand why - or I regret that - the narrator allowed herself to be pressured - assaulted really - into so many shallow sexual relationships with brutish dumb men. It shows of course how potential trauma is everywhere for young women, but the author doesn’t transform or even comment on these ugly all-too-common experiences. Is this book purposely pre-me-too?

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Horrible

Revisado: 07-17-21

Recommended if you like amoral characters and black endings. At least it’s free to members!

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Infuriating

Revisado: 04-23-20

Both Quirke and Phoebe are written to be infuriatingly passive, and slow-witted. Phoebe allows herself to be drugged, and Quirke allows Mona and the twins to smart off to him repeatedly. A truly hopeless drunk as Quirke is depicted to be would have clenched her by the throat, smacked her across the face a few times and thrown her into a heap on the floor. “Watch the way you speak to me, you filthy whore.” Then, later Phoebe is drugged, Quirke goes in and accepts a drink! I hate stupid weak protagonists!

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It’s good, just not that useful

Revisado: 09-04-19

All the things I like in chick lit - lots of talk about clothes, cooking and love ... sisterly love, in this case. Interesting to me largely as evidence that literary fiction by young women is really still chick lit - if this is literary fiction. Anyway, to cleans my slate now some Saul Bellow stories, ha ha.

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Hmmm

Revisado: 07-13-18

Keith Gessen has a good literary reputation that this book won’t do much to protect. It reads like a memoir, and our main character is whiny, not very clever, and rather too impatient with his 80-plus grandmother — who turns out to be the sweetest character. I wish he had worked harder to plumb her fading memory, but it doesn’t seem to occur to him, even though she’s why he has returned to Moscow. So as a fiction it’s a drag, but in the end you’re rooting for him, not in his dumb everyday struggles, which occupy most of the text, but in his powerlessness as he is swept up in the oppressive society of this “terrible country.”

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Well...

Revisado: 10-18-17

...if you like a tale where the hero meets with one calamity after another, is insulted and wronged and never takes his recompense, then this book is for you. Nicely written and well-read, it nevertheless has a plot that disappoints.

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When she let her ex

Revisado: 08-22-17

put his hands on her without breaking his nose and causing a scene, having him arrested for assault, I knew the book was doomed to mediocrity.

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It should be an interesting movie

Revisado: 01-18-17

I read a lot of sci-fi as a kid, but no longer -- it's just too juvenile. I downloaded this audiobook after I read in the NYT that Spielberg was filming it, and I've got to say I'm astonished at how juvenile it is. Good maybe for nerdy boys age 10 to 12? I wonder if all popular sci-fi is this childish.

The book may make a fascinating movie, however. It's narrative takes place largely inside various video games and old TV shows and movies. The protagonist's avatar actually turns into these various characters as the action proceeds. Could be interesting.

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So annoying

Revisado: 09-03-15

Any additional comments?

Concept good, writing good, narrator good -- but I can't bear a weak heroine -- one who has to flee from her enemies, escaping their clutches only by accident. What's the point of being a robot and having no power? There's even a scene straight from the Perils of Pauline, where she has to squirm out of bonds holding her to a futuristic railroad track. She's doubly weakened because her "emotions" make her helpless. Is this some animus the author has towards women, ie that they're stupid? Anyway, it's a real waste of a character. I'm not finished yet -- right now the heroine has a slave chip in her head, and I'm not really looking forward to what boring trick the author uses to save her.

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