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emberology
Montaillou: Cathars and Catholics in a French Village 1294-1324
Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie, Barbara Bray
Vinski of the Whole Town
My grandmother first read it to me out loud when I was at a sleepover at her house one summer. We had so much fun with this book when we found out about all the tricks and practical jokes Vinski did.
My grandmother first read it to me out loud when I was at a sleepover at her house one summer. We had so much fun with this book when we found out about all the tricks and practical jokes Vinski did.
Loses its strength a bit on the length, but the character of Uncle Silas almost makes up for it. He's multidimensional, mysterious and more than once got me to question his nature. Towards the end the plot thickens incredibly fast and you just want to race to the last page, even though it's clear how all's going to be finished. All in all a nice Victorian mystery, especially for the fans of The Woman in White.
Asian Studies
When I read the last words of Clea, I was disappointed. Disappointed because the story ended and because I had to leave Alexandria. Durrell describes it with such great passion and tenderness, that during some passages I was moved and almost teary-eyed. The glimmering sea, dusty streets, hedonistic carnivals, Arabic quarters... All that refused to leave my mind alone whenever I had to stop reading, due to boring everyday necessities. The four books gradually reveal the stories of Alexandria's people, those who are changed by the city. Despite however macabre their fates might be, Durrell's writing makes it seem beautiful and maybe slightly melancholic. All of their lives are tangled up in a huge web that spreads over Egypt and which is a catalyst for the events, events that represent the difficulty of loving someone, in all forms possible.
Asian Studies
I'm expecting a train wreck worthy of the Big Bang, but I seriously need to satisfy my curiosity. I mean, the thought of reading this has been banging in the back of my brain for weeks now!
* * *
Damn, where to begin... This was actually the first time during my entire life, that I wrote down stuff on a piece of paper while reading. Forsyth didn't make me bulge out of rage as I expected, he just more or less made me confused and annoyed. The book is still bad, though. Horrifyingly so.
Let's start with the preface, that so many users here have found downright insulting. Again, I was pretty scared when I started reading it, but didn't find it as bad as I thought. The brief recounting of Phantom's history was fairly interesting, but Forsyth's attitude towards Leroux's novel was at times a bit strange. For instance, he claims that "Leroux appears also to have made an error with the position, appearance and intelligence of Madame Giry, an error corrected in the Lloyd Webber musical". I mean, what the hell? The creation of an author can't be an error, it's just simply a creation which was meant to be like it was envisioned by the author. You can criticise it, but you cannot claim an ownership of something previously created by another person. Like Forsyth seems to be hinting, you certainly cannot claim that the product based on the original thing is the one and true only.
One thing in the preface does make sense: the suggestion that Erik's past told by the Persian in the novel is implausible. Why someone widely travelled and after being a contractor of the opera house where he would be bound to meet people, would suddenly reject all human contact and move under the opera house? I haven't read the book in ages, so I only need to presume the story of the Persian is how Forsyth tells it, which in my opinion as well is beyond comprehension. However, despite the inconsistencies in the actual story, I wouldn't go so far as to try to rebuke the whole Persian character and claim he is an utter liar in everything else as well, when clearly it might have been just a writer's mistake.
In the novel itself also, Forsyth seems to forget that Erik and the musical Phantom are two different manifestations of the same basic character. He chose to use the name Erik, yet the Erik we know from the novel is a sadistic psychopath compared to the musical Phantom, who is lonely, misunderstood and on the verge of a status of a romantic hero. You cannot mix those two and expect a coherent story, especially when Leroux didn't create a love story but a horror story. Although Forsyth claims that when you strip away the useless stuff you get an extremely romantic love story. If you're a blind illiterate and forget Leroux's intentions, then maybe.
Strangely, Forsyth also claims through Madame Giry that Bouquet was depressed and committed a suicide. We already know from the musical (which Forsyth is mainly basing his sequel on) that the Phantom hanged Bouquet, so he wasn't such a sweetheart either. Maybe the suicide was Lloyd Webber's original idea, and since he planned the sequel together with Forsyth it was never changed? Who knows, but it just seemed weird to further glorify the Phantom when he clearly made mistakes and resided in a grey villainous area.
Before I read that the Phantom landed on a desolate place full of outcasts, far from the bureaucracy of Ellis Island, I wondered why wasn't he turned back to where he came from, since in Ellis Island they were pretty strict about deformities and everything else that might have affected New York's shiny reputation. So at least that Forsyth got right. Then again, he seems to spend an awful lot of time in namedropping and describing stuff that doesn't have any relevance story-wise. In fact, if all that was stripped, only a small short story would have been left, if even that. A glaring inconsistency happened at the final confrontation, when the reporter claimed he heard what was said between Phantom and Christine. In the beginning he told us he couldn't speak a lot of French, yet the two must have been talking in French. Why would they use English, when their native language was French?
The thing that bothered me about the whole execution of the novel was exactly that: 90 percent of the story was told by someone else. In addition to the fact that the writing was clumsy and too modern, the characters didn't have distinct voices. There were even a couple of newspaper articles by some random people who didn't have a proper place in the actual story. All these different perspectives made the story seem like a real mess, and left all the characters (especially Phantom and Christine, let alone Raoul who could have been a mere footnote) paper thin and useless. I didn't recognise any personalities from either the novel or the musical, because there were no real personalities to discover. It's like Forsyth put everything hastily together during the course of one evening.
Some of the plot devices on the other hand were absolutely ridiculous, and more implausible than any that Leroux wrote. During the short amount of time that Christine spent at the lair of the Phantom, they presumably had sex. Um, right... I'm not denying there couldn't have been any feelings of affection or even love after all those years (despite the fact that the Phantom stayed invisible the entire time), but that Christine would have let him made love to her? Quite a laughable idea that she would have let things go so far, especially when considering that the character of Christine is angelic and innocent.
Anyway, Forsyth then goes even further by coming up with the idea that a child was born out of this moment of weakness, and that because de Chagny was shot in a tender place years ago and as a result couldn't conceive children (??), they knew the child was the Phantom's (he discovered this through a letter from Madame Giry). Well, in the end the poor confused child is made to choose between his birth father and the father who raised him. Quite strange, even if you didn't know that the child heard about his real father just a second ago, when Christine was shot by the Phantom's crazy sidekick. Well, what happens then? You guessed it, Pierre isn't at all scared by the Phantom's face and chooses him. I can't imagine this would happen in any real world situation.
What baffles me the most, is the participation of Andrew Lloyd Webber in this atrocity. I'm not exactly sure in what extent he was part of the writing process, but I know that a musical sequel went into planning relatively quickly after Phantom had premiered (the plans were eventually abandoned), and that apparently he had discussed with Forsyth about making a novel. That means that at any time he could have stopped Forsyth and cancel the whole novel. I have no idea what came to him that he didn't see the mess, but I only have to assume that he's either not much of a reader or that he was just too polite to say anything. What comes to Love Never Dies, the musical sequel that finally premiered in 2010 and was - gasp!- cancelled shortly after, it didn't have a memorable score and the basic idea of the ridiculous plot was retained. No offence Ramin, I still love you and forgive you for being part of it, because otherwise you wouldn't have been chosen to be the Phantom in the anniversary concert!
Wow, that became the longest review I have ever written. I just hope I never have to bump into this book ever again, even though I'm glad that I can now at least say that I read it. If some people think this is a completely plausible and well written story, I just can't take them seriously. It doesn't work as standalone novel due to the thinness of characters, let alone a sequel. I mean, if you're a Phantom fan, then by all means try it, but don't say I didn't warn you about not losing anything important by not hunting this down. Wait, there is one small plus to all this: it's short, so you can get it out of your system quickly!
The end.
PS. If you're interested in a Phantom sequel, I'd suggest you search for a fanfiction called Demons. Now, I read it years and years ago so don't hold me responsible if it turns out to be utter crap. I'm not even entirely sure about the name, but I do remember that in the Phantom community it was at that time regarded as one of the best ones.
* * *
Damn, where to begin... This was actually the first time during my entire life, that I wrote down stuff on a piece of paper while reading. Forsyth didn't make me bulge out of rage as I expected, he just more or less made me confused and annoyed. The book is still bad, though. Horrifyingly so.
Let's start with the preface, that so many users here have found downright insulting. Again, I was pretty scared when I started reading it, but didn't find it as bad as I thought. The brief recounting of Phantom's history was fairly interesting, but Forsyth's attitude towards Leroux's novel was at times a bit strange. For instance, he claims that "Leroux appears also to have made an error with the position, appearance and intelligence of Madame Giry, an error corrected in the Lloyd Webber musical". I mean, what the hell? The creation of an author can't be an error, it's just simply a creation which was meant to be like it was envisioned by the author. You can criticise it, but you cannot claim an ownership of something previously created by another person. Like Forsyth seems to be hinting, you certainly cannot claim that the product based on the original thing is the one and true only.
One thing in the preface does make sense: the suggestion that Erik's past told by the Persian in the novel is implausible. Why someone widely travelled and after being a contractor of the opera house where he would be bound to meet people, would suddenly reject all human contact and move under the opera house? I haven't read the book in ages, so I only need to presume the story of the Persian is how Forsyth tells it, which in my opinion as well is beyond comprehension. However, despite the inconsistencies in the actual story, I wouldn't go so far as to try to rebuke the whole Persian character and claim he is an utter liar in everything else as well, when clearly it might have been just a writer's mistake.
In the novel itself also, Forsyth seems to forget that Erik and the musical Phantom are two different manifestations of the same basic character. He chose to use the name Erik, yet the Erik we know from the novel is a sadistic psychopath compared to the musical Phantom, who is lonely, misunderstood and on the verge of a status of a romantic hero. You cannot mix those two and expect a coherent story, especially when Leroux didn't create a love story but a horror story. Although Forsyth claims that when you strip away the useless stuff you get an extremely romantic love story. If you're a blind illiterate and forget Leroux's intentions, then maybe.
Strangely, Forsyth also claims through Madame Giry that Bouquet was depressed and committed a suicide. We already know from the musical (which Forsyth is mainly basing his sequel on) that the Phantom hanged Bouquet, so he wasn't such a sweetheart either. Maybe the suicide was Lloyd Webber's original idea, and since he planned the sequel together with Forsyth it was never changed? Who knows, but it just seemed weird to further glorify the Phantom when he clearly made mistakes and resided in a grey villainous area.
Before I read that the Phantom landed on a desolate place full of outcasts, far from the bureaucracy of Ellis Island, I wondered why wasn't he turned back to where he came from, since in Ellis Island they were pretty strict about deformities and everything else that might have affected New York's shiny reputation. So at least that Forsyth got right. Then again, he seems to spend an awful lot of time in namedropping and describing stuff that doesn't have any relevance story-wise. In fact, if all that was stripped, only a small short story would have been left, if even that. A glaring inconsistency happened at the final confrontation, when the reporter claimed he heard what was said between Phantom and Christine. In the beginning he told us he couldn't speak a lot of French, yet the two must have been talking in French. Why would they use English, when their native language was French?
The thing that bothered me about the whole execution of the novel was exactly that: 90 percent of the story was told by someone else. In addition to the fact that the writing was clumsy and too modern, the characters didn't have distinct voices. There were even a couple of newspaper articles by some random people who didn't have a proper place in the actual story. All these different perspectives made the story seem like a real mess, and left all the characters (especially Phantom and Christine, let alone Raoul who could have been a mere footnote) paper thin and useless. I didn't recognise any personalities from either the novel or the musical, because there were no real personalities to discover. It's like Forsyth put everything hastily together during the course of one evening.
Some of the plot devices on the other hand were absolutely ridiculous, and more implausible than any that Leroux wrote. During the short amount of time that Christine spent at the lair of the Phantom, they presumably had sex. Um, right... I'm not denying there couldn't have been any feelings of affection or even love after all those years (despite the fact that the Phantom stayed invisible the entire time), but that Christine would have let him made love to her? Quite a laughable idea that she would have let things go so far, especially when considering that the character of Christine is angelic and innocent.
Anyway, Forsyth then goes even further by coming up with the idea that a child was born out of this moment of weakness, and that because de Chagny was shot in a tender place years ago and as a result couldn't conceive children (??), they knew the child was the Phantom's (he discovered this through a letter from Madame Giry). Well, in the end the poor confused child is made to choose between his birth father and the father who raised him. Quite strange, even if you didn't know that the child heard about his real father just a second ago, when Christine was shot by the Phantom's crazy sidekick. Well, what happens then? You guessed it, Pierre isn't at all scared by the Phantom's face and chooses him. I can't imagine this would happen in any real world situation.
What baffles me the most, is the participation of Andrew Lloyd Webber in this atrocity. I'm not exactly sure in what extent he was part of the writing process, but I know that a musical sequel went into planning relatively quickly after Phantom had premiered (the plans were eventually abandoned), and that apparently he had discussed with Forsyth about making a novel. That means that at any time he could have stopped Forsyth and cancel the whole novel. I have no idea what came to him that he didn't see the mess, but I only have to assume that he's either not much of a reader or that he was just too polite to say anything. What comes to Love Never Dies, the musical sequel that finally premiered in 2010 and was - gasp!- cancelled shortly after, it didn't have a memorable score and the basic idea of the ridiculous plot was retained. No offence Ramin, I still love you and forgive you for being part of it, because otherwise you wouldn't have been chosen to be the Phantom in the anniversary concert!
Wow, that became the longest review I have ever written. I just hope I never have to bump into this book ever again, even though I'm glad that I can now at least say that I read it. If some people think this is a completely plausible and well written story, I just can't take them seriously. It doesn't work as standalone novel due to the thinness of characters, let alone a sequel. I mean, if you're a Phantom fan, then by all means try it, but don't say I didn't warn you about not losing anything important by not hunting this down. Wait, there is one small plus to all this: it's short, so you can get it out of your system quickly!
The end.
PS. If you're interested in a Phantom sequel, I'd suggest you search for a fanfiction called Demons. Now, I read it years and years ago so don't hold me responsible if it turns out to be utter crap. I'm not even entirely sure about the name, but I do remember that in the Phantom community it was at that time regarded as one of the best ones.