octavia_cade's Reviews (2.64k)

This is just really rather tedious in its endless, endless rambling. I can't quite see myself giving it one star, because many of the sentences are attractive creatures and some of the imagery is lovely. Strung together, the whole should be more appealing than it is but the horrible shapelessness of it, the entire amoeba-like structure, made it something I had to force myself to finish. Like listening to a slightly dotty old relative meander relentlessly through a (supposed) story after half a bottle of sherry, it's something to suffer through out of politeness rather than enjoy.

I don't have a "once is enough" shelf but if I did this would be on it.

I refuse to give this one star, on the grounds that the writing itself is excellent - Nabokov certainly knows how to turn a phrase. If only he could have understood texture, because this is the same consistency all through.

Look, the subject matter is revolting. Humbert is a paedophile rapist, but he is also the most one-note character I've read for quite a while. He is a small man and an evil one, but in a fictional character small and evil are no barriers to interest. There are plenty of small and evil men who are fascinating to read about. He is not one, because added to the smallness and the evilness is sheer fucking tedium. He whines and whines and whines all the way through the book, more obsessed with his own feelings than he ever is with Lolita or hers. It is 300+ pages of absolute consistency, and the homogeneity of it was so crushingly dull that it took me days and days to read because, once the first shock of unpleasantness was over, it was all the same. I am reminded of a mosquito at night: the small sensation of the bite, and then that endless, unwavering drone.

Perhaps the small whining could have held my interest had this book been cut down to novella size, but as it is, it felt much longer - so much painfully longer - than its relatively low page count would suggest.

Beautifully written, but proof positive that science fiction and fantasy aren't the only genres suffering badly from bloat. This book is extremely repetitive, and I can't help but feel it would have been more effective at half the length - partly because half the length would give us less time with the main character.

I can't really call this a romance. It's more of an obsession, as a spoilt young man self-indulges his way into emotional martyrdom while essentially wrecking the life of his love object in the process. For Fusan, sadly, is an object - the protagonist, who is a most unpleasant creature, is so much in love with himself and his own (self-inflicted) suffering that he spends approximately zero time considering what his constant hounding is actually doing to the poor girl he purports to adore. I'm left with the feeling that the author thinks I should somehow admire and/or pity this man for the depths of his love and heartbreak? I don't. What I felt for Kemal was an amazingly constant sense of contempt. I think you'll understand when I say I both kept reading in the hope that he'd off himself and was simultaneously certain that his burning desire to ostentatiously wallow in misery would prevent him from doing any such thing.

So why does this get three stars from me? As I said, it's beautifully written. At no point did I stop admiring, and being conscious of, the skill by which the words were put together. Even towards the end of the book, when I was honestly pretty sick of both character and story, I was still appreciating the language. That counts for a lot with me.

I feel a bit bad giving this book two stars. It is ambitious and literate; the writing is accomplished. I've certainly rated other books at a higher level than I otherwise might, out of "this is a good book, but not quite my thing" feelings, because I can still recognise quality work even when it's not to my taste. And the thing is, there were parts of this book that I did enjoy.

But it's just so bloody interminable. You'd think decades of reading SFF would have accustomed me to bloat, but this is so sprawling, so slack, so self-indulgent in its meanderings that it honestly drowned out, for me, a lot of the more interesting qualities of the book in a way that went past "not for me". I was so irritated, for example, by the seemingly endless chapter on the hen and the Goatwriter (which had no relevance to anything as far as I could see, and seemed to exist solely in order to increase the word count) that I nearly gave up on the whole book right there. Instead I gritted my teeth and went on to the end, but I had to force myself to do it.

Getting to the end was a relief.

Interesting read, mostly for the untethered nature of the narrative, I think. I'm not sure that that's a very good descriptor, but "untethered" is the word that came to mind while reading it; I sort of felt as if I were floating through the story, never quite latching onto anything other than imagery.

That imagery is the real strength of this book. It's vivid and disparate, a kaleidoscope of sensory detail. It quite overshadows the main character. The story is told in the first person, and Arminto, our protagonist, is one of the most colourless narrators I've read in quite some time. Perhaps that may have contributed to the sense of floating, as he seemed to have absolutely no personality. Sort of a passive, drifting vacuum, constantly waiting for the next thing to happen to him. This lack of characterisation doesn't seem to apply to the supporting cast, all of whom are clearly, if briefly, delineated, so I can only assume it's the choice of the author to make his main character such a non-entity. I'm not altogether sure that I see why, all I know is that I felt no connection whatsoever to Arminto. The beauty of the imagery is a compensation for that, but not a complete one.

I always comes away from a Rushdie novel feeling a little drunk on words, and Fury is no exception. It's typically words and images and ideas balanced precariously on top of each other, and the exploration of dolls and images and politics, the stories we make up to explain the fundamental moments of our lives, is fascinating if sometimes unfocused.

I'm not hugely familiar with Steinbeck - but now I really want to be! I had no expectations of this book, but when I finished it I was just so glad that I'd taken the opportunity to read it. It's delightful, and so well and minutely observed! (And with quite a lot of marine biology; as someone who spends her grad-student time waiting on tides and messing about in the intertidal zone, I was very taken with Doc.)

It's not really a typical novel; more a sequence of vignettes about people living on the Row, but it was wry and compassionate and genuinely-believing-the-best-of-people and I was utterly charmed.

Definitely going to read more Steinbeck! If I like the rest of his stuff half as much as I liked this it'll be worth adding him to the ever-increasing pile of books threatening to topple over and smother me in my sleep.

I'm not actually certain that I like this book. I'm fascinated by it, I admire it deeply, and I'm frequently confused by it (I've just finished reading it for the second time and I'm still not sure I've grasped exactly what's going on)... but enjoyment? That comes in patches, and is heavily influenced by intellectual appreciation rather than emotion.

So why four stars? Basically, I appreciate ambition. And this is quality work, if a bit too muddled for perfection - because that confusion I mentioned before? It's not all my fault; the structure is overly complicated, more for showing off than story I think. But the scope and the imagination and the thought behind this is incredible.

Penelope's view of the Odyssey, and a damn sight more interesting than that ever was, in my opinion. I love the use of the poor murdered maids as Greek chorus, and the sprinkling through of poems and trials and even a really fascinating mini-essay on a possible basis for the myth. Thoroughly enjoyable.

This is the first time I've read Morrison and I've just been blown away. This is excellent, and tragic, and horrifying and I was mesmerised. I only stopped reading it last night because I couldn't keep my eyes open any longer (nothing to do with the book!) and I gobbled down the rest today, completely incapable of helping myself.

Beloved, the title character, is going to stick with me for a long time. There's this curious mix of revulsion and pity and the hair-standing-up-on-the-back-of-neck around her, and it's not hard to see that indulging her will lead to trouble (and that it's going to happen anyway, because why wouldn't it?).

It's just wonderful. I don't give five stars very often (the curse of grading books on a bell curve!) but I wasn't far into this at all before it was plain it was a cut above my normal reading fare.