Tag: 1 star

Moving Review

This book gets 1 old house out of 5. This house should look more ominous, but all the photos of ominous houses were small houses, and I decided that a big rich person house was more important. The point being that luxurious, beautiful facades can actually be the most false and misleading ones.
[There is a beautiful, light yellowish Gothic-inspired house sitting amidst some green trees.]
  • Why did I pick this book up?

A few months back, I got some books at the bookstore on their infamous 3/$10 table. This was the last book from that pile. Honestly, I was pretty excited for it, but had left it til last because it was the longest, and I had read a ton of long books in the past few months.

It was also right before Christmas, and I knew that I would be able to go get some new books soon, so I figured that again, should read what I already own.

  • Would I recommend why/why not?

As evidenced by my rating, I did not like this book. Typically, I would not recommend books I did not enjoy. So that goes for this book as well.

I would not recommend this book because it was asinine as hell, the big reveal and payoff was so not worth it, and the characters were dumb and annoying. Also the metaphors this writer used at times were actually goddamn insane and left me laughing in confusion. So I guess that could be a reason to read the book; have a laugh!

Actually, I recommend this book if you are wondering how NOT to write a book. If you have a kind of cool story percolating in your head, read this book first and ask yourself “is my story more interesting than this one?”

If the answer is “no,” then DO NOT WRITE A BOOK WITH THAT STORY. If it’s more interesting than Moving, it may not necessarily be a good book, but it will definitely be better and more interesting than Moving so that could be a great argument to convince a publisher to give it a go?

  • Quick Synopsis  **SPOILER ALERT FROM HERE ON, DO I EVEN HAVE TO SAY IT?!**:

So this story is told in a non-linear manner, and from three different point of views. I will give a brief overview.

The book starts with Edwina, an old lady who lives by herself in a big house that is quickly falling into disrepair. We learn that Edwina was widowed young, with two twins, Rowena and James. She remarries a man who has a son around the same age as her twins, Lucas. Her step-son hates her and his dad’s new family, which like, fair. He’s a damn child, he’s supposed to be childish. I’m trying to think of what details are relevant, because honestly there is a lot of tedium. I’d say Edwina’s section is the most interesting because she is an unreliable narrator by virtue of her impending dementia and also has some commentary on how shitty and hard it was to be an independent career woman in the “good old days”.

We realize that Edwina is essentially totally alone: her second husband has been dead for years, her daughter Rowena is estranged, and James is dead. We go through their sordid and twisted pasts; James was always a troubled and troubling child who goes to a boarding school and blows the whistle on a teacher who molests his students. This is not portrayed with nearly enough seriousness in my opinion. There is an “incident” that is alluded to the whole time, but we don’t know what it is, and other than knowing that James dies young, we do not find out any details at this point.

The next point of view is from a girl named Fern. She sucks and is my least favourite. She is some rich girl who goes to acting school and befriends/starts fucking James even though she is engaged to some boring military dude. She has a cousin who is also a rich girl and loves to party and do drugs. James goes to some posh party with this cousin, gives her drugs, and she dies from an accidental overdose. This, we discover, is the dreaded incident the book has been hinting at this whole time. James goes to jail for negligence or manslaughter or some shit, just as Fern discovers that she is pregnant and doesn’t know who the father is.

The last section is in Lucas’ point of view. Here, we discover that he is the reason James went to jail: he saw James give the rich girl drugs, and reported it to the police when she died. So, he was a good Samaritan realistically. Like, not a villain in my opinion. We also learn that his parents’ divorce affected him so terribly because his mother tried to commit suicide as a result, and this is the root cause for his hatred of Edwina and her children. We learn that James remained a drug addict after he left prison, eventually dying in Thailand from a drug overdose before he is thirty.

Lucas is now a grown-up and wants to atone/is tormented by guilt for his actions. So eventually he goes to Edwina and apologizes. We learn that Rowena is a lesbian (apparently that was what made her so ‘weird’ which as a queer person just gtfo also how is this Rowena’s only character trait other than being studious I’m over this book’s character development) and living in Australia, estranged from Edwina because she blames Rowena for James’ death. Edwina decides that she wants to reconnect with her daughter. The book thankfully ends.

  • Overall brain gushings :

Readers, this book is actually insane. Also we don’t get any insight into the more interesting characters; the narration is told from the point of view of the three worst and most annoying characters in the book, which is saying something. Why don’t we get any actual insight into James? Or Rowena? So lame.

Also, the climatic betrayal/secret reveal is so underwhelming! I get it, blaming your step-brother for a tragic death and testifying in court for his criminal case is shitty, but it isn’t actually even that shitty. Particularly when James is sort of to blame for the socialite’s death! Why shouldn’t he experience some form of punishment? Just because he is a rich, handsome, white boy? NO! It’s not like Lucas then made James relapse and die of a drug overdose. If anything, Moving seems to make it seem like this outcome may have been inevitable and had nothing to do with Lucas. I get it family dynamics are complicated, and this was a messed up one, but by giving us so much of Lucas’ backstory and motivations, his actions as a boy are quasi-justified, and he comes off as a sympathetic character worthy of pity! So there isn’t even a good antagonist! And the whole “no one is totally evil” thing is a good concept, but to me did not read as interesting or rewarding. Get rid of the two tragic deaths at the hand of drugs and this story is not special or intriguing at all. And in fact, with the opioid crisis what it is today in North America, two deaths at the hands of drugs is sadly not very out of the norm, and I feel no sympathy reading about two rich kids accidentally overdosing when there is a much more real and unjust drug crisis happening in our very backyards. I’d rather read an interesting commentary on that!

This book was so over the top and at the same time boring and bad, that I took a photo of it in my sad work cubicle, in front of phones that never get used because that is how this book made me feel.
[A hand holds the book Moving in front of a grey carpet and some old office supplies. The most interesting part of the cover is the tagline “A family home, filled with secrets. For Sale.”]
  • What does it mean?

So apparently Jenny Eclair is like a celebrity author type lady that does the rounds on talkshows and has a really loyal following, and this book received a ton of reviews gushing about “the realistic characters” and the “layered” plot and the depth of the themes of family and betrayal that it discussed… So it could mean a lot of great things.

I really did not like this book, but I can still acknowledge that it is a book that highlights the sad fact that our relationships with people are largely based on our own perceptions, and that we get in the way of truly connecting with people because of resentment and a bitterness we are too afraid to face.

There were also some interesting meditations on what it means to have our identities constructed around memories and experiences when our memory and recollections start to fade. And even before our memories fade and warp, can they really be trusted? Are they ever unbiased? The answer is a clear no.

I would like to point up that I was, not to be too dramatic, shocked and appalled by the raving reviews online by readers for this book. I get that opinions vary, but I kept thinking, did we read the same book?!

  • Favourite passages :

There are no such thing as favourite passages in this book, but what I present to you dear reader, is much more enjoyable; instead we have the most bat-shit metaphors and turns of phrases in this book! Seriously, some of these straight up made me uncomfortable!

This passage is actually the epitome of jaw-droppingly bizarre and terrifying and I actually had to put the book down, wondering what human, especially what human woman could write this:

She doesn’t know how Jill does it. She’s obviously besotted with Rob but she can still eat, whereas Fern can barely choke down three grains of rice at a time. Under the table, her vagina beats as if she has a spare heart tucked away down there.

Eclair, pg 175

EEEEEEEEEEEKKKKKK!!!! What in tarnation is that paragraph?! A spare heart down there?! Also why are we moving from talking about her appetite to talking about her PULSATING VAGINA?! I know this was supposed to be sexy or like erotic or something, but I nearly died. As someone who has a vagina, and actually likes vaginas that are not my own, I found this description to make my skin crawl! Ew ew ew.

Sandra, who play the oldest Prozorova sister, doesn’t believe in using deodorant or shaving her underarms.

It’s a good job her dress has sleeves, thinks Fern. My mother might pass out at the sight of a lady exposing her underarm hair! She wouldn’t believe it; she’d think she was keeping a gerbil under each armpit.

Fern’s hands are shaking so much she can barely pin her hair into a bun, a bun which she has been practicing putting into place on a much more regular basis than her diaphragm.

pg 154

A gerbil?! I get it, this is meant to show that Fern’s mom is super judgemental and conservative, but could this scene have been written any more horrifically? There are just literally a million better ways to show this, or even to comment on a woman’s body hair, but I am so over Fern and her weird fucking narrative voice that is also judgemental but thinks she’s not, and is grossly horny in the most innapropriate moments. I’m no prude, but I’m tired of reading about her mean mom one second, and then how she can’t stop thinking about sucking cock! A literal quote!

Also, you should be practicing putting a bun in more often than a diaphragm! I get that this is supposed to be foreshadowing that Fern is bad with birth control, but Jesus, what a bad comparison and what a stupid way to foreshadow what turns out to be pretty important to the plot!

Also I’m done picking crazy passages because it would basically be me quoting most of the things Fern thinks or does, as well as some pretty choice passages from Lucas and Edwina.

  • If you liked this (or my review), consider reading :

If you liked my review and want to read an actually engaging tale about family secrets and family stories, read Michael Ondaatje’s semi-autobiographical text Running in the Family. A book about memories, and how stories are changed by their teller, this is Ondaatje’s tour de force in my opinion. It also blends prose with poetry and photographs, making it a multi-layered text that changes every time you engage with it.

Another good read about family dynamics, the ties between siblings, and how trauma can affect a whole family structure, I cannot recommend On the Shores of Darkness, There is Light by Cordelia Strube enough. This book is one of the most beautiful books I’ve read, and is also Canadian literature, so that’s great!

Stay tuned for my next review, the much-anticipated new book by Margaret Atwood, The Testaments. Will I like this book? Will I hate it? Will it live up to The Handmaid’s Tale? The answer to all of these questions is NO! Read on to see why!

Bel Canto Review

This book gets 1.5 grand pianos out of 5. I cannot cut the piano in half, so you just get one photo (this novel does not deserve to have its score rounded up for the sake of a pretty diptych).
[There is a black and white photo of a grand piano: it looks sad and comforting at the same time. You can see inside the piano, which could be a metaphor for how this book shows you the inside of the characters, only the piano is more beautiful and meaningful than the characters. #bitter)

Now, I know it has been a long time since I have posted a review. In fact, I finished reading Bel Canto sometime at the end of November, but have got caught up in working full time in a government job that sucks my will to look at a computer more than necessary, and the holidays really destroyed my free-time and my ability to nurture my hobbies. So, I am now again at a point where I have a couple books I have read which can be reviewed, so I am hoping to return to a more regular pace. However, since I am reading a bit more slowly, what with less free time than in the Fall, I am hoping to be able to publish reviews on a biweekly schedule, as opposed to a weekly one. Thank you readers for your patience.

  • Why did I pick this book up?

I originally bought this book at a yard sale many years ago, and got around to reading it a few weeks ago because it is one of the only books on my shelf that I haven’t read, other than some Dickens. I also ask my Instagram followers to pick between 2 books I suggest, and this is what was picked. So that’s what I chose to read. Also, I thought it would be interesting to read a book that tackles the subject of terrorism, but in a pre-9/11 time (this book came out mere months before 9/11).

  • Would I recommend why/why not?

I personally found this book to be not good. I am trying to be polite, as it is an award-winning book, and I felt that this book was trying to accomplish a lot, but failed. So, I personally would not recommend this book as I found the ending to be so dumb and trite (in fact, I found the ending so bad that it ruined any positive feelings I had had for the book up until that point).

I also would not recommend this book as there was a lot of sort of weird quasi-racist statements peppered throughout the book. It was hard to tell if these statements were merely meant to reflect the imperfect characters, or if these statements reflected the pervasive racism the author feels, (I know, I know, we are supposed to separate the author from the book/protagonist) but there was simply so many weird statements about the ‘savagery’ of Latin Americans and their nations that I couldn’t simply swallow them without questioning what their inclusion meant and reflected.

I suppose I would recommend this book if you really, really like opera, and if you like reading interesting descriptions of music and its effect on people and their mood/memories. That’s about the only positive thing I have to say about the book.

  • Quick Synopsis  **SPOILER ALERT FROM HERE ON, DO I EVEN HAVE TO SAY IT?!**:

The book opens at a fancy opera show in the Vice President of some unnamed Latin American country’s home. The main characters we are introduced to are: a lady opera singer, a middle-aged Japanese man who is her biggest fan, and his translator, who is a younger Japanese man. Terrorists (who we learn are really just trying to fight political and economic injustice in their country) break into the home, intending to hold the President hostage. The president is not there, so they decide to take the whole house and its dozens of guests hostage. Ok. Sounds like a genius plan.

They release all the women except for the opera singer because they decide she must increase their bargaining power (am I a jackass for thinking being an opera singer doesn’t make you a valuable hostage?) so the rest of the text is basically this woman and a bunch of men (and the 2 terrorists who happen to be young girls) living in this fancy house and waiting for negotiations to go through. Apparently this country really doesn’t have its shit together, because hostages and captors live together in relative peace for MONTHS.

Lalala time passes, pretty much every man is in love with the opera singer because of her voice/the fact that she is basically the only woman in sight. The translator falls in love with one of the terrorist women. His employer is super in love with the annoying opera singer (again, her only perceivable quality is her voice) and they all conspire to get them to bone in secret. The translator and the terrorist also bone in secret. It seems like things will continue like this forever.

But no! Right at the end the government busts in, killing literally all the terrorists (including the young sexy lady the translator loves), and they manage to kill the old Japanese guy (who was shielding the sexy terrorist) as well.

If this had been the end I would’ve been somewhat satisfied.

However, the horrifying epilogue shows us that the opera singer has married the younger Japanese guy (what?! why?! creepy!!!) in some weird attempt to bond and preserve their memory of being held hostage and having both their loved ones murdered in front of them? Again, WHAT?!

Anyways, made the book feel like a waste of time imo, and also just talk about a weird and stupid ending that is supposed to wrap things up neatly, but honestly at no point did the book establish that these characters were compatible, so I would’ve been way happier if they had remained sad forever. Ugh. Also, a lot of weird racist and kinda weirdly sexist shit appears in this novel.

It took me so long to get this blog post together that I couldn’t be bothered to take a fancy picture.
[A book sits on a planner. The book has a blueish photo of fancy people at a fancy party. There is a gold music note on the cover as well.]
  • Overall brain gushings :

Ugh. This book. Patchett seems to have really weird preconceptions about men and women based on their gender: the men seem to be really sexist, and the women seem to be very frivolous and superficial. Also, there are only heterosexual people (or so it would seem) and any passages that deal with Carla (a young girl who gets mistaken for a boy) are incredibly creepy/sexist and highlight the weird biases that Patchett and her characters seem to share.

Seriously, the characters are INSANE.

Also, music is amazing, but I felt like Patchett was being snobby about opera throughout the novel, placing it above all art forms.

Again, the ending is actually terrible: I was ready to give the novel a pass, was even thinking the ending was sort of poignant, and then she had to ruin it with a super bizarre epilogue that undercut all the emotion and work the novel had put into making me care about or even slightly like the characters.

  • What does it mean?

I think that there are a few things the novel is trying to say: that music connects people in ways nothing else can, that it crosses all boundaries of culture, gender, and language. That’s pretty nice. However, I think it also means that in the end, while music can connect people on a personal level (and change them in a similar manner) it cannot affect geopolitical and large-scale change. It cannot end a revolution; it cannot address the root causes of unhappiness and marginalization, and this is the failure of art.

I do tend to disagree with this, as I can think of a lot of examples of really influential art that affected large scale change (though I suppose nothing in the vein of stopping a revolution/freeing hostages) and moved beyond the realm of the personal, and into the public. Books like The Well of Loneliness or Lady Chatterley’s Lover are a few examples of books that helped spur on sexual revolutions and change mainstream attitudes about sexuality and LGBT awareness. Other books like Ayn Rand’s Atlas Shrugged (confession: I have only ever read this book’s Wikipedia page, so take my analysis with a large grain of salt) have managed to influence a bunch of douchey dude-bro libertarians so that’s another example.

Also, it weirded me out that she chose to constantly emphasize the non-specificity of which country this was. Like it could be any Latin American country, because Patchett views them as all the same. Ugh. To pile on my “alsos”, this book is loosely based on something that happened in Peru in 1996 and to quote a Goodreads review “It upset me to realize that Patchett was using a piece of Peruvian history with no intention of telling a story of Peru or its political unrest or even including a proper description of the country”. She could have had a lot to say about the shady way in which the militants were killed, or what caused this situation in the first place, but instead Patchett seems more concerned with what opera can do, and telling a romantic story full of purple prose.

Patchett seems to view opera as a panacea for all the worlds tension and fear, and yet her ending (again, something that is based in history and could therefore be rendered extremely poignant) shows that this is deluded, and the chance to make a commentary on real-world situations and contexts is lost.

  • Favourite passages :

Honestly, I didn’t really have that many favourite passages… There were a few sentences here and there that were poignant (usually about music and memory) but nothing too notable/quotable. I am going to cite some of the batshit things too because that amused me to no end.

A French ambassador muses on how he has fallen in love with his wife anew upon his arrival to “this godforsaken country” (that is also a direct quote!) :

In this country with its dirt roads and yellow rice he discovered he loved her, he was her. Perhaps this would not have been true if he had been the ambassador to Spain. Without these particular circumstances, this specific and horrible place, he might never have realized that the only true love of his life was his wife.

Ann Patchett, pg 36

Again, WHAT IS THIS PASSAGE? Prejudice on prejudice! And to those who think that maybe it is just the ambassador’s point of view, and not Patchett’s, literally every character is super prejudiced, so if the point that she is making is that everyone is prejudice, then it makes perfect that sense that she is prejudiced AF.

There are a few moments where Patchett actually has some semi-insightful things to say about the “terrorists” but these moments are not mined to their full potential:

‘We all should have gone home a week ago,’ General Benjamin sighed. ‘But we have to see our brothers released.’ For General Benjamin, of course, this meant both his philosophical comrades and his literal brother, Luis. Luis, who had committed the crime of distributing flyers for a political protest and was now buried alive in a high-altitude prison. Before his brother’s arrest, Benjamin had not been a general at all. He had taught grade school. He had lived in the south of the country near the ocean.

pg 136

  • If you liked this (or my review), consider reading :

Although I did not like this book, it made me think about interesting texts that discuss the importance of art and creativity in the face of crisis. The texts I would recommend that deal with this theme would be Octavia Butler’s The Parable of the Sower and Emily St. John Mandel’s Station Eleven (pretty sure I have recommended that book before, but since it is my favourite, can’t hurt to recommend it often).

I’ve also realized that writing reviews on books I didn’t enjoy is more fun than writing about books I liked. Clearly, I like to bitch about books I didn’t have the talent or dedication to write. Ha!

Stay tuned for my next review of the oh-so-fun read that is Good Omens by Neil Gaiman and Terry Pratchett. Seriously, this book was such a silly and enjoyable romp through the Apocalypse.