Cat
I'm confused and conflicted about this one.
Aside from being a considerably long book, it's hazy, redundant, morally reprehensible in every which way and strangely anticlimactic. Yet, despite all this, it's good. Very good.
What I enjoyed the most, I was delighted to discover, was something the author himself ended up mentioning in the brief conclusive chapter: his incredible ability to give a believable account of what being a teenager feels like, pristine and unadulterated as if forty years hadn't gone by.
There are many things in this book that I did not enjoy as I was reading it, but whichever way I try to look at it, they all end up becoming essential elements to this daunting tale of manic unraveling.
I have to say, though, as someone who has yet to visit California, I found myself often scoffing in impatience at the constant mentioning of roads and boroughs of L.A.
I was reminded of the SNL ‘Californians' sketch, where the cast pokes fun at Angelenos because they only seem to talk about traffic. Because of this, I feel like I sometimes took the book less seriously than it wanted to be.
By the time I got to the halfway point, I couldn't wait for it to finish.
The narrative around the protagonist's learning disability sounds genuine, and I would have liked it if it had been developed further.
Le storie sono concetti ambigui, falsificabili e falsi. Come la vita.
Non so dire se questo libro sia scritto bene, editato bene, entrambe o nessuna.
Ma mi sono riconosciuta dalla prima alla quarta di copertina ed è la prima volta che mi capita di assegnare una valutazione alta a un libro per questo.
O almeno, questo è quello che mi racconto, a bordo di un treno verso Milano.
Nothing happens in this novel.
But it's such a pregnant silence, fraught with history, shame, impostor syndrome, uncertainty and ultimately a broken relationship with the self, it becomes a hazy echo-chamber of a book, in which readers can actually feels on their own skin the hot and humid, disorientating Japanese summer, occasionally interrupted by the soft plinging and dinging of a pachinko machine.
4.5 stars.
This seemed like an attractive concept, but the execution is what I have trouble with.
Aside from the usual Japanese meta-realistic storytelling style, which slowly insinuates something is maybe not really happening the way you thought it was, but then provides no resolution, this also suffers a particularly dry writing style (at times it almost sounds like product placement, see the whole Amazon Prime tangent) and a form of subtle social criticism that's perhaps way too subtle.
This keeps you glued to the pages. But in a weird, narcissistic way. It definitely left an impression, but I didn't enjoy it.
Y/N is a book that begs one fundamental question: not so much “why?” but “how???” How was such a monstrosity even... forget published. I want to know how it was written, because - and this is just my impression, I'm probably wrong about this - it seems really difficult to string together such a cacophony of wildly meaningless things and excessively obsolete words.
Reading it feels like putting your head through a garlic press, while listening to a zombie version of your own teenage self ramble about how your love interest “doesn't love me, they just love the idea of me”.
Maybe it's enjoyable on drugs?
Un simpatico spiegone.
Può risultare noioso a tratti, specie per chi conosce già parte dei mondi descritti (editoria, traduzione, stampa, etc.).
Per me, è valsa la pena anche solo per alcuni contributi di Luca Sofri e per l'ultimo capitolo sui ladri di libri.
Un paio di errori e imprecisioni mi hanno leggermente infastidita (il font di sistema dei device Apple è, già da qualche anno, San Francisco, non Helvetica Neue, per esempio).
Beasts of a little land is like Game of Thrones, in that it got me caring for the first leading man and killed him off shortly after, leaving behind a lot of well written but ultimately bland prose and a slew of characters I just couldn't connect with, no matter how hard I tried.
The last literary straw, for me, was the sudden and unjustifiable change of narrator for the last chapter.
I wanted to like this one, but didn't.
This was a rollercoaster.
Started VERY strong, ended very strong. Lots of fluctuation in between.
Overall, nicely done.
Assembly cuts like a knife: sharp, deep, painful. It reads more like a manifesto than a novel, anticlimactic, and anti colonial, upping the ante of its meaning at every turn. Very remarkable.
I've just finished reading this book and now, now! I'm about to write a review that really recommends it. Deliciously unnerving. Definitely not for the faint of stomach.
Mary Trump makes a convincing job of showcasing her uncle's (and, with few exceptions, her family's) horrifying lack of humanity.
The terrible, horrible, no-good book of self-praise, as narrated by extraordinarily strong-willed but otherwise insufferable mountaineer Nimsdai Purja.
A study in brokenness with too much of an open ending for my taste.
Still, loved the discussion of colorism.
Did not care for any of the characters.
A disappointing execution for a very interesting premise.
Given the hype, I was expecting to dislike this.
I didn't.
The protagonist is privileged, inhuman, simultaneously vapid and profound, fake and the realest. A complete basket case.
The writer is incredibly skilled in controlling her naked prose and cut it as close to where it would bleed as possible.
(At one point, she describes the movements of a character's hands as they mimic the box in which their mother's ashes are sitting, unironically, as “voguing”).
The book doesn't really want to teach you anything. And that's okay.
That's honest.
5 out 5 stars. As unethical and slightly painful as it feels to describe this book as “good”, it's impossible not to.
Den är boken fick meg att skratta högt , att blir arg och att gissa. Den är inte perfekt, med fem stjärnor får den i alla fall.