Ratings232
Average rating3.7
DNF @ 38%
I liked the voice of the main character as he was snarky and had dark humour, but about halfway in and nothing has happened and the negativity of the character started to wear me down. The writing style is also difficult to get into - it feels like an unedited manuscript, with long run-on sentences and no paragraph breaks. I should have known because the summary is similarly poorly structured.
3,5* eigenlijk
Mijn misvatting was dat de Pulitzer prijs voor vooral serieuze (‘literaire' ?) boeken was. Dit boek heeft ‘m gewonnen en ontkracht mijn misvatting.
Een aangenaam luchtig verhaal over een (bijna) 50-jarige schrijver, Arthur Less, die ooit een heel goed verkopend boek schreef maar nu een beetje vergeten is (en vooral nog herinnerd wordt als jong vriendje van een Pulitzer prijs winnende dichter...) en die een reis rond de wereld gaat doen om vooral niet naar de bruiloft van zijn eigen (jonger) ex-vriendje te hoeven.
Chaos ensues, met een happy end :-) In het boek worstelt Arthur overigens met zijn volgende boek, dat in een aantal opzichten wel iets heeft van dit boek...
Poetic trip around the world. I wish I loved the setting s and characters more, but I see how the book deeply moves others.
It was alright, but I kept getting bored. Was more drawn to side characters than feeling anything for the main character.??
I think what I enjoyed most about this book (warranting a 4-star rating, rather than 3) was the writing. Andrew Greer is very talented, especially in his ability to capture the unique and authentic voice of the protagonist. I enjoyed the wit and humor that peppered nearly every page without sounding overly forced.
Also, Arthur Less is just the most relatable guy ever. Peak imposter syndrome struggles; aversion to any change; hopeless romantic. Loved the relatability and rawness of the main character.
Ultimately, the plot took a little longer than it needed to (could have ended about 100 pages earlier) and I disliked the cliche ending. Cut the plot of the last 10 pages and it would have left a much stronger impact. Break the garden wall, The End. I understand that Greer likely ended the book the way he did so as to drive what he envisioned for book #2, but that was just a poor choice of direction in my opinion.
Favorite passage:
Chapter 7 “Less Indian”
“It was nothing like he expected, the sun flirting with him among the trees and houses; the driver speeding along a crumbling road alongside which trash was piled as if washed there (and what first looked like a beach beside a river turned out to be an accretion of a million plastic bags, as a coral reef is an accretion of a million tiny animals); the endless series of shops, as if made from one continuous concrete barrier, painted at intervals with different signs advertising chickens and medicine, coffins and telephones, pet fish and cigarettes, hot tea and “homely” food, Communism, mattresses, handicrafts, Chinese food, haircuts and dumbbells and gold by the ounce; the low, flat temples appearing at regular intervals like the colorful, elaborately frosted, but basically inedible sheet cakes displayed at Less's childhood bakery; the women sitting roadside with baskets of shimmering silver fish, terrifying manta rays, and squid, with their cartoon eyes; the countless men standing at tea shops, variety stores, pharmacies, watching Less as he goes by; the driver dodging bicycles, motorcycles, lorries (but few cars), moving frenetically in and out of traffic, bringing Less back to the time at Disney World when his mother led him and his sister to a whimsical ride based on The Wind in the Willows—a ride that turned out to be a knuckle-whitening rattletrap wellspring of trauma. Nothing, nothing here, is what he expected.”
In the small, the writing is lovely. Arch observations and very funny scenes. But our main character manages to travel the entire world without living in it once.It has to be purposeful, but every time Arthur has to deal with something emotionally difficult, it's at arm's length: a hard conversation with someone who is dying happens over Zoom. A hard conversation with someone Arthur wronged, just never really happens. Arthur never talks to his best friend/arch nemesis apart from a few sentences. Yes, he's literally running away from his problems (that's the premise), but surely over the course of the novel something has to break.What would it be like to have to struggle to take care of a child? To take care of an elderly person? To stay committed to a single person for your whole life? To build a house with your own two hands? To revitalize a town, to save someone's life, to care for a rescue animal, to say what needs to be said, no matter how difficult? To pull the plug on someone, to accidentally hit someone with your car, to confront a rapist, etc etc. Arthur's story is devoid of most everything that makes life actually hard, so one of his biggest challenges is not being as attractive as he once was, and that makes the force of the novel quite weak, even if the writing is well done.I realized that perhaps this isn't entirely the fault of the character or the author. Among Arthur's friends, people are worn like clothes and are equally disposable. One must be young, attractive, fun at parties, not old and a bore. There's not really a sense of community through thick and thin, or room for disability or age (very young or very old). In some sense, Arthur's preoccupation with his age is a problem for him not because he is unusually vain, but because of the very real danger that he might be abandoned if he's no longer sparkly. I was disappointed that it ended with Arthur's boyfriend returning to him, since it seemed like the wrong thing for Arthur to learn. If it were more heterosexual, and a old superficial man was rewarded at the end with a hot young woman, I'd think that was awful. “Still got it!” is the wrong lesson. I would have liked to see Arthur stretched to become a larger person, like the protagonist in [b:Senlin Ascends 35271523 Senlin Ascends (The Books of Babel, #1) Josiah Bancroft https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1502224161l/35271523.SX50.jpg 24467682].
Perhaps this review is slightly spoilery. I mean, there are no key points spoiled... And actually nothing really about what's happening, but I do mention a couple of things that may not be as impactful if you know about before reading the book. I know that would be the case for me, but the majority of people may not care. Either way, proceed with caution.
This book is not what I expected. When I started reading, I thought I wouldn't get much out of it, but the writing pulled me in and I'm really glad I did read it. It was so poetic, funny (but not the laugh out loud kind), clumsy, devastating... Tenderhearted.
Tenerhearted is actually a word that I first encountered while reading this book. Or maybe I saw it before, but it wasn't the right fit and I didn't notice it as I did now. And it describes the book so well, the characters, and I love it so much that right now it is one of my favourite words. Tenderhearted. Lovely word!
I liked everything about this book. I liked the writing style, as I already mentioned, but besides it being quite poetic, I liked how it sometimes went ahead then turned back. It did that without making me feel like it is spoiling the story, but in a way that made me wonder what happened, how did we get here. And it also made me sit on the edge of my seat, it gave me everything bit by bit, not too much, but enough to keep me anxiously reading on.
And I liked the characters. Even when their actions were questionable, I still liked the characters. I liked the way they were flawed. And when I'm thinking about Less being (weirdly, unexpectedly) likeable I cannot not think about Swift too and wonder how did he turn out.
Really, Less is a wonderful book, I enjoyed it a lot.
This originally appeared at The Irresponsible Reader.
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I am probably going to say an awful lot of seemingly contradictory things here, so the tweet-length version of this post is: Less is full of gorgeous prose but the character and story never interested me one whit.
What’s Less About?
From the back of the book:
Who says you can’t run away from your problems?
You are a failed novelist about to turn fifty. A wedding invitation arrives in the mail: your boyfriend of the past nine years is engaged to someone else. You can’t say yes–it would be too awkward. And you can’t say no–it would look like defeat. On your desk are a series of invitations to half-baked literary events around the world.
QUESTION: How do you arrange to skip town?
ANSWER: You accept them all.
What would possibly go wrong?
Thus begins an around-the-world-in-eighty-days fantasia that will take the novelist Arthur Less to Mexico, Italy, Germany, Morocco, India, and Japan and put thousands of miles between him and the plight he refuses to face.
Why Didn’t I Just DNF This?
Three reasons, none of which hold any kind of water, but seemed to carry the day.
- I hate to DNF books, holding out hope that they’ll win me over eventually. Enough have that I can’t shake the habit. (as I explained here)
- I really hate to DNF books I spent money on. I also refuse to DNF books that I receive from an author or as an ARC. So basically, I’ve learned via this bullet point that I’ll only DNF library books (with incredibly rare exceptions)
- I finally took this off my TBR shelf because of a reading challenge, and it’d feel strange to cross this off my to-do list without having read the whole thing.
But I came close frequently over the first hundred pages or so, but then I figured while I wasn’t going to have a good time, there were enough gems along the way, that it was worth the bother. Also, there was one thing I was mildly curious about (although I forgot about it until the answer was revealed).
The Metanarrative at Work
This may get too close to a spoiler for the truly phobic, although I’ll be as vague as I can be, so feel free to skip to the next heading.
Throughout the book, Arthur hears some hard things about his work. Someone that he meets along his travels is very frank about the problems with his novels as a whole—although she adored one of them—and their criticisms, he hears a lot about what is wrong with the novel his publisher had just declined to buy from him.
Their words stick with him and at some point, he accepts their argument (at least about his new book) and dives in to rework it in light of those ideas. In his view, at least, saving the novel and maybe producing something his publisher would want—perhaps something that would find success both with the critics and the market.
It could be said—It shouldn’t (probably), but it could—that Greer took an early draft of Less and saw (or was shown) the same things in it that Arthur saw in his new novel, and then took the same approach that his character did, reshaping the work until it resulted in what I just read. I’m sure Greer just came up with this device for Arthur (perhaps started from it) and wrote for it.
Instead, what we really have is the Author coming alongside the reader and telling us “Here’s how to read this book. All those things along the way up to this point? This is what I’ve been doing with them.” I can appreciate why he’d do that, I think it worked pretty well for this book—and I generally like it when authors do that (although I usually think it’s unnecessary and often self-indulgent). I don’t know that the book needed that done, but I think it helped.
It didn’t change my opinion of the novel much, if at all, but it did make me a bit more certain about Greer’s intention and themes.
So, what did I think about Less?
I started with this point, and I’ll wrap up with it here at the end—the prose is gorgeous. If you can go more than three pages without admiring a sentence or paragraph (if not more), it’s because you weren’t paying attention. I can see why readers and critics who connected with the material raved about this and threw awards at it.
But I never connected to Arthur. It’s not his lifestyle, it’s not his indolence, his pretentiousness, his…cluelessness (it’s not the right word, but it’s close enough). I’ve read and enjoyed characters like that before (and will again). It’s just Arthur and his story that didn’t work for me. I found his strategy for dealing with the wedding foolish and cowardly. I didn’t find the humor in the whole less-fluent-than-he-realizes-in-German schtick.* I’m not so sure I ever bought into whatever self-discovery he made. I really think the ending—and what it suggests is about to happen—undercut whatever Less had achieved through his travels.
* On the other hand, DeLillo’s Jack Gladney being unable to read or speak German absolutely works for me. I am not anti-satire involving Teutonic languages. I just thought I should make that clear.
Because I appreciated the writing so much, I can’t bring myself to give this the 2.5/2 stars I’d have otherwise given this. Read other people raving about the book, read the book if you’re curious, but I really can’t recommend it.
Originally posted at irresponsiblereader.com.
Ngl, I googled the qualifications to receive a Pulitzer because I couldn't figure out what would make this book receive such an award other than the manifestations of the main character in the story. I couldn't find much information other than if the board likes the submission, they vote and someone wins. This book was suggested to me by a book loving friend, but it took me two years to attempt to read it. I judged from the cover that it would be about the misfortunes of a white male so you can imagine my surprise when not only is that exactly what the book is about, but the characters even talk about it not being a good selling plot. It's not that I didn't enjoy this book, it was just mundane and okay at best. I will not read the second one.
If you'd told me at some point while I was reading the first half that I'd give this a 4-star rating, I would have been skeptical. I couldn't tell if it was tragic and sort of pedantically so, or comic and a little too amused at its own cleverness, but really, Greer laid out his protagonist's dilemma explicitly (“The tragicomic business of being alive is getting to him.”), and then built skillfully to a point when his protagonist, the brave and hapless Arthur Less, embraces the tragicomedy in a way that I found neither sentimental nor fatalistic. Less is a lovely love story, and I can't recall a “serious” novel that made me laugh out loud this frequently. Great Pride Month read, great summer read.
What an amazing book. I enjoyed the playfulness of the story and ridiculousness of it all. Greer really captures issues surrounding gay men. I couldn't help but laugh throughout the book and see the struggles Arthur Less went through. Bravo! I recommend to anyone looking for a ridiculously fun story and heartwarming as well.
The book follows the story of Less, an unsuccessful writer who is about to turn 50.
An invitation to the wedding of his ex-boyfriend of the last decade (which Less doesn't want to go to) causes him to accept invitations to events around the world.
Pros: I really enjoyed Andrew Sean Greer's writing and the way the different episodes of Less's life are told, interspersing the past and present to support the character's development.
I immediately sympathized with Less, empathized with many of his fears, and devoured the book to find out how the story would end.
Cons: Less is a privileged and shallow character. I didn't feel there was any real growth for Less throughout its journey, ending up becoming a series of interesting episodes to tell friends, without much of a personality transformation or development.
“You are the most absurd person I've ever met. You've bumbled through every moment and been a fool, you've misunderstood and misspoken and tripped over absolutely everything and everyone in your path, and you've won. And you don't even realize it”
“Arthur Less, you have the best life of anyone I know”. This is nonsense to Less
I believe this was the author's purpose since you can support it with several quotes but part of my enjoyment of the book was lost because I felt Less had no agency in his happy ending.
Overall it is a good story about love, relationships and accepting yourself and I realy enjoyed it.
I can't ignore the feeling that if this book had been written by a woman or followed the story of a female character, it would be classified as chick-lit and not be a pulitzer.
Literary value: 4 stars
Entertainment value: 5 stars
I cried off and on for the entire book. People are messy. He was just running away from himself without succeeding. Which I get. Living too much in your own thoughts. Gotta pick something light next. Wish there had been an epilogue though.
The writing is magical and the story was awfully endearing. I found it very comforting. A case of the right book at the right time for me.
Eh it was fine, well written and mundane and not for me. But, like, can we please stop putting blurbs on the back of books that say “Hilarious!” when the book is kindof just occasionally vaguely amusing?
5 stars to the audiobook, but 3 for the book itself. Took a while to get into but it was enjoyable. Another great audiobook from Robert Petkoff, who has now become one of my faves. I've listened to books (like this one) I wasn't planning to read just for his performance. Content wise, nothing laugh out loud funny but overall amusing and hopeful.
I was not impressed with this book at all. It got my interest because of all the travel involved. In reality the book does not paint an interesting picture of all the places, instead it focuses on the constant dissatisfaction and whining reminiscences of a middle-aged loser. It feels like despite having traveled almost around the world he has learned nothing, gained no perspective and grown in no way as a person. The ending was disappointing and unbelievably cheesy.
3 e meia estrelas pra esse cara todo atrapalhado que te conquista implacavelmente e me fez sorrir.
This book was a treat and I loved it. Funny, sad, hopeful, and beautifully written. I'm sad it's over.
I normally dislike litfic intensely. Especially litfic by white men. But then I learned this was about a gay man, so I thought I'd give it a chance.
I laughed. I had feelings. I even got teary.
Arthur Less is a writer of middling fame. He was, however, the partner of a much older, very famous poet from around the age of 21 until he was about 35. And he was always in that other man's shadow and dealing with his dysfunction and genius. He was basically a woman.
Then he began and on-off relationship with a much younger man. Problem is, they're in love, even if they don't act upon that love. So when his young boyfriend sends him an invitation to his wedding, Arthur decides, NO!, he cannot face the torment; and he accepts every literary event invitation he's received which will take him months and all across the world, meeting different people, losing his best suit, having the universe smile on him, and learning about life. And, importantly, learning that his love can, indeed, prevail, even if everything else around him changes.
Arthur is absurd. He's dense. He's mild-mannered. He sometimes says the damnedest things. But, he's somehow still...likable. Even precious. And relatable. And, in the end, one hopes, happy.
I haven't been able to settle on another book for the last week because I so enjoyed this one. Once in a blue moon, I like litfic by white men.
apparently not even a Pulitzer Prize winning book can break me from this 3-star streak