Larissa Carini Carini itibaren 10022 San Michele e Grato TO, İtalya
i'd give it six stars if i could. paul murray is just... awesome. his other book, An Evening of Long Goodbyes: A Novel, is also brilliant. can't wait to see what he does for book #3. i've read An Evening of Long Goodbyes two or three times. i'll read Skippy Dies at least that many. i am quite sure that it will take me a good many more reads to have fully mined either book. not many books reward that kind of attention, but murray's do. awesome :-)
I found this first novel by the doctor-turned-author to be troubling in a couple ways. First, the subject matter gets to be so heavy and devastating. If something can go wrong for someone in this story, it almost certainly will. One scene in particular left me sitting around silent for the rest of that evening. Second, the narrator got to be whiny and ingratiating to me. Was this Hosseini's intent? I don't quite think so. Amir (narrator) also makes some questionable decisions even as an adult. He left me shaking my head at some turns of fate, and so did some of the coincidences that happen in the book, for they are many. Still, The Kite Runner is highly readable. The bandwagon for this book is cruising. I can see why people take to it. There's also a CliffsNotes-styled history lesson about mid-1970s strife in Afghanistan with the Russian invasion, too. This covers the inception of the Taliban, and the descriptions are chilling in light of 21st-century (read: current) events.
This was kind of like Hades & Persephone meets Beauty & The Beast. Click here for my full review.
I'm too distracted to read this in French, since Sophocles is still giving me fits and, well, I do have a life. Besides, the translation I'm reading is wonderfully brisk and colloquial. How can you not love a novel from 1780 that begins with this Beckettian up-yours?: How had they met? By chance, like everybody else. What were there names? What's it to you? Where were they coming from? From the nearest place. Where were they going? Does anyone really know where they're going? I don't want to jinx myself, but I think this might be just the thing to break my recent streak of Books Tossed Aside with a Jaded Shrug.