Dianitiya Zavala từ Wantirna South VIC , Australia

_iana_avala

11/21/2024

Dữ liệu người dùng, đánh giá và đề xuất cho sách

Dianitiya Zavala Sách lại (10)

2019-07-19 09:31

Sống Một Cuộc Đời Bình Thường Thư viện Sách hướng dẫn

Sách được viết bởi Bởi:

The Intuitionist is an odd little novel. The copy on the back cover does its best to make the story and tone of the book sound extra weird, while at the same time remaining fairly vague. And I suppose that's a fair representation of what you find inside. The novel's themes and even its setting make for a good jumping off point, but Whitehead continually does things in half measures. The setting, obviously NYC but pointlessly vague, reminded me quite a bit of Quinsigamond, from Jack O'Connell's similarly weird-noir Word Made Flesh. It's all grays and silvers, skyscrapers and tarmac, dirt and grime. In nearly all of the book's scenes the reader is given the briefest sketch of the surroundings and then buried under pages of back and forth dialogue--most of it exposition. The characters are similarly flat, particularly the heroine, Lila Mae Watson. At 100 pages I was hoping for some kind of picture of who she was. At 150 pages I was still waiting. By page 200 I'd given up hope. There are flashes of personality beneath the blankness, but not many. This is sort of endemic to first novels--the crutch of writing a character who is a mirror for his/her surroundings, who doesn't have a bold personality, who is reactive rather than proactive. I lost count of the number of times someone said "you don't talk much, do you?" in regard to Lila Mae. This can work, but only if the surroundings rise to the occasion. The period is also vague--something I often like--but here, in combination with the other vaugenesses, it again feels like a crutch. It's post-war, but we're not told which war. Socially it feels like the 50s, technologically it could be anywhere from the 30s to the 60s. While this is a neat idea, in the end it feels half-baked. The big hook, the battle between the factions of the Guild, never really gets going. Lila Mae is kept at several removes from the real players and so the reader is yet another layer removed. Empiricism and Intuitionism are never well enough defined to feel like anything more than Group A and Group B--it could have been Liberals vs. Democrats, Yankees vs. Red Sox, paper vs. plastic. Maybe this is the idea, but the concept of Intuitionism is one of the big draws of the novel and since it is never explored in any meaningful way I felt very let down. Writers like Borges, Wolfe, or PK Dick would have at least evoked a sense of wonder and tangible weirdness through the concept, but Whitehead settles for "yeah, I just FEEL it." Unconvincing and uninteresting. The racial allegory is present but muted and half-baked like everything else. The flashbacks to Lila Mae's youth and her interactions with the "Uncle Tom" other colored maintenance man play like Morrison-lite and don't bring anything new to the table. The notions of passing brought up toward the end of the book are briefly interesting but it's like holding up a match in a cavernous darkness. I'm interested to see if Whitehead's later novels rebound, but based on this one I'm not rushing out to get them.

Người đọc Dianitiya Zavala từ Wantirna South VIC , Australia

Người dùng coi những cuốn sách này là thú vị nhất trong năm 2017-2018, ban biên tập của cổng thông tin "Thư viện Sách hướng dẫn" khuyến cáo rằng tất cả các độc giả sẽ làm quen với văn học này.