I surround myself with books – reading is essentially my life when I am not making flexographic plates at work. I’m often asked why I don’t review the numerous books that I read – for instance I just read Martyr! by Kaveh Akbar and The New Life by Tom Crewe in the past two weeks. The reason that I don’t do reviews is that the type of reviews that I like to do and the type of reviews that I will pay attention to are generally atypical in style and therefore I never see them fit for a general audience.
The most important aspect of a novel for me is whether or not I will be able to perceive the characters as ‘real’. Incidentally that is the problem I had with both of the books I mentioned earlier. The characters were one dimensional which prevented me from feeling like I could get immersed in the story. So many new books have this issue for me. The characters feel like paper dolls that the author clearly is moving around a cardboard set because they haven’t figured out how to build that character up so they can stand and move on their own without the authors constant interference.
This issue often clouds my entire perception of a story. The modern author seems to think that if they offer a fairly colorful framework of a character then the reader can just do the fleshing out for them. Authors don’t know how to have their characters stand on their own.
I do know that Martyr! is receiving a lot of praise right now but Cyrus – the main character – felt to me like he was a clone of the main character of Chuck Palahniuk’s book Fight Club so all I could ‘see’ was a Persian Edward Norton. Then as I got further into the book I could not “unsee” (as the kids would say) that the entire plot was something that had a Palahniuk flavor to it. The only thought I had when I got to the last page was “this is only popular due to the relevant historical event this story revolves around, isn’t it?” In other words I didn’t find the story extraordinary because nothing about it felt like I could get immersed in.
I likewise had similar feelings about The New Life. The story is historical fiction that dealt with two people, however the story was just so incredibly dry. My interest in the story and its outcome kept waning with every page I read. I never felt like got to know who these characters were because the author was more focused on leading them down the plot line instead of allowing the characters to come alive and do it themselves. I just finished The New Life a few hours ago and I can’t even recall the names of the characters which, for me, is a sign that they did a lack luster performance in the story where they were supposed to be the stars.
When I read reviews of novels, the reviewers never really talk about things like this so when I read the novel that got numerous five-star and rave reviews in literary journals and encounter these paper thin, unconvincing characters I wonder if they had read the same book that I had.
I am likely to include book reviews among my writings I post on this Substack but they will not be your typical style of review because I’m not sure if I’m capable of having a ‘typical’ review of a book
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