Pellegrina Leoni said:I agree. What Roy does with language is amazing, and the story turned me inside out.
I think she HAD a story, but through her "clever" structure (she compared her structure to a circular dance) the story had no impact.Astyanax said:I read about half of this novel several years ago. I didn't like it much at all, and so flagged it away half-finished and to this day it sits in my bookshelf and remains "something I haven't read, but am told I ought to."
I too found it over-cute. Roy lacked story, and tried to make up for it with cleverness which, after a while, became tedious.
That said, I would like to have another try sometime in the future and hopefully I will see something different, and better, in it then.
It's been years since I read it, but I remember my overall impression was irritable. It is beautiful in places, but what got under my skin the most (if I'm remembering correctly) was the relentless use of simile. Nothing was what it was. Everything, no matter how trivial, was always 'like' something else, to the effect of being ridiculous. A good bit into the book, there was some absurd parallel drawn between something and the elaborately-described bark of a tree that made me snort and she pretty much lost my confidence after that.Her imagery and use of language is at times rather poetically beautiful, but at other times is all just a little bit too much, too bloated and too distracting. There is an adjective (at least one) in front of every noun. And she has an annoying habit of capitalizing words mid sentence for effect and of lumping two words together when she feels like it, which works sometimes and not others.