As I was forcibly reminded tonight on
Grumpy Old Women, albeit hardly the pinnacle of philosophical comment, that once you are more than what can be estimated as halfway through life, time is no longer endless.
So the thought of an 800-page novel is daunting. And I am also allergic to the endless generation of weird characters, such as Rushdie, Márquez and others produce, seemingly to show off about the fact that they have lived in the same world as the rest of us, or have read a few books, on which they can endless draw intertextual anecdotes.
So unless this book grabs me when I flick through it, next time I'm in a bookshop that stocks it, I'm going to concentrate on a tiny fraction of the thousands of other things I would like to read.
The parameters sound interesting: enlivening a killingly boring provincial town, as Fausto writes in his review. But
yet another 800-page novel? Hubris or genius? It pulls out all the right stops, on the organ of contemporary British life. But before I get hold of a copy to judge, I will be rather negatively inclined towards it. The problem areas it takes up, according to Fausto, are highly relevant. But it's how she deals with them that I want to see, before committing myself to so many pages.
Fausto:
Quote:
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Et puis le style. Barker n’écrit ni mal, ni bien.
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Curate's egg? Manic outpourings? I want to read good books, not ones that are stylistically in between.