by Hermione Hoby
I feel this book really didn’t work. It’s told in a big foreboding tone, but “what eventually happened” didn’t really come across as believable or well-told.
And it was hard to read an entire story with such an insecure young narrator always doubting himself and never happy. Even when he pops into the present tense, he’s still unhappy. I think his descriptions of the wife and marriage he ended up with are cruel.
I only bookmarked one part, a passage which I guess gives lie to my claim that Luca is never happy. Describing an impossibly beautiful summer, “I felt a kind of benevolence so acute that I sometimes wanted to cry. It felt like all the days came with fat apples in their mouths. It felt like everything was made of poetry.”
Thing is, in the day-to-day passages, he is always self-doubting and never really conveys this happiness which is described above so well in theory. It all just didn’t work for me.
Tytania 