Via d'uscita

I didn't take to this pretentious exercise. It's as if he was trying so hard to be funny that all the characters and situation were distorted into a facetious and silly world of their own, bearing little relation to any experience.

I am noticing a pattern with his books. Patrick Melrose novels - love, couldn't put down. Everything else so far (3 other novels) -eh.

By having your central character as a writer, albeit a sometime scriptwriter who wants to write a book, allows the author to pass judgement on all manner of things within the world of writing and publishing. He can parody the role of the agent, for example. While I enjoyed this book, I did come away Leggi tutto

Until roughly the last 5% of this novel, St. Aubyn had me (once again) firmly in his delicious grip. I was sailing through, often flying. It was great. (There's quite a master at work here.) Then he lost me. More specifically, he set me free and loose in the world of the novel's theme: the inability Leggi tutto

I took seven months to complete this book. Read so many others in between and came back to this. It is one book I just can’t get into. I had no idea what I was reading and didn’t enjoy it at all.

Pretentious and not funny.

Has many of St Aubyn's distinctive virtues - acute black comedy about every social stratum, characters creatively misspending resources, the sometime delight of being exploited, actual knowledge of modern philosophy - but this time it doesn't gel. The protagonist, Fairburn, writes a book with Patrick Leggi tutto

The narrator, a bestselling novelist, has recently been told he has only a short time to live. He becomes obsessed with both living his last days in a meaningful way and creating an authentic work on the nature of consciousness. Neither of these desires is easily fulfilled. The expected route of thi Leggi tutto