Pretentious – …But I Also Have a Day Job

Sophisticated and Poetic Literary Novel About Old Age With No Plot (2013)

September 8, 2017 Ian Comment

One of my favorite books of all time, Catch-22, can also be said to have no plot, but what makes Catch-22 different is that while its chapters jump erratically through time and veer off on massive tangents, the novel’s events are thematically linked by the issue of Yossarian being bullied by his superiors into fighting a war that doesn’t make sense. This novel has no such thematic link, or only vague links that did little to convince me that this novel was about anything besides character exploration and poetic-sounding prose, which, sadly, aren’t enough to make a novel work.

Rating

Flighty Lyrical Literary Novel, by Anonymous (2013)

May 5, 2017 Ian Comment

Believe me when I say that great lyrical writing can be some of the most stirring writing there is—I loved Milan Kundera’s The Unbearable Lightness of Being, for instance. This novel, though, felt like a poor man’s version, with a heavy emphasis on style and very little in the way of a plot (which was inspired by historical events in Europe a hundred or so years ago, and may have been part of the problem). The passages that flowed well didn’t go anywhere, and the ones that didn’t felt pretentious and masturbatory—with far too many of them.