Reviews

In the Shape of a Boar by Lawrence Norfolk

flogigyahoo's review against another edition

4.0

In the Shape of a Boar by Lawrence Norfolk is a challenge to read and I admit I did not understand two thirds of it. What kept me reading was the excellent writing. Norfolk starts off with descriptions of mythical lands, people and gods of Ancient Greece, half of the page bearing footnotes in abbreviated Greek. Slowly the description turns into the story of Atalanta and a hunt for the boar and the footnotes peter out. The second part of the book is the story of Solomon, Ruth, and Jacob , 3 friends who have grown up in a small town in Romania. It is the eve of Germany's attack on the USSR and most of the Jews have no idea what is in store for them. A year later they all try to escape. The scene shifts to Paris after the war. Sol is now a famous poet, his poem, The Boar Hunt, a bestseller in many countries. Ruth has become a film director and is making a movie version of his poem. Norfolk jumps around in time--to a few years after the war, to many years after the war, then back again to wartime Greece and Sol's plight. What Norfolk conveys was a mystery to me and there is a mystery in the story. Is Sol's poem the truth? What really happened in Greece? As I said, I could not put this book down because the writing is superb, but I failed to understand it. Hard to recommend this book although I am ready to read another one by Norfolk.

mehlsbell's review against another edition

Changes shape and tone to mimic styles of works as disparate as The Odyssey to "Jules et Jim" to the Old Testament. Many parts of the opening hunt recounting, and a particular section detailed how many Jews were ghettoised, are reminiscent of OT genealogies: this god begat that son who would die years later stranded on a foreign shore; a brief interlude of Odysseus's feat with the bow; this businessman was not well liked and his two sons took over the business before eventually the soldiers beat them to death with the butts of their rifles. They all meld together in a haze of war and wistfulness and memory, wilful deceptions and self-preservatory lies.

Some feels more an exercise in style and clever obfuscation for the sake of cleverness, but the prose is knackful, and there's something to be said for being able to change styles so quickly and effortlessly, even if some of the styles mimicked aren't as engrossing as others.

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So rarely do I read a book and think, "I'd rather see the movie," but I'm curious what a film would be able to do with the conflation of time, confusion of characters, the shifting of reality. Bergman would have made a great piece of it. Let Denis Villeneuve or Karyn Kusama or David Lowery adapt this material, please.

stephend81d5's review

4.0

this book I felt got better as it went along, did get bogged down in the first part which is a retelling of an ancient Greek tale with all of the notes attached. The second part Paris and interwoven with Romania in the 1930's and later Greece brings out the best in this author as you relive the terror of war and racism and hints of the ancient surface whilst prisoner of the Germans as characters emerge from the past. Secondly the thread of betrayal and lost love and living in the past and chasing lost dreams that the feeling with Ruth and Sol.