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lifeinbooks's review against another edition
the writing style is too confusing, couldn't get into the story
book_lizard42's review
4.0
This book was provocative and evocative, and it's a stretch to say I liked it. It wasn't a comfortable read, but a well-written and thought-provoking books deserves stars. Not every book should be comfortable.
aquint's review
2.0
I found myself speeding through this to be done with it. I disliked the characters and the story felt like it was going in too many directions and trying too hard to be clever.
kimobim's review against another edition
1.0
This book was just terrible. It sounds amazing from the blurb, but it was just so difficult to get through. It felt like there was just no plot. I understand what he was trying to get at, but I feel like he just never got there. Nothing was resolved, in fact there was absolutely no climax to this story. It could have been written so much better. Maybe it was over my head, but I believe myself to be an intelligent person and voracious reader but this was just a huge waste of time.
I kept reading hoping that it would get better or SOMETHING, ANYTHING would happen, but the development just wasn't there.
I kept reading hoping that it would get better or SOMETHING, ANYTHING would happen, but the development just wasn't there.
meshuggeknitter's review
After wanting to read this book for ages, my library finally had this available as an e-book. I eagerly started reading and bam - could just not get into it. The story line is intriguing but found the writing very hard to follow. I kept waiting for the prose to pull me into the story but finally gave up.
iddylu's review
2.0
It feels really hypocritical of me to think "I can't believe this book has such a low average rating on Goodreads" and then add yet another two-star review to the pile, but here we are. From reading some of the other reviews, it seems like it was apparently marketed as a thriller, which it definitely isn't - and so a good chunk of those low reviews are from people who thought they were getting one type of book and ended up with something very different. I'm not one of those, but still, it didn't hit the mark for me. It's very well-written, so that's not the issue. Honestly, it might just be that I'm not that into surrealism. Oh, well.
terrypaulpearce's review
4.0
What hit me from the first page with this book, and kept hitting me again and again, is the prose. After careful consideration, the word 'sumptuous' seems to fit best. I could wallow in Marcus' turn of phrase and description without even much in the way of a story, in the way he weaves deep insights about life into beautiful sentences about anything and everything. BUt in fact there's a diverting story here too: what if your child was killing you, slowly, every time they communicated with you? What if this were happening everywhere? Bizarre and surreal at times, and maybe ultimately unsatisfying to people who want everything explained, The Flame Alphabet is always atmospheric, always perfectly crafted, and always intriguing. The best literary sci-fi I've read in a long time.
aleffert's review
4.0
This has a nice science fiction premise: Children acquire a disease where speaking causes an actual illness in adults. It starts from there and gets weirder and freakin' weirder. The disease spreads. The very notion of communication is called into question. Society is deeply fucked.
The whole thing is suffused with an intense visceral anxiety that reflects the toxic language of the book. It's full of bodily fluids and uncomfortable feelings. Reading it wasn't painful or difficult per se, indeed, it was quite a bit more readable than The Age of String and Wire, which I mostly enjoyed despite its opacity, but reading this made me kind of ick.
There are all these juicy themes running around - communication between generations, solitude, the power of symbols and names, but they all kind of hover on the edge of saying anything specific. Which, is totally allowed, but felt just slightly on the wrong side of coherence.
The characters are kind of flat and awful.
I think I liked this. Parts of it were amazing. I wouldn't necessarily recommend it to anyone. But if you can deal with a certain amount of Experimental, it has a lot of positive qualities.
The whole thing is suffused with an intense visceral anxiety that reflects the toxic language of the book. It's full of bodily fluids and uncomfortable feelings. Reading it wasn't painful or difficult per se, indeed, it was quite a bit more readable than The Age of String and Wire, which I mostly enjoyed despite its opacity, but reading this made me kind of ick.
There are all these juicy themes running around - communication between generations, solitude, the power of symbols and names, but they all kind of hover on the edge of saying anything specific. Which, is totally allowed, but felt just slightly on the wrong side of coherence.
The characters are kind of flat and awful.
I think I liked this. Parts of it were amazing. I wouldn't necessarily recommend it to anyone. But if you can deal with a certain amount of Experimental, it has a lot of positive qualities.
abbywdan's review
3.0
I thought I was past the part of my life where books were academic slogs, but along came The Flame Alphabet. The first half of this novel made me feel like a high school freshman sitting through a college seminar I thought I was prepared for. It felt like reading Great Expectations in third grade and NOT GETTING IT. It felt like reading The Awakening in eighth grade and NOT GETTING IT. It felt like reading Seven Gothic Tales in college and NOT GETTING IT. But I'm thirty years old and I'm smart, so instead of deciding that I wasn't getting it, I just kept reading.
The first half of the novel begins with the middle of the story, backtracks to the beginning, and then catches you up. That catchup, where you know it's all leading, takes forever, and the timeline loops all over the place, and there's a wonderful aside about having people over to your house whose children destroy your things and whose shits destroy your toilet, but mostly, it's a tangle of backstory that doesn't shed enough light on the situation at hand but does introduce you to important ideas and vignettes that are important later on. They're there, so they must be important, it's just hard to remember to see that when you feel like you're at sea.
Then, halfway through, you get sucked toward the falls. The plot catches up, the theory and the metaphor and the themes start to make more sense, and it all become oddly satisfying. I'm still not going to claim to get it all, but I do get parts of it. I thought the tie-in to Judaism (not real Judaism, I think, but a metaphorical, future underground religion based on it) was really interesting. I thought the effects of speech and understanding and of humans on humans were well chosen and well written. In short, I'm glad I stuck with it, and I have a lot to think about.
The first half of the novel begins with the middle of the story, backtracks to the beginning, and then catches you up. That catchup, where you know it's all leading, takes forever, and the timeline loops all over the place, and there's a wonderful aside about having people over to your house whose children destroy your things and whose shits destroy your toilet, but mostly, it's a tangle of backstory that doesn't shed enough light on the situation at hand but does introduce you to important ideas and vignettes that are important later on. They're there, so they must be important, it's just hard to remember to see that when you feel like you're at sea.
Then, halfway through, you get sucked toward the falls. The plot catches up, the theory and the metaphor and the themes start to make more sense, and it all become oddly satisfying. I'm still not going to claim to get it all, but I do get parts of it. I thought the tie-in to Judaism (not real Judaism, I think, but a metaphorical, future underground religion based on it) was really interesting. I thought the effects of speech and understanding and of humans on humans were well chosen and well written. In short, I'm glad I stuck with it, and I have a lot to think about.