Scan barcode
skadinova's review
4.0
"I wanted to cry. If I knew someone was going to write such a shit poem, I wouldn't have killed her. "
This perfectly encapsulates this book for me. The main character is brutal in a calm, matter of fact way and his commentary on the Chinese society he lives in is cold and damning as he methodically carries out his simple plan to kill.
This perfectly encapsulates this book for me. The main character is brutal in a calm, matter of fact way and his commentary on the Chinese society he lives in is cold and damning as he methodically carries out his simple plan to kill.
kimmym's review
3.0
I think I went into this with really high expectations. It was fine. I didn’t love it, didn’t hate it, was curious to know how it ended, but it won’t stay with me.
disis19's review
2.0
In all honesty this is probably a 1.5 and not a 2.
Did I enjoy this book? No. Is it a book that's meant to be enjoyed? I don't think so. Then why did you pick up this book? I thought that with a title like A Perfect Crime, this would be a great crime novel. Was it a perfect crime or wasn't it? But I was mistaken.
I can't even say why I disliked this so much without giving things away. I guess what I can say is that the narrative was very harsh and in the end, what I got out of reading this does not equal the time I took to read it and I am very disappointed.
Did I enjoy this book? No. Is it a book that's meant to be enjoyed? I don't think so. Then why did you pick up this book? I thought that with a title like A Perfect Crime, this would be a great crime novel. Was it a perfect crime or wasn't it? But I was mistaken.
I can't even say why I disliked this so much without giving things away. I guess what I can say is that the narrative was very harsh and in the end, what I got out of reading this does not equal the time I took to read it and I am very disappointed.
tonstantweader's review
3.0
A Yi’s A Perfect Crime is one of those novels that is certain to draw comparisons to Crime and Punishment or American Psycho. As a first person narrative by a killer who kills for reasons other than greed, love, jealousy or any of the other simple motivations that give us comfort, it falls into that small collection of books that feature murderers whose crimes are presumed to reflect the alienating forces of society.
None of these stories would be interesting if narrated by investigators or any third party. Their intensity and their attraction lie in the conceit that we are entering the mind of a murderer, seeing why they do what they do. In this, I think A Yi is perhaps more successful than either Dostoyevsky or Bret Easton Ellis because despite the efforts of the Chinese courts to impose reason on this murder, he really allows it to be about nothing other than boredom and the thrill of being a murderer. This nameless killer has no moral theory to justify his act, he is just bored.
Like many unpopular high school kids, A Yi’s murderer assuages his feelings of rejection and loneliness with contempt. Who would want to be friends with those people anyway? He is bored, he wants more from life, excitement, the thrill of the chase, so he resolves to kill Kong Jie, the one classmate who is friendly and sympathetic. He argues there is a purity in choosing her, because she is such a good person. That may be a self aggrandizing explanation as it is more likely she was the only person he could persuade to come to his home.
And of course he kills her, goes on the run and is terribly frustrated by the incompetence of the police efforts to capture him. At times, it seems almost farcical. Where is the thrill when no one is close to catching him? He even goes to the police station to charge his phone. Eventually, with diligent efforts on his part, he is caught, there is a trial and there we see the desperate efforts by those who represent society as a whole to find a reason for the murder. This is all too human. We do not want to accept that people kill for the thrill of it. We want there to be some childhood trauma, some slight, some need, some reason, no matter how tenuous. We want to know why.
A Perfect Crime is a Chinese novel by a Beijing writer and it is his first work to be translated and published in English. In some ways it seems quaint, this need by the police and the court to understand the motivation, their shock and revulsion that someone would murder out of boredom. Here in the United States, we are inured to that kind of perpetrator. Leopold and Loeb were shocking but that’s eighty years ago. When our narrator is disappointed there is a bigger wanted poster for a man who killed seventeen people, he sounds just like most of the far too long list of killers who kill for excitement and celebrity. They are common as dirt.
This is one of those books that is written with a fast, propulsive prose that keeps you reading. For all its grim subject matter and brutality, there are moments of with and humor, even a bit of slapstick when the killer, fleeing police does a classic “he went that away” sort of misdirection. It is short, which makes it something you can finish in one bite if you have a couple hours to read. That is good, because it is discomfiting to be in the head of someone so callous and enraged. The narrator is observant of people, seems to have a keen insight at times. He is interesting even while being morally repugnant.
I cannot say I enjoyed A Perfect Crime, but I don’t think A Yi wrote it for anyone to enjoy. It is a book that asks us to think about society, about why we produce these monsters. Given the rate at which we do it here in the US, it’s a good question.
A Perfect Crime was provided by LibraryThing which holds a monthly drawing for review copies of recent releases.
http://tonstantweaderreviews.wordpress.com/2016/04/10/a-perfect-crime-by-a-yi/
None of these stories would be interesting if narrated by investigators or any third party. Their intensity and their attraction lie in the conceit that we are entering the mind of a murderer, seeing why they do what they do. In this, I think A Yi is perhaps more successful than either Dostoyevsky or Bret Easton Ellis because despite the efforts of the Chinese courts to impose reason on this murder, he really allows it to be about nothing other than boredom and the thrill of being a murderer. This nameless killer has no moral theory to justify his act, he is just bored.
Like many unpopular high school kids, A Yi’s murderer assuages his feelings of rejection and loneliness with contempt. Who would want to be friends with those people anyway? He is bored, he wants more from life, excitement, the thrill of the chase, so he resolves to kill Kong Jie, the one classmate who is friendly and sympathetic. He argues there is a purity in choosing her, because she is such a good person. That may be a self aggrandizing explanation as it is more likely she was the only person he could persuade to come to his home.
And of course he kills her, goes on the run and is terribly frustrated by the incompetence of the police efforts to capture him. At times, it seems almost farcical. Where is the thrill when no one is close to catching him? He even goes to the police station to charge his phone. Eventually, with diligent efforts on his part, he is caught, there is a trial and there we see the desperate efforts by those who represent society as a whole to find a reason for the murder. This is all too human. We do not want to accept that people kill for the thrill of it. We want there to be some childhood trauma, some slight, some need, some reason, no matter how tenuous. We want to know why.
A Perfect Crime is a Chinese novel by a Beijing writer and it is his first work to be translated and published in English. In some ways it seems quaint, this need by the police and the court to understand the motivation, their shock and revulsion that someone would murder out of boredom. Here in the United States, we are inured to that kind of perpetrator. Leopold and Loeb were shocking but that’s eighty years ago. When our narrator is disappointed there is a bigger wanted poster for a man who killed seventeen people, he sounds just like most of the far too long list of killers who kill for excitement and celebrity. They are common as dirt.
This is one of those books that is written with a fast, propulsive prose that keeps you reading. For all its grim subject matter and brutality, there are moments of with and humor, even a bit of slapstick when the killer, fleeing police does a classic “he went that away” sort of misdirection. It is short, which makes it something you can finish in one bite if you have a couple hours to read. That is good, because it is discomfiting to be in the head of someone so callous and enraged. The narrator is observant of people, seems to have a keen insight at times. He is interesting even while being morally repugnant.
I cannot say I enjoyed A Perfect Crime, but I don’t think A Yi wrote it for anyone to enjoy. It is a book that asks us to think about society, about why we produce these monsters. Given the rate at which we do it here in the US, it’s a good question.
A Perfect Crime was provided by LibraryThing which holds a monthly drawing for review copies of recent releases.
http://tonstantweaderreviews.wordpress.com/2016/04/10/a-perfect-crime-by-a-yi/
aina's review
dark
mysterious
tense
fast-paced
- Strong character development? No
- Loveable characters? No
- Diverse cast of characters? N/A
- Flaws of characters a main focus? It's complicated
3.0
Okay I've been procrastinating with writing this review for so long now I need to actually stop and freaking write it. So here we go. This might be all over the place (might even sound a bit rant-y too) but oh well.
First of all, this is a hard one to rate for me. When I finished this book I felt ambivalent. I had mixed feelings towards the story. There were aspects of it that appealed to me. The rest, however... Sad to say, but it's not enough to compel me to turn the next pages. To summarize the plot, it's about the mc and we follow him as he plans and executes his crime, and suffers from the consequence.
The beginning was intriguing since we get to see the mc preparing for the murder he then would commit. I liked how the story's written in first person pov which can be tricky since we don't really know if there were things the mc omitted in his narration or not, if he was even a reliable narrator or not. My problem though lies in the writing/translation. It felt somewhat stiff and detached, in a way. Because of this my reading experience was affected and I couldn't fully enjoy the story. The pace was fast too, which isn't necessarily a bad thing, but it took away my enjoyment of the book which was slowly dwindling at the time. I ended up speed reading the whole thing like I would a school literature text.
The middle part, and I'm gonna be honest here, was boring. It was mostly actions and I couldn't care less about anything that's going on in those chapters. During that point, I was contemplating on dnf-ing the book but I pushed myself to continue because I was still interested enough in knowing what would happen to the mc next. But alas, that particular scene fell flat to me and I was like “whaaaaaat” the whole time.
The last chunk of the book though was what made me give this 3 stars instead of 2. A few scenes from some chapters was interesting, thought-provoking. I liked the social commentary sprinkled throughout the chapters. It prompted readers to think about the world we're in, giving them some food for thoughts. There were parts that felt a little bit philosophical though and frankly speaking, I almost skimmed the paragraphs because I seriously had no idea what the heck the mc was talking about. (Plus I wasn't really interested to know and understand so yeah.) But on a positive note I could understand, if not fully a little, on why he was like that the whole time.
Overall, I could see how this book can appeal to some people. It provides us the window for readers to see inside the mind of this type of killer, learn another reasons why people kill others despite its morbidity. The premise surely is interesting, but unfortunately it did not deliver for me. I appreciate, however, what the author's trying to do with this book and for that I gave it a solid 3 stars.
cw: description of murder scene, violence against woman, cruelty towards animal, suicide attempt, mentions of rape
First of all, this is a hard one to rate for me. When I finished this book I felt ambivalent. I had mixed feelings towards the story. There were aspects of it that appealed to me. The rest, however... Sad to say, but it's not enough to compel me to turn the next pages. To summarize the plot, it's about the mc and we follow him as he plans and executes his crime, and suffers from the consequence.
The beginning was intriguing since we get to see the mc preparing for the murder he then would commit. I liked how the story's written in first person pov which can be tricky since we don't really know if there were things the mc omitted in his narration or not, if he was even a reliable narrator or not. My problem though lies in the writing/translation. It felt somewhat stiff and detached, in a way. Because of this my reading experience was affected and I couldn't fully enjoy the story. The pace was fast too, which isn't necessarily a bad thing, but it took away my enjoyment of the book which was slowly dwindling at the time. I ended up speed reading the whole thing like I would a school literature text.
The middle part, and I'm gonna be honest here, was boring. It was mostly actions and I couldn't care less about anything that's going on in those chapters. During that point, I was contemplating on dnf-ing the book but I pushed myself to continue because I was still interested enough in knowing what would happen to the mc next. But alas, that particular scene fell flat to me and I was like “whaaaaaat” the whole time.
The last chunk of the book though was what made me give this 3 stars instead of 2. A few scenes from some chapters was interesting, thought-provoking. I liked the social commentary sprinkled throughout the chapters. It prompted readers to think about the world we're in, giving them some food for thoughts. There were parts that felt a little bit philosophical though and frankly speaking, I almost skimmed the paragraphs because I seriously had no idea what the heck the mc was talking about. (Plus I wasn't really interested to know and understand so yeah.) But on a positive note I could understand, if not fully a little, on why he was like that the whole time.
Overall, I could see how this book can appeal to some people. It provides us the window for readers to see inside the mind of this type of killer, learn another reasons why people kill others despite its morbidity. The premise surely is interesting, but unfortunately it did not deliver for me. I appreciate, however, what the author's trying to do with this book and for that I gave it a solid 3 stars.
cw: description of murder scene, violence against woman, cruelty towards animal, suicide attempt, mentions of rape
More...