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jrabbit12's review against another edition
2.0
I don't know why, but I had a really hard time plowing through this book. I just didn't care about any of the characters, and found the narration/writing style a choppy, a good idea but poorly executed. I almost abandoned it but was encouraged by my mother to skim the last 100 pages (I had already made it that far, so why not, right?). I'm am glad I skimmed it, only to re-enforce that fact that I was glad to be done with it, I would have been very annoyed if I had taken the time to read it porperly, because overall it was just 'meh'.
itsfreelancer's review against another edition
4.0
Slow at first. Engrossing in the later parts. The final 50 pages blew me away
joy_kat's review against another edition
I almost made it to the end, but would fall asleep after just a few pages every time. Beautifully descriptive writing.. but no plot.. and incredibly slow paced. You think it will be about a mystery case.. but no.. just a long drawn out story about a boys life in the Ceylonese jungle.
softandcrunchy's review against another edition
3.0
With the stack of books sitting by my bedside that I can't wait to read this summer, it's difficult to stick with something that's barely holding my interest. de Krester is clearly a good writer, and she's created fantastic characters in this story, but the whole thing only gives me a lukewarm feeling. It's a witty novel, but unexciting.
grubstlodger's review against another edition
1.0
Without a doubt 'The Hamilton Case' by Michelle De Kretser is my least favourite book I have ever read.
Slow, dull and so heavy on repetitive descriptions of foliage it's like cutting through a jungle to read it.
The main character is weak, dull and is completely reactive to everything around it.
The book shifts from first person to third to a different first person for no discernible reason.
The book is so engaged with its desire to be lush it forgets to be clear, there are some moments that despite reading them 9 or 10 times, I still couldn't work out what had happened.
Which doesn't matter, because there isn't anything like a plot in the book anyway.
The experience of reading this book was gruelling but I had to finish it for a course. It put me off reading for a month.
Needless to say, I will not be reading any follow up novels.
Slow, dull and so heavy on repetitive descriptions of foliage it's like cutting through a jungle to read it.
The main character is weak, dull and is completely reactive to everything around it.
The book shifts from first person to third to a different first person for no discernible reason.
The book is so engaged with its desire to be lush it forgets to be clear, there are some moments that despite reading them 9 or 10 times, I still couldn't work out what had happened.
Which doesn't matter, because there isn't anything like a plot in the book anyway.
The experience of reading this book was gruelling but I had to finish it for a course. It put me off reading for a month.
Needless to say, I will not be reading any follow up novels.
thisislaura's review against another edition
5.0
This is the kind of juicy, immersive, writing style that I love! The plot was pretty thinly woven throughout the novel which was fine by me as I was so enjoying being transported to colonial Sri Lanka. You can feel the humidity and the oppressive British hierarchy radiating off the page. If you took the protagonist from The Remains of the Day and dropped him into a lush, multi-generational novel ala Gabriel Garcia Marquez, you would get something like The Hamilton Case.
sleeping_while_awake's review against another edition
2.0
As other reviewers can point out, the actual mystery of the Hamilton Case takes up little room in this drawn out novel. Whoever wrote the synopsis on the back of the book did an excellent job of what this book could have accomplished. In re-reading that paragraph, I am sort of tempted to give it a higher score because it sounds so intruiging.
de Krester certainly has a knack for description. She repeatedly takes delight in rattling off lists of every day objects that are perceived treasures by the Obeysekeres. She crafts the environment well, but the book dully trods along, due to the glaring fact that there is little dialogue in the book. Most events are described in the past tense with little hype or investment for the reader. The very end of the book proved to be the most interesting. However, this ending seemed too late to truly convince the reader that this is indeed a mystery novel.
The protagonist Sam is unlikeable. Why? We gain very little insight into his character, except for his occasional interactions with his mother Maud. In fact, Maud's part of the story entertained me the most as I was able to get away from Sam's boring perceptions. Even the court case was boring when in fact it could have been quite riveting.
Instead of living in the excitement of the book, it's like your reading it from a very far, unengaged place. de Krester hides behind her brilliant descriptions and fails to really develop her characters, letting the environment take over as the lead. I couldn't care less for Claudia or Leela when I suppose that their ends should have garnered an emotional reaction besides indifference. Possibly I could have cared more for the rotting abode at Lokugama. It was given more attention to than the characters.
It's a letdown that this novel was painful to finish. de Krester has definite skill and talent. Where was the action?
de Krester certainly has a knack for description. She repeatedly takes delight in rattling off lists of every day objects that are perceived treasures by the Obeysekeres. She crafts the environment well, but the book dully trods along, due to the glaring fact that there is little dialogue in the book. Most events are described in the past tense with little hype or investment for the reader. The very end of the book proved to be the most interesting. However, this ending seemed too late to truly convince the reader that this is indeed a mystery novel.
The protagonist Sam is unlikeable. Why? We gain very little insight into his character, except for his occasional interactions with his mother Maud. In fact, Maud's part of the story entertained me the most as I was able to get away from Sam's boring perceptions. Even the court case was boring when in fact it could have been quite riveting.
Instead of living in the excitement of the book, it's like your reading it from a very far, unengaged place. de Krester hides behind her brilliant descriptions and fails to really develop her characters, letting the environment take over as the lead. I couldn't care less for Claudia or Leela when I suppose that their ends should have garnered an emotional reaction besides indifference. Possibly I could have cared more for the rotting abode at Lokugama. It was given more attention to than the characters.
It's a letdown that this novel was painful to finish. de Krester has definite skill and talent. Where was the action?
stefhyena's review
4.0
This was a lush, richly textured, complex novel sort of like Proust except interesting. I actually think the post-structuralist bent of it was deliberate as was certain reflexive elements within it.
Set in Sri Lanka, the novel probes identities available to colonised yet somewhat privileged people. Sam is a lawyer, one who is proud of his English education and sees himself as above Singhalese and Tamil people (even though technically he is still Singhalese himself). He goes out of his way to distance himself from anyone who is embarrassingly un-English - this includes his own family and people he went to school with. He is a man devoid of real connections.
He is oddly fixated on his mother and sister. Some of that fixation gets deconstructed later in the book as we see the way Sam deals with one or perhaps two murders (the "truth" remains hazy and overlaid with several different possible interpretive narratives).
I found the book hard to read, meaning was not always clear sentence to sentence but atmosphere and character were. Sam was unlikable, every time I began to have some sympathy for him he would say and do something unforgivable. Other characters were softer and more mixed, although noone was really there for the reader to connect with- a rugged and tragic sort of individualism was perhaps what I liked least about this book.
Cliches and literary conventions are critiqued in scenes such as the anglophile Sam insisting that his gin and marmalade (or whatever) are just as authentic to Sri Lanka as spicy curries and monsoons. Also at the end where every solution to the murder/s unravels into another better one (or is this progress too illusion?). People are shown to write or say or be or live what is expected from them, the only difference in being educated is that a person might act out their education, but it is still a culturally/socially constructed set of choices and possible identities.
I largely agreed with the thrust of the book, but I wanted it not to be so bleak to the point of despair- I need to believe that humans are not only fallen/flawed/fragmented but are somewhat good in some way too. I largely enjoyed the complexity and lack of obvious meanings- steeped as it was in atmosphere but at times a little bit of clarity would have helped. This was an exhausting book to read.
The racism and sexism in the book are I am sure deliberate- part of showing the fragile and fickle "truths" that are people's identities. The problematisation both of colonialism and of some sort of "pure essence" of Sri Lanka that is untouched by the historical fact of colonisation I felt were good.
I think I will read more from de Kretser.
Set in Sri Lanka, the novel probes identities available to colonised yet somewhat privileged people. Sam is a lawyer, one who is proud of his English education and sees himself as above Singhalese and Tamil people (even though technically he is still Singhalese himself). He goes out of his way to distance himself from anyone who is embarrassingly un-English - this includes his own family and people he went to school with. He is a man devoid of real connections.
He is oddly fixated on his mother and sister. Some of that fixation gets deconstructed later in the book as we see the way Sam deals with one or perhaps two murders (the "truth" remains hazy and overlaid with several different possible interpretive narratives).
I found the book hard to read, meaning was not always clear sentence to sentence but atmosphere and character were. Sam was unlikable, every time I began to have some sympathy for him he would say and do something unforgivable. Other characters were softer and more mixed, although noone was really there for the reader to connect with- a rugged and tragic sort of individualism was perhaps what I liked least about this book.
Cliches and literary conventions are critiqued in scenes such as the anglophile Sam insisting that his gin and marmalade (or whatever) are just as authentic to Sri Lanka as spicy curries and monsoons. Also at the end where every solution to the murder/s unravels into another better one (or is this progress too illusion?). People are shown to write or say or be or live what is expected from them, the only difference in being educated is that a person might act out their education, but it is still a culturally/socially constructed set of choices and possible identities.
I largely agreed with the thrust of the book, but I wanted it not to be so bleak to the point of despair- I need to believe that humans are not only fallen/flawed/fragmented but are somewhat good in some way too. I largely enjoyed the complexity and lack of obvious meanings- steeped as it was in atmosphere but at times a little bit of clarity would have helped. This was an exhausting book to read.
The racism and sexism in the book are I am sure deliberate- part of showing the fragile and fickle "truths" that are people's identities. The problematisation both of colonialism and of some sort of "pure essence" of Sri Lanka that is untouched by the historical fact of colonisation I felt were good.
I think I will read more from de Kretser.
flogigyahoo's review against another edition
4.0
This is the 2nd book by Michelle de Kretser I have read and she is a wonderful writer. She is so good at writing one gets the feeling she simply gets carried away. The Hamilton Case takes place in 1930s Sri Lanka where de Kretser was born. She tells the story of the Obeyekeres, Sri Lankans and "black." They are wealthy but the head of the family tries every extravagance to rid himself of his inheritance and the property he owns. De Kretser loves lists and lists all the artwork, knick knacks, souvenirs, jewellery, furniture they own. The mother loves fripperies, parties and herself and has no time for her children. They are left in the care of servants most of the time. Little Sam Obeyekeres one soon learns is a nasty kid with an unhealthy love for his sister, Claudia, and apparently the two manage to get rid of their bothersome new brother. The years go by and obnoxious Sam becomes a lawyer, a prig and is stingy to boot. The Hamilton Case is a murder mystery supposedly solved by Sam, but it is only a minor occurrence in a very long novel about the downfall of a family. The decrepit house lived in by Sam's mother is described in vivid but too lengthy detail. And right at the end The Hamilton Case surfaces again. I liked this novel with its weird characters, weird houses, and i will always read her, but in The Hamilton Case de Kretser overdoes it.
smcleish's review
3.0
Originally published on my blog here.
The genre of post-colonial literary fiction has become one of the mainstays of the Booker Prize, with wins for several over the years. When starting to read The Hamilton Case, I thought that it was strange that this novel, set in Ceylon in the generation leading up to independence, had been overlooked by the judges - and I am not the only one, as Hilary Mantel (herself now of course a double winner of the prize) suggests that it should have made it to the short list in her endorsement on the back cover.
Sam Obeysekere is a Ceylonese from a wealthy background, descendant of a family which has worked with the rulers of the island for centuries (hence the schoolyard taunt, "Obey by name, obey by nature). His father's profligate generosity destroys most of Sam's inheritance, but not before a (local) public school and then Oxford University education let him become a prominent lawyer, who then achieves fame by solving the murder case of the title, leading to the arrest of an Englishman for the killing. This all takes place against the background of nationalist unrest (parallel to, but less well known to me than, Ghandi's campaign in India), in which Sam's brother-in-law (and long term hated rival) Jaya plays a prominent role.
Much of the novel is told from Sam's point of view, but not all of it. I prefer the parts of the novel which are told by Sam, with observations which appear in the third party narrative such as "He gave no signs of understanding that his life had been a series of substitutions" being irritating brickbats from a writer who has shown herself able to use Sam's one-sided account to portray the relationship between Sam and Jaya with subtlety and humour.
The later parts of the novel become a different story, of madness and ghosts, but this is nothing like as powerful as the first half. I found myself no longer being engaged by a novel which initially seemed to be one of the best (excluding things I had read before) I was going to read in a while. Some of the short chapters remain atmospheric, but the real meat of this book is exhausted by page 121, the end of the second section and the Hamilton murder case itself.
Perhaps this change is partly deliberate: there have been many people who have lived lives of early promise and a brief flowering which then go nowhere - at least in some terms. But it is odd: to catalogue the life of a Sri Lankan who would have been closely associated with the British colonial regime in the period after independence could have been an interesting story. There is little of this to be gleaned from what Kretser chooses to write about, which is basically Sam's inability to relate to those close to him - his parents, his sister, his wife, and his son.
Perhaps Hilary Mantel only read the first half of the book; perhaps there is more to the second half than I saw - as I find Mantel unreadable myself, I am unlikely to appreciate the same things in fiction that she does. The best rating I can give The Hamilton Case is 6/10, despite the brilliance of the beginning.
The genre of post-colonial literary fiction has become one of the mainstays of the Booker Prize, with wins for several over the years. When starting to read The Hamilton Case, I thought that it was strange that this novel, set in Ceylon in the generation leading up to independence, had been overlooked by the judges - and I am not the only one, as Hilary Mantel (herself now of course a double winner of the prize) suggests that it should have made it to the short list in her endorsement on the back cover.
Sam Obeysekere is a Ceylonese from a wealthy background, descendant of a family which has worked with the rulers of the island for centuries (hence the schoolyard taunt, "Obey by name, obey by nature). His father's profligate generosity destroys most of Sam's inheritance, but not before a (local) public school and then Oxford University education let him become a prominent lawyer, who then achieves fame by solving the murder case of the title, leading to the arrest of an Englishman for the killing. This all takes place against the background of nationalist unrest (parallel to, but less well known to me than, Ghandi's campaign in India), in which Sam's brother-in-law (and long term hated rival) Jaya plays a prominent role.
Much of the novel is told from Sam's point of view, but not all of it. I prefer the parts of the novel which are told by Sam, with observations which appear in the third party narrative such as "He gave no signs of understanding that his life had been a series of substitutions" being irritating brickbats from a writer who has shown herself able to use Sam's one-sided account to portray the relationship between Sam and Jaya with subtlety and humour.
The later parts of the novel become a different story, of madness and ghosts, but this is nothing like as powerful as the first half. I found myself no longer being engaged by a novel which initially seemed to be one of the best (excluding things I had read before) I was going to read in a while. Some of the short chapters remain atmospheric, but the real meat of this book is exhausted by page 121, the end of the second section and the Hamilton murder case itself.
Perhaps this change is partly deliberate: there have been many people who have lived lives of early promise and a brief flowering which then go nowhere - at least in some terms. But it is odd: to catalogue the life of a Sri Lankan who would have been closely associated with the British colonial regime in the period after independence could have been an interesting story. There is little of this to be gleaned from what Kretser chooses to write about, which is basically Sam's inability to relate to those close to him - his parents, his sister, his wife, and his son.
Perhaps Hilary Mantel only read the first half of the book; perhaps there is more to the second half than I saw - as I find Mantel unreadable myself, I am unlikely to appreciate the same things in fiction that she does. The best rating I can give The Hamilton Case is 6/10, despite the brilliance of the beginning.
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