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A review by carley
Adam Haberberg by Geoffrey Strachan, Yasmina Reza
3.0
The blurb about this being a "nonhero's big adventure" is an accurate description. Nothing really happens in this book. The title character encounters a woman from his past, goes home with her and has dinner.
What makes the book good, along with confusing at times, is the writing. There is a constant jump between Adam's thoughts and his actual conversations with Marie-Therese. Sometimes, the formatting clues you in on these jumps, but sometimes it doesn't and that took me out of the story a bit. Reza tackles the internal conflict and utter confusion of Adam quite beautifully. The formatting however, and the jump from clear areas of dialogue to less clear sections, takes away from her talent for me. I'm not sure if that was intentional or possibly a change made in the translation. Nevertheless, I had a few people in mind to recommend it to while I was reading, which speaks to my own enjoyment of this very short, gladly uneventful novel.
What makes the book good, along with confusing at times, is the writing. There is a constant jump between Adam's thoughts and his actual conversations with Marie-Therese. Sometimes, the formatting clues you in on these jumps, but sometimes it doesn't and that took me out of the story a bit. Reza tackles the internal conflict and utter confusion of Adam quite beautifully. The formatting however, and the jump from clear areas of dialogue to less clear sections, takes away from her talent for me. I'm not sure if that was intentional or possibly a change made in the translation. Nevertheless, I had a few people in mind to recommend it to while I was reading, which speaks to my own enjoyment of this very short, gladly uneventful novel.