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A review by midici
A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius by Dave Eggers
1.0
There were very few things I liked about this book. I liked the style: the long, run on sentences that conveyed a sense of urgency, or of time passing, that captured the expression of a place at a certain point in time and everything it felt like at that one moment. But I only liked that style when describing a place, or when using it to convey a large spread of time. I think it's something that would have worked well in a short story. In a long novel, told in first person, it became a one-man rant, a sort of never ending misery that I struggled to slog through.
The main character comes across as a pretentious, narcissistic idiot. I could not stand him. And through his point of view, everyone was described as terribly boring people - I could barely remember their names, let alone care about them. Every one was described as faking some sort of personality and it was impossible to like any of them.
The other people were only props to the narrator, to tell this story in which nothing happens. The first chapter or so when his parents die and he gets custody of his younger brother is vaguely interesting and moving, but that's practically the last bit of humanity. It's all down hill from there.
The worst part is that you're supposed to ignore these issues because you're in on the joke. There's a whole intro to put you into that frame of mind:
"P) THE SELF-AGGRANDISEMENT AS ART FORM ASPECT
Q) THE SELF-FLAGELLATION AS ART FORM ASPECT" etc, etc.
The wink-wink, nudge-nudge to say, 'I know this is self-absorbed bullshit and so do you, and the self-awareness means that it's not actaully as self-serving as it seems.' It doesn't work.
The main character comes across as a pretentious, narcissistic idiot. I could not stand him. And through his point of view, everyone was described as terribly boring people - I could barely remember their names, let alone care about them. Every one was described as faking some sort of personality and it was impossible to like any of them.
The other people were only props to the narrator, to tell this story in which nothing happens. The first chapter or so when his parents die and he gets custody of his younger brother is vaguely interesting and moving, but that's practically the last bit of humanity. It's all down hill from there.
The worst part is that you're supposed to ignore these issues because you're in on the joke. There's a whole intro to put you into that frame of mind:
"P) THE SELF-AGGRANDISEMENT AS ART FORM ASPECT
Q) THE SELF-FLAGELLATION AS ART FORM ASPECT" etc, etc.
The wink-wink, nudge-nudge to say, 'I know this is self-absorbed bullshit and so do you, and the self-awareness means that it's not actaully as self-serving as it seems.' It doesn't work.