You'll recall that this is one of my two "fun books" right now. . . I'm about to finish it, and I'll just say that it's not a book to read if you're feeling grim about the human condition. I knew it was a novelization of some real events, but I didn't really know how horrible those events were. It's basically the story of a run-up to an absolute massacre.
From a strictly literary standpoint, I was happy to see that MVL uses his very effective "telling the story" technique in the latter third of the book--i.e., we have a figure telling the story in the present, and large parts of the story are told as if being recited from memory. Of course, since memory is faulty and subjective, the coloring of the story changes, and that's where the horrible truth meets artful storytelling.
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2 comments:
Aye carumba. The Wikipedia article was enough to tell me that this novel is not beach reading.
thing is, I love MVL's work, but some of his historical novels (this one, _The Feast of the Goat_) are really harrowing. It's been an interesting juxtaposition with Genji. I'm going to read some Wodehouse next, just to lighten it up a bit.
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