Her whole life and existence becomes about Stephen, and the novel that starts as Eilis’s sexual bildungsroman ultimately casts Eilis in a rather inconsequential role. But the more he tells his story, the more Eilis fades. His backstory was unexpected harrowing, more twisted and disturbing than I had possibly imaged. What frustrates me about this novel is that even though it’s told from Eilis’ point of view, I think Stephen’s story is the one that McBride really wanted to tell. But I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t wholly captivated by this affair from time to time, against my better judgement. On the one hand, I sort of admire how Eimear McBride was able to make the stakes of this story feel so high when all that was really at stake was an unhealthy train wreck of a relationship on the other hand, it got to be somewhat tedious. 18-year-old Eilis meets 39-year-old Stephen, and we chronicle their dysfunctional liaison with a heightened pathos verging on absurdity. I don’t know, I still haven’t made up my mind.īut my main problem with this book is the story itself, which is basically two highly melodramatic people having a lot of sex. Once I got into the rhythm of it, it became easier (reading a few lines out loud every now and then helped), and I sort of vacillated between thinking it was pretentious gibberish, and thinking this Joycean stream of consciousness was actually a very profound and striking means of storytelling. I won’t lie – this book is challenging and draining.īut interestingly, the style of prose isn’t what ultimately hurt this for me. Then wake up.īecause the whole thing is written like this. Wander where no notion wanders in amongst the dust of. Stilts pander to streets and their up down their. So, why the delay?ĭown down I down to the last flakes in. But even so, this is the longest it’s taken me to read a book all year – and it’s only 310 pages. I think I read the first 75 pages or something and then found myself unable to read this concurrently with War and Peace, so it got put aside for a few months.
So, even though I had The Lesser Bohemians on my ‘currently reading’ shelf for over three months, I actually read the bulk of it in the last two days.
0 kommentar(er)
