Reviews
An impressive and highly original novel. The book holds a journal-like quality but gets never boring. It’s very dense with cultural references, at times almost too dense, until you realize late in the novel, perhaps too late, that this constant intellectual and cultural referencing is part of the pose of our protagonist, Jules. The rhythm of the walks in the city determine the book and give it it's character. The whole book feels like an ode the anonymity and alienation of the city, no doubt, but it’s more than that. I loved the part where he spends some time in Brussels. Admittedly because of the recognizability, but also because it makes for an interesting change of decor, a lighter atmosphere even, but with more intense meetings, as one has when on a holiday. The original goal, to find his grandmother, quickly disappears and instead we find Jules walking around, visiting a phone shop, and having long, deep, provocative discussions with a Belgian Moroccan named Farouq. One of the most impressive features in this book was the description of Jules’ thoughts and most of all his subjective feelings. For example in Jules perception of classical music, or towards the end when he finds himself alone, looking at the stars, standing on a fire-escape; “My hands held metal, my eyes starlight, and it was as though I had come so close to something that it had fallen out of focus, or fallen so far away from it that it had faded away.” Jules is, as it turns out, deeply flawed. But he remains, as he himself says, the hero of his own story and in this way, he stays our hero too.
This is a book of well crafted, painfully boring prose. It took me a while to warm up to it even while I enjoyed individual sentences throughout. It's a bit of a novel of ideas, though I don't remember any one idea that Cole stuck with for very long at all. Until I was well into it, it was hard for me to read more than 4 or 5 pages in a sitting.
Really hard to read. The discussion about music was so pretentious. What redeemed the book were two shocking events at the end, so it's worth working your way through it.
