This book had so much promise, the collision of two families together on holiday. But after his two wonderful books ("The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night Time" and "A Spot of Bother") I found this new novel, The Red House by Mark Haddon, to be quite tedious. I felt that the author was trying to be too modern; frequent jumps from one character to another (sometimes ... guess which character I'm talking about). The ultra short sentences that here sound pretentious ("It all faded. Hard to feel passionate about anything now. She thought about her mother. It was physiological of course. Myelin breakdown, neural tangles. But you couldn't help wonder. Being bored of life, wanting to let go". And too much jumping back into the past. Memory is an attractive method of explaining character, but please, not all the time! Sometimes I longed to get back to the real time story. The author seemed to have lost the plot with some of his descriptions: "Airport novels shelved according to height". So although I found the book hard work, the last third at least has some forward momentum. But a really good idea got lost somewhere along the way.
Perhaps it was because I so enjoyed the first part of this book that I was unprepared for the last tumultuous third. There were times late on I wanted to give up, but the sheer force and dynamism of the writing kept me going. I was always going to read this novel after having finished the author's wonderful collection of short stories "Drown" only eight months ago. If anything, I should have waited at least a year or so, as the style of the two books is quite similar. In both, Junot Diaz writes about people from his home country, the Dominican Republic. This novel encompasses three generations of the same family. It is not told entirely in a linear form, but it mostly gains from it's occasional journey into the DR's past. The characters are colourful and their difficult lives are magically described. I will definitely read the author's latest book "This is how you lose her", but I will save it on my To Read List for a couple years.
I wanted to like the first person and other stories more than I did, being a huge fan of Ali Smith. Maybe it was because the first few of the twelve pieces in this collection of short stories were a little disappointing. Typical is the huge strangeness of number five where a woman, in bed with her married lover, muses on Beethoven's opera "Fidelio". Fortunately these are followed by some riveting blasts of language few writers can match in just a few pages. "the history of history" is an eight page wonder. A really thin slice of life, compared to a novel as a fully formed loaf. The author occasionally weaves some baffling fantasy into stories that are essentially about relationships. In one, a woman is talking to her fourteen year old self, a concept that is both provoking and funny. I would give that five stars on it's own.
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