This Is How You Lose Her, Maddaddam and Solo

This was a bit of a disappointment after "The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao". "This is how you lose her" contains nine short stories about being unfaithful and how this can mess up your life. They are mostly about Yunior, who we met in Junot Diaz's previous two books. The first few were great fun, and whilst the later ones were probably better, I just got tired of the whole business of cheating. I guess the short story format was the only way to go when there is no coherent plot. 

Although it is a few years since I read "The Year of the Flood" and even longer for "Oryx and Crake", I do believe that "Maddaddam" is the best of Margaret Atwood's futuristic trilogy. The highlight for me was when Zeb tells Toby about his life. It is the best bit of storytelling I have read for a long, long time. This is a bit about his father: "The Rev had his very own cult. That was the way to go in those days if you wanted to coin the megabucks and you had a facility for ranting and bullying, plus golden-tongued whip-'em-up preaching, and you lacked some other grey-area but highly marketable skill, such as derivatives trading. Tell people what they want to hear, call yourself a religion, put the squeeze on for contributions, run you own media outlets and use them for robocalls and slick online campaigns, befriend or threaten politicians, evade taxes. You had to give the guy some credit. He was twisted as a pretzel, he was a tin-foil halo shit-nosed frogstomping king rat asshole, but he wasn't stupid." No, Zeb did not like his father. The bits in between are OK but are a little too much fantasy for my taste. There is too much that involves the new species of the Crakers, Painballers, Pigoons etc. Toby was a main character in the previous book, and here it is her personality that shines through. Atwood is such a brilliant writer that I almost gave it five stars. I just felt the conclusion of the trilogy was somewhat disappointing, especially after the previous books' endings were so great. But when you read paragraphs like the one above, who cares.

The only reason I read this book was because of the author. I have thoroughly enjoyed every book by William Boyd but "Solo" was a big disappointment. It was nearly all plot and very little in the way of decent prose. Fortunately, it was very short. The first part set in Africa was boring and the story only got better when Bond returns home. But then we were off abroad again and more action stuff. Alright if you like that kind of thing. It's just not for me.