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I seriously had to fight
not to put this one down. It has to be called a ''classic'' for a
reason. Maybe I'm missing the subtle subtext and biting social commentary?
Maybe it's more than just a muddled, self-indulgent collection of
obscure literary and geographical references and run-on sentences?
Perhaps I felt absolutely no connection to the high-minded, culture-spewing
characters because I could give two shits about Goethe and the Iberian
Peninsula? The fact that there is very little sense of linear reality
in this book bothers me less than the fact that the characters≠non-linear
realities mirror actual time so closely it is practically impossible
at times to tell if you're inside a character's head or there with
them in actual space and time. Given the fact that the book spans
less than twenty-four hours, and our protagonist downs about three
bottles of mescal, 20 beers and several gallons of other assorted
booze, may have added to the disorientation of the whole thing, but
there is nobody but the author responsible for the unevenness of the
book. The thing jerked along like a bus with a broken transmission,
at times speeding ahead several hours and then slowing to a crawl
and then going off on tangents that bump on for pages and put me right
the hell to sleep. In fact I sometimes didn't even need to open the
book to taste of its stupefying effects. I would merely perch the
thing on my chest and by osmosis absorb the drag. Lowry certainly
does have an encyclopedic knowledge about everything, but reading
the encyclopedia would put me to sleep too. There's an afterward to
this particular copy of the book that compares it with books like
''The Sound and the Fury,'' which, ironically, is one of the few books
I gave up on--and pretty early on into the book. I don't get Faulkner,
and apparently I don't get Lowry either.
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