More Book Reviews
Dec. 3rd, 2018 02:30 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
brigdhNight Film by Marisha Pessl. A horror novel set in modern-day Manhattan, with semi-retired/semi-fired journalist, Scott McGrath, as our narrator. Several years ago McGrath set out to investigate notoriously reclusive horror-film director Stanislaus Cordova (a mix of Stanley Kubrick and Thomas Pynchon), whom he abruptly accused of being a child serial killer. Unsurprisingly, when McGrath could not actually prove such a wild claim – his source having disappeared, or perhaps never having existed at all – his career tanked. Now Cordova's 23-year-old daughter has apparently committed suicide, but McGrath is certain that something more complicated may be going on, and he sets out to investigate.
I particularly enjoyed the structure of the novel. McGrath's straightforward first-person narration is occasionally interrupted with articles from magazines, medical reports, screencaps of the messageboard for obsessive Cordova fans, and other metatextual items, which provided an intriguingly different perspective. For a story obsessed about the difference between reality and fiction, and the overlap between them, it's a great technique.
Unfortunately, the depiction of New York City made me laugh. Within just the first few chapters, we have blocks of abandoned buildings in Harlem, a "known crack-den" in Chinatown, and McGrath considering that any woman entering Central Park after dark is "naive – or reckless". None of these are remotely plausible in today's gentrified and excessively safe Manhattan. It seemed to improve as the book went on, though perhaps that's just because most of the later scenes took place outside of NYC, and so didn't strike me as so ridiculously inaccurate.
McGrath himself is quite the self-centered misogynistic asshole. To be fair, I'm fairly certain Pessl wrote him this way on purpose, since there are several scenes where he assumes he knows exactly what another character will do, only to be immediately proven wrong. And to be honest, "misogynist asshole" is the exact characterization I would expect from an investigative journalist proud of his war stories from Africa and undercover work in cocaine smuggling. This, too, improved as the book went on, though I couldn't quite tell if that was because McGrath was supposed to be evolving as a person or because there was too much suspense, action, and supernatural stuff going on to deal with minor points of characterization.
Despite these problems, I enjoyed the book. It's certainly enthralling, and kept me turning the pages. But the ending didn't quite work for me. On the one hand, I can't imagine any other ending that would fit the themes of Night Film so well. Yet on the other hand it's so unresolved and leaves so many questions unanswered that I came away dissatisfied.
So, in the end, do I recommend Night Film? It's hard to say. I didn't hate it, certainly, and the parts that were good were very good, but the rest of it just wasn't enough to push it over the line. I suppose I recommend it if you're particularly into questioning the meaning of truth.
The Tale of the Missing Man by Manzoor Ahtesham. Translated by Jason Grunebaum and Ulrike Stark. A novel set in Bhopal, India, mostly in the 1980s, but with significant flashbacks to the 50s, 60s, and 70s. Zamir Ahmad Khan is an excessively average guy: middle-aged, middle class, married to a wife he seems to have no particular feelings for, father of two young children whom he spends little time with, and not as close to his friends as he used to be. He had a job selling antique furniture, but lost it due to his strategy of simply not showing up for months on end. Zamir believes he has a mysterious disease that has caused all of these problems, but multiple doctors haven't been able to diagnose anything, and indeed he seems to have no symptoms beyond vague feelings of alienation and guilt. Zamir is the missing man of the title, but he's not missing in any literal sense; instead, he's missing from his own life, missing any idea of who he is or what he's meant to be doing.
There's no real plot to the novel. Zamir watches his life slowly disintegrate while reminiscing about people or places he once knew in short, disintegrated vignettes that make up the majority of the page count. This is all extremely slow and extremely unengaging; I really had to struggle even to finish the book. My main problem wasn't just boredom, though. Zamir is a complete asshole of a protagonist. Despite all his moping and claims of ill use, he continually commits petty crimes against others: deliberately running up debts at small shops with no intention to pay, spreading negative rumors about people, starting fights, committing adultery. And for all his whining and avowed guilt, he never changes or does anything to correct these problems. He's a realistic enough person, I suppose, but I absolutely do not want to spend two hundred pages with him. The afterword describes this as "subversive and sardonic", but if that was the intention, it absolutely did not come through in the writing. Though I don't know if that's the fault of the original author or the translators.
Overall a draggy book with an irritating protagonist. There are a million novels about middle class India that are so, so much better than this.
I read this as an ARC via NetGalley.
I particularly enjoyed the structure of the novel. McGrath's straightforward first-person narration is occasionally interrupted with articles from magazines, medical reports, screencaps of the messageboard for obsessive Cordova fans, and other metatextual items, which provided an intriguingly different perspective. For a story obsessed about the difference between reality and fiction, and the overlap between them, it's a great technique.
Unfortunately, the depiction of New York City made me laugh. Within just the first few chapters, we have blocks of abandoned buildings in Harlem, a "known crack-den" in Chinatown, and McGrath considering that any woman entering Central Park after dark is "naive – or reckless". None of these are remotely plausible in today's gentrified and excessively safe Manhattan. It seemed to improve as the book went on, though perhaps that's just because most of the later scenes took place outside of NYC, and so didn't strike me as so ridiculously inaccurate.
McGrath himself is quite the self-centered misogynistic asshole. To be fair, I'm fairly certain Pessl wrote him this way on purpose, since there are several scenes where he assumes he knows exactly what another character will do, only to be immediately proven wrong. And to be honest, "misogynist asshole" is the exact characterization I would expect from an investigative journalist proud of his war stories from Africa and undercover work in cocaine smuggling. This, too, improved as the book went on, though I couldn't quite tell if that was because McGrath was supposed to be evolving as a person or because there was too much suspense, action, and supernatural stuff going on to deal with minor points of characterization.
Despite these problems, I enjoyed the book. It's certainly enthralling, and kept me turning the pages. But the ending didn't quite work for me. On the one hand, I can't imagine any other ending that would fit the themes of Night Film so well. Yet on the other hand it's so unresolved and leaves so many questions unanswered that I came away dissatisfied.
So, in the end, do I recommend Night Film? It's hard to say. I didn't hate it, certainly, and the parts that were good were very good, but the rest of it just wasn't enough to push it over the line. I suppose I recommend it if you're particularly into questioning the meaning of truth.
The Tale of the Missing Man by Manzoor Ahtesham. Translated by Jason Grunebaum and Ulrike Stark. A novel set in Bhopal, India, mostly in the 1980s, but with significant flashbacks to the 50s, 60s, and 70s. Zamir Ahmad Khan is an excessively average guy: middle-aged, middle class, married to a wife he seems to have no particular feelings for, father of two young children whom he spends little time with, and not as close to his friends as he used to be. He had a job selling antique furniture, but lost it due to his strategy of simply not showing up for months on end. Zamir believes he has a mysterious disease that has caused all of these problems, but multiple doctors haven't been able to diagnose anything, and indeed he seems to have no symptoms beyond vague feelings of alienation and guilt. Zamir is the missing man of the title, but he's not missing in any literal sense; instead, he's missing from his own life, missing any idea of who he is or what he's meant to be doing.
There's no real plot to the novel. Zamir watches his life slowly disintegrate while reminiscing about people or places he once knew in short, disintegrated vignettes that make up the majority of the page count. This is all extremely slow and extremely unengaging; I really had to struggle even to finish the book. My main problem wasn't just boredom, though. Zamir is a complete asshole of a protagonist. Despite all his moping and claims of ill use, he continually commits petty crimes against others: deliberately running up debts at small shops with no intention to pay, spreading negative rumors about people, starting fights, committing adultery. And for all his whining and avowed guilt, he never changes or does anything to correct these problems. He's a realistic enough person, I suppose, but I absolutely do not want to spend two hundred pages with him. The afterword describes this as "subversive and sardonic", but if that was the intention, it absolutely did not come through in the writing. Though I don't know if that's the fault of the original author or the translators.
Overall a draggy book with an irritating protagonist. There are a million novels about middle class India that are so, so much better than this.
I read this as an ARC via NetGalley.
no subject
Date: 2018-12-03 10:51 pm (UTC)Oh, dear.
I didn't hate it, certainly, and the parts that were good were very good, but the rest of it just wasn't enough to push it over the line. I suppose I recommend it if you're particularly into questioning the meaning of truth.
Do you think it would make a good film?
(Do you mind if I ask about the ending?)
no subject
Date: 2018-12-31 05:22 am (UTC)That's an interesting question! We spend so much time hearing about Cordova's fascinating and outrageous films that it would be nice to actually get a glimpse of them, if only briefly – though on the other hand, it may be one of those cases where it's better to leave it to each reader's imagination, since any reality could never live up to the promises. There's also several scenes where what "really" happens is highly subjective, and the reader only gets the experience filtered through a character who's drugged/hallucinating/lying/etc. That's probably possible to do in film as well as in writing, though I'm less familiar with how one would go about it.
(Do you mind if I ask about the ending?)
McGrath spends the entire book tracking down Cordova, hearing vastly different opinions of him from different sources, but never actually meeting him face-to-face. At the end they finally meet, and McGrath is able to hear Cordova's version of the truth – and the book ends before we the readers hear it. So on the one hand, I understand that Pessl couldn't really give away the "right" answer, since that would contradict the whole point of the book: that there is no singular truth. And yet it felt a little like I'd just spent a thousand pages reading a mystery that was left unsolved.