Clonk, clonk, clunketty-clonk
Does anyone, anywhere, talk like this? The speaker and his listener are both from the same European country and therefore, one assumes, will already have some general idea of when it granted female suffrage:
'It wasn't until women won the right to vote, well into the twentieth century, that they were even allowed to attend the shareholders' meetings'
[Emphasis mine]
Sheridan codsmacked that kind of thing in The Critic in 1779 - 'Philip, you know, is proud Iberia's king' 'He is'
This is a crime novel which has won extensive plaudits, and I'm finding it heavy going. This was only a final straw of info-dump some of which does not even appear particularly necessary to the convolutions of the plot (maybe it will turn out to be significant that the protag uses a particular database?).
Maybe the prose style is the fault of the translator, though I'm not sure anybody who is quite so tin-earedly infodumpy is going to be a wonderful prose stylist nonetheless.
Because this work has been so praised and people seem so keen on it, I took a punt on it as a 2 for 99p offer in the Oxfam bookshop last week and am really glad I didn't spend serious money on it.
Perhaps all this is just winding up the mechanism for the whole thing to suddenly go 'sprongggggg!!!!' and let go in a tumultuous car-chasey blowing-up stuff way but I doubt it.
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