Reviews - Julian Branston, Kazuo Ishiguro
The Eternal Quest (Julian Branston)
This took me oddly long to read. It's quite dense. It wasn't quite as full of hijinks as I'd expected, really, given that the summary is that Don Quixote was a real character who Cervantes met and who got involved in his life. But it's enjoyable, in any case. Cervantes as characterised here is likeable and fun. Ongorra is comically villainous. And the old Knight is quite batty and yet also noble, particularly in light of his back story. Cervantes' family made me laugh a little, though they're so... tumultuous that really there's only an impression of the whole of them, not any particular character that stands out. There's a lot of small details that I rather like.
I'm ambivalent on the little bit of romance. It's nice, but also somewhat out of the blue, and it doesn't really go anywhere, either. The Duchess disappears from the text, just like that.
Perhaps more editing would have made this an easier, more enjoyable read -- it certainly had the potential for me to give it four stars, at some points.
Never Let Me Go (Kazuo Ishiguro)
This book is a bit like having a one-sided conversation with the narrator. In consequences, it kinda feels like it rambles a bit -- they digress to talk about something else and then a couple of pages later, wrench it back to the original point. In some ways that makes it feel very natural, like someone talking, but to read it, it gets irritating.
There's a difficult tone to it... Very resigned, unemotional, and somewhat, I don't know, superficial. The narrator skims the surface of the truths revealed. It's natural to do that, in some ways, for a real person, but in a character, it's hard to engage. The characters of Ruth and Tommy were much more vivid for me than Kathy: Ruth and her needing to be in the know, needing to be superior; Tommy and his anger issues and his struggle to be creative. Ruth felt especially real to me: I knew a girl whose name was very much like her, and I was pretty much the Kathy in our interactions, too.
The way it engages with the issues -- with the idea of clones -- without dragging out all the backstory is interesting, dealt with it in this way. Like it's a fact of life, like what you're reading is all very matter of fact. And you go along with it a little, and then you stop, and you think about it... It actually reminds me of the way Kathy describes being taught about what her life will be: somehow it builds up so you've known it all along, but you never have this big moment of revelation. Unfortunately, that deadens the sharper shocks, I think.
I enjoyed it, and it was very easy to just settle down and read it. It's not racing action or anything, pretty leisurely, and not compelling in the sense that I couldn't put it down. But I wanted to know -- even suspecting what the end would be like, I wanted to get there and see.
During the "Three Weeks for DW" stuff, I will not be disabling comments here, but I will be asking people to come over and comment on DW, if at all possible. Go here to do so. If you need a DW invite, ask. There is a tutorial on how to set up your OpenID here. If you comment anonymously, please sign your comments!
This took me oddly long to read. It's quite dense. It wasn't quite as full of hijinks as I'd expected, really, given that the summary is that Don Quixote was a real character who Cervantes met and who got involved in his life. But it's enjoyable, in any case. Cervantes as characterised here is likeable and fun. Ongorra is comically villainous. And the old Knight is quite batty and yet also noble, particularly in light of his back story. Cervantes' family made me laugh a little, though they're so... tumultuous that really there's only an impression of the whole of them, not any particular character that stands out. There's a lot of small details that I rather like.
I'm ambivalent on the little bit of romance. It's nice, but also somewhat out of the blue, and it doesn't really go anywhere, either. The Duchess disappears from the text, just like that.
Perhaps more editing would have made this an easier, more enjoyable read -- it certainly had the potential for me to give it four stars, at some points.
Never Let Me Go (Kazuo Ishiguro)
This book is a bit like having a one-sided conversation with the narrator. In consequences, it kinda feels like it rambles a bit -- they digress to talk about something else and then a couple of pages later, wrench it back to the original point. In some ways that makes it feel very natural, like someone talking, but to read it, it gets irritating.
There's a difficult tone to it... Very resigned, unemotional, and somewhat, I don't know, superficial. The narrator skims the surface of the truths revealed. It's natural to do that, in some ways, for a real person, but in a character, it's hard to engage. The characters of Ruth and Tommy were much more vivid for me than Kathy: Ruth and her needing to be in the know, needing to be superior; Tommy and his anger issues and his struggle to be creative. Ruth felt especially real to me: I knew a girl whose name was very much like her, and I was pretty much the Kathy in our interactions, too.
The way it engages with the issues -- with the idea of clones -- without dragging out all the backstory is interesting, dealt with it in this way. Like it's a fact of life, like what you're reading is all very matter of fact. And you go along with it a little, and then you stop, and you think about it... It actually reminds me of the way Kathy describes being taught about what her life will be: somehow it builds up so you've known it all along, but you never have this big moment of revelation. Unfortunately, that deadens the sharper shocks, I think.
I enjoyed it, and it was very easy to just settle down and read it. It's not racing action or anything, pretty leisurely, and not compelling in the sense that I couldn't put it down. But I wanted to know -- even suspecting what the end would be like, I wanted to get there and see.
During the "Three Weeks for DW" stuff, I will not be disabling comments here, but I will be asking people to come over and comment on DW, if at all possible. Go here to do so. If you need a DW invite, ask. There is a tutorial on how to set up your OpenID here. If you comment anonymously, please sign your comments!