another knitting blog

I will be happy when...

I will be happy, when?

round one: an unfinished dew breaker

An Unfinished Season: A Novel by Ward Just

When I first read the title, I thought the season unfinished would refer to some sport or other; my bet was on basketball. Bad guess. Let's call it an unfinished novel instead. Once again, true to form for the modern novel, a strong start peters out into a weak, pointless finish. Why can't authors bring their A game to the end or just quit while they are ahead.

The Dew Breaker By Edwidge Danticat

Points of interest: Edwidge Danticat is female and was born in Haiti. This book is actually a collection of stories about, or told by, a group of semi-related characters including a former Hatian torturer--the dew breaker of the title. I would have preferred if one or two of the stories had been more fleshed out and some of the more tangential stories left for greater exploration elsewhere.

Neither of these books was particularly good or bad.  Neither would be likely to make it out of the next round anyway, so I'll flip a coin.

Winner: An Unfished Season

round one: the cloud school

Cloud Atlas: A Novel by David Mitchell

This book has a unique and maddening structure: there are six loosely related stories representing six genres successively wrapped within one another so that for the first half of the book you are starting and leaving the beginnings of things. After reading the central story at one go, you are back a the end of story five, then four, and so on. This structure did not endear this book to me; I resented constantly being interrupted. Moreover, it didn't help my experience as a reader that the book was in such high demand from the library that I could never renew it, but had to keep returning it and then waiting sometimes several weeks to be able to check it out again. That just made the bifurcated stories feel even more disconnected. 

This is the book that won the 2005 tournament. Some people really liked it. I would not discourage you from giving it a chance, but I'm not making any promises.

The Finishing School by Muriel Spark

This is actually more of a long short story or a novelette than a novel. Unlike the protracted ordeal of Cloud Atlas, I read this book comfortably in an afternoon. It's a lark; but don't pay much, if anything, to read it--it will be done all too quickly.  Perhaps it should packaged in a volume together with Spark's better known work of teachers and students, The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie.

Annoyance almost made The Finishing School the winner, but after cooling off, I reconsidered.

Winner: Cloud Atlas