Lucian Cojocaru Vrei Si Bani Vrei Si Iubire Pierduta
I understand that Eleanor Oliphant Is Completely Fine is the first novel Gail Honeyman has published. As a debut, it is a very interesting novel I understand that Eleanor Oliphant Is Completely Fine is the first novel Gail Honeyman has published. As a debut, it is a very interesting novel indeed, with its fresh and lively voice that leaves the readers with a smile on their lips after closing the book.I must confess I have had some trouble in establishing its genre, though. To label it 'chicklit' seemed to me a little unfair, since this label carries a soupcon of superficiality, of light reading. The author of the appears to have encountered the same problem, calling it “part comic novel, part emotional thriller, and part love story” – a little too many parts, in my opinion, from which at least one an exaggeration and/ or wishful thinking.
Nevertheless, it could be all three (and a few others), if you encompass them in a satirical approach, with a touch of neo-modernist psychological (melo)drama (hum, more and more confusing, told you, not so easy to classify).Anyway (and all the reviews I’ve browsed agree with this), the most savurous ingredient of the novel is its humor, its gentle satire of the contemporary society, with all its political correctness, mating rituals, smugness of the public image and so on:I’d made my legs black, and my hair blond. I’d lengthened and darkened my eyelashes, dusted a flush of pink onto my cheeks and painted my lips a shade of dark red which was rarely found in nature. I should, by rights, look less like a human woman than I’d ever done, and yet it seemed that this was the most acceptable, the most appropriate appearance that I’d ever made before the world.Eleanor Oliphant’s charm springs precisely from the fact that she is so different, with her pixie-like appearance – a little fairy who, although she looks attentively around her, does not completely understand the world she however learnt so much about. The narrative follows her efforts to comprehend the society and fit in it by mimicking its rules, which leads to little scenes like this one, hilarious and touching at the same time:The barman was well over six feet tall and had created strange, enormous holes in his earlobes by inserting little black plastic circles in order to push back the skin. For some reason, I was reminded of my shower curtain.This comforting thought of home gave me the courage to examine his tattoos, which snaked across his neck and down both arms. The colours were very beautiful, and the images were dense and complex. How marvellous to be able to read someone’s skin, to explore the story of his life across his chest, his arms, the softness at the back of his neck.
The barman had roses and a treble clef, a cross, a woman’s face. So much detail, so little unadorned flesh.The dark side of the story is not bad either, the narrative being often saved from melodrama by the same quality of the voice that keeps its involuntary humour even in the most traumatic moments of her life:I slowly opened one eye—it was gummed shut—and saw that the living room was unchanged, the frog pouf staring back at me. I hoped so, but only because if this was the location of the afterlife, I’d be lodging an appeal immediately.So true is the narrative voice that I must confess I was amused even by some overused jokes, like in the scene in which the heroine, drunk and looking a mess, opens the door to a stupefied Raymond, who exclaims “Jesus Christ!” and to whom she politely introduces herself in turn as “Eleanor Oliphant”.To conclude, I would say that the strongest points of Eleanor Oliphant Is Completely Fine are its genuine humour, the unreliable narrator and the social satire.
Lucian Cojocaru Vrei Si Bani Vrei Si Iubire Pierduta De
On the other hand the book has some weak points too, like the improbability of the storyline (everything falls too conveniently into place, the heroine being suddenly absorbed into the whirl of the society after a lifetime of solitude), the commercial twist of the narrative towards the end (Evil as a reality was more convincing for me than Evil as a ghost) and the occasional slip into melodrama:I have been waiting for death all my life. I do not mean that I actively wish to die, just that I do not really want to be alive. Something had shifted now, and I realized that I didn’t need to wait for death.
I didn’t want to. I unscrewed the bottle and drank deeply.Overall however, for any reader with a need to counter the absurd of existence with a wry laugh, Gail Honeyman’s novel is, to say so, completely fine. In an published in Vanity Fair after the release of the movie adaptation of The Glass Castle, Christine Champagne quotes Jeannette Walls In an published in Vanity Fair after the release of the movie adaptation of The Glass Castle, Christine Champagne quotes Jeannette Walls remembering the effect her memoir had on her mother: “The book was tough on her. But bless her heart—she said, ‘I don’t see it quite the way you did, but that’s the way you saw it.’ It’s crazy that she can see that.”This candid statement made me meditate, not for the first time, upon that controversial and sometimes even ingrate place memoirs, diaries, even personal letters occupy – not quite fiction, because the events are supposed to have truly happened, but not quite reality – not only because human memory is faulty but also because the interpretation of the said events often distort them.
Therefore these works are suspended somewhere in between, where everything is a little blurred and you cannot really accept nor deny objectivity, reliability, spontaneity and so on. Sometimes one of them makes that big step towards the literature realm and becomes art, like Solzhenitsyn’s Gulag Archipelago, in which the truth and the way the truth is told are equally important, but most of them inhabit the grey zone forever.Jeannette Walls’s Glass Castle, despite its fairytale title and its peculiar talent to present the gruesome in an affectionate way is no exception. A very good memoir, but, as Francine Prose justly remarks in her NY Times, a memoir that “falls short of being art”.Which does not mean the book is not worth reading, on the contrary, for it raises many serious and frequently debated questions about parenting, family life, social conventions, social institutions and so on. The amazing book of Yuval Noah Harari, Sapiens. A Brief History of Humanity, could be summed up in two images: the one that reminds us, from the veryThe amazing book of Yuval Noah Harari, Sapiens. A Brief History of Humanity, could be summed up in two images: the one that reminds us, from the very first pages, of our not-so-noble origins:Just 6 million years ago, a single female ape had two daughters.