Klik op een omslag om naar Google Boeken te gaan.
Bezig met laden... The Mars Room: A Novel (2018)door Rachel Kushner
Bezig met laden...
Meld je aan bij LibraryThing om erachter te komen of je dit boek goed zult vinden. Op dit moment geen Discussie gesprekken over dit boek. Last thoughts as I closed the book were “huh?”...as I proceeded to tear up. Did I understand the point to the book? No, but the ending was still incredibly sad to me. Everything was written very well. I love the characters, I love the storylines, but nothing connected. It was almost like this was a book of a few short stories but instead of reading one short story at a time, you read a little bit from each story in every other chapter. I kept waiting for it to “click“, for some connection to be made but that never happened. So I don’t want to give this book a bad score because overall I really enjoyed the stories, but I can’t give it a five because I don’t really understand the point to the book and that irritates me. ( ) The Mars Room is a hard-bitten prison novel. At the outset, Romy Hall is being transported to a high security prison to serve a life sentence for murder. Romy was an exotic dance at the Mars Room in San Francisco, but he life has been on a downslope since then. In the prison, Romy meets Gordon Hauser, a teacher, who sees her academic potential and tries to encourage her, however Romy is more interested in what she can leverage from him. We also encounter Doc, a disgraced ex-cop serving hard time in another prison for doing a hit on behalf of one of Romy's cell-mates. Doc lives in fear of his past being made known to the other prisoners. In telling their stories Kushner does not try to varnish any of her characters; they are all flawed human beings. The book is an engrossing read with plenty to say, but I'm not sure that I entirely got it. For example, I don't understand why Kushner included excerpts from the Unabomber's wilderness diary as some sort of counterpoint to Gordon's remote existence near the prison. I don't feel that added anything other than confusion to the novel. For me, this book ambled along in the three star realm until the ending where I felt it improved. I love when an author can take essentially bad characters and make them sympathetic (a la Lolita), and I thought Kushner did that to some degree throughout the book, but in a more masterful fashion when describing Romy’s stalker, Kurt. The characters were just generally plain interesting; I felt like I was introduced to people I would never know in real life. My major knock on the book was with the plot. I didn’t mind the disjointedness as many characters were introduced and then put on the back burner, but I couldn’t help but think that the author’s in-depth research was just a little too in evidence. It read like non-fiction to me in so many ways. I love non-fiction, so I am fine with that, but I expect a different kind of narrative arc in a novel, and honestly, this book didn’t deliver. I can put down and pick up a non-fiction read with ease; and with this book, I felt the same way . . .and that’s not the quality of a great work of fiction. geen besprekingen | voeg een bespreking toe
PrijzenOnderscheidingenErelijsten
Met een veroordeling tot twee maal levenslang plus zes jaar, strekt het leven van de 29-jarige Romy Hall voor zich uit in een lange, onverbiddelijk rechte lijn. Buiten in het San Francisco van haar jeugd, groeit haar zevenjarige zoontje Jackson op. Het leven in de gevangenis, is weinig meer dan overleven. Maar zelfs als je levenslang hebt, is het leven niet gedaan tot het voorbij is. Geen bibliotheekbeschrijvingen gevonden. |
Actuele discussiesGeenPopulaire omslagen
Google Books — Bezig met laden... GenresDewey Decimale Classificatie (DDC)813.6Literature English (North America) American fiction 21st CenturyLC-classificatieWaarderingGemiddelde:
Ben jij dit?Word een LibraryThing Auteur. |