User Profile

Desole pour le manque d'accents, mon clavier n'en a pas.

J'ai longtemps hesite avant de lire ce classique car je connaissais l'antisemitisme passione de l'auteur. En general les extremistes en toutes choses ont un discours qui m'ennui tres vite. Ils repetent toujours la meme chose de maniere similaire ou differente mais toujours la meme chose. Je me suis enfin resolu a le lire pour me rendre compte que ce que je craignais se realisait: en gros on peut resumer les quelques 400 pages par ces mots: chienne de vie, nous sommes des vers pourris sur une terre pourrie. Ce sont mes mots mais je crois que je traduis assez fidelement le message de l'auteur. Il a bien sur son stlyle a lui et fait souvent de bonnes trouvailles mais la repetition incessante rend la lecture lassante. N'allez pas m'assassiner pour la comparaison mais il m'a fait penser a La Putain de Nelly Arcan. Toujours la meme hargne repetee sans repit.

Read this book because I'm just back from Buenos Aires which totally charmed me and where the action of this novel is located.

A thriller a la A.E.Poe the goal is to find who murdered one of the participants to a Poe convention that has been moved at the last minute to Buenos Aires.

Allow me to quote to give you a better idea of the tone: "And you told us what the story would be like if you had written it. Urquiza was to kill Johnson. Urquiza was to invoke the powerful beings from the South, Azathoth and Yog-Sothoth, and to be the embodiment of Hastur, the destroyer, he who walks in the wind, so as to prevent Johnson from revealing even more than he already had, quite innocently, revealed of the language of the Necronomicon and of the secret code concealed in Poe’s literature. Everything had been set up with that end in mind. The conference was moved to Buenos Aires in order to bring Johnson to the South, where Urquiza would invoke the powers of Azathoth and Yog-Sothoth as well as Hastur’s lethal skill with “the slicer” to eliminate him without leaving any traces..." As you can see Poe is not very far but diverted by Jorge Borges and the result makes for a light but nevertheless interesting reading. Maybe I'm still under the spell of this beautiful city...?

You're probably too young to remember painting by numbers. Basically when you bought that, you got a board on which you found the outline of what was being painted in (a tiger, a house, etc) and this outline was filled with small numbered areas. You applied paint #1 to the areas numbered 1, 2 to the 2s and the final result was a beautiful tiger in full colour which you could then show to your friends pretending you painted that. This novel by Follett reminds me exactly of that. It seems to be written by Mr Follett following a pretty exact recipe on how to write a spy novel. You have to hang in during the first 75% because not much exciting happens. Things get a bit more lively towards the end but by then I had mostly lost my patience. Nevertheless reading a work on a possible scenario leading to nuclear war is a bit too close to home in these troubles times.

Not sure where to begin... First, after reading some ten pages of this novel you discover the importance of the paragraph, for here they are few and far in between. So reading the whole thing (352 pages) is reading a wall of text. It's like a marathon and you never know if you'll be able to hold on until the next paragraph. Second the language is surprising. Like English at the time of Cavern man: Me husband, you wife, she older daughter, she middle daughter, them wee daughters. But allow me to quote her: "After a pause brother-in-law said he was going to beat him up all the same. ‘Not necessary,’ I said. ‘Still,’ he said. ‘Ach,’ I said. ‘Ach nothing,’ he said. ‘Ach sure,’ I said. ‘Ach sure what?’ he said. ‘Ach sure, if that’s how you feel.’ ‘Ach sure, of course that’s how I feel.’ ‘Ach, all right then.’ ‘Ach,’ he said. ‘Ach,’ I said. ‘Ach,’ he said. ‘Ach,’ I said. ‘Ach.’ " Third, reading this book is heavy not only because of the said " wall of text" and length but also because nothing very rejoicing is happening in there. Deaths, violence, more deaths. This is not to say it's never funny, as showed by the above quote. But for all that I kept on reading till the end because she does an incredible job at making you feel what it must have felt like to live during The Troubles. Very soon you realize that this language has a function, it makes every event, every thought, every word something dangerous. And you realize that as she explains you had to think in layers, top of your head ( thoughts that could and should be seen and felt by others), middle head (not so safe) and bottom ( not to be disclosed under any circumstance). One of the most original works I've read in quite a while.