Finding Myself
Toby Litt
Penguin Books, 2004
ISBN: 0141006544
Victoria About is a bestselling novelist. For her new novel, she wants to do something completely different that will rock the world: She rents a house by the sea and invites eleven of her friends to stay there with her for one month. What the others don’t know is that there will also be hidden cameras and microphones involved. Victoria hopes for games, chats, affairs and lots of material for her new novel. Of course, things don’t turn out the way she had planned it because people behave like people and not like characters in a novel. Worst of all, they discover the cameras. So now she has to deal with guest who do not trust her at all, who do what they want – even more so than before. How can she talk and write herself out of it, fix up the friendships and relationships that got seriously damaged?
Now, it is a rather interesting book. But. Never in my career as a reader have I had such a problem with the author not being of the same sex as the person telling the story. There were so many times when I thought ‘That’s more what a man thinks a woman would say or do.’ I found that quite sad because otherwise the novel is quite entertaining, above all because it contains all the notes of her editor. Sentences and paragraphs crossed out, comments, etc.
So, would I recommend it? Difficult to say. I would recommend it to people who want an easy holiday book to have a laugh. I would not recommend it to anyone who does not really have time to read. There many other books in this blog that I would rather have them read. Like the Albom books.
Available at Amazon in English.
Tags: English, novel, humor
Penguin Books, 2004
ISBN: 0141006544
Victoria About is a bestselling novelist. For her new novel, she wants to do something completely different that will rock the world: She rents a house by the sea and invites eleven of her friends to stay there with her for one month. What the others don’t know is that there will also be hidden cameras and microphones involved. Victoria hopes for games, chats, affairs and lots of material for her new novel. Of course, things don’t turn out the way she had planned it because people behave like people and not like characters in a novel. Worst of all, they discover the cameras. So now she has to deal with guest who do not trust her at all, who do what they want – even more so than before. How can she talk and write herself out of it, fix up the friendships and relationships that got seriously damaged?
Now, it is a rather interesting book. But. Never in my career as a reader have I had such a problem with the author not being of the same sex as the person telling the story. There were so many times when I thought ‘That’s more what a man thinks a woman would say or do.’ I found that quite sad because otherwise the novel is quite entertaining, above all because it contains all the notes of her editor. Sentences and paragraphs crossed out, comments, etc.
So, would I recommend it? Difficult to say. I would recommend it to people who want an easy holiday book to have a laugh. I would not recommend it to anyone who does not really have time to read. There many other books in this blog that I would rather have them read. Like the Albom books.
Available at Amazon in English.
Tags: English, novel, humor
posted by Tolk at
29.5.06
