The Japanese Lover

I've only read two of Isabel Allende's books, but I've already come to expect a lot from her as an author. Those two books were so good, amazingly structured and filled with fully-realized characters. I loved everyone from the protagonists to the third-string characters. Even the characters I didn't like felt like complete people, which complicated my feelings in wonderful ways.

And The Japanese Lover didn't quite measure up. I think part of it may be that she was working with a different translator. There were glimpses of the lyrical language I'd become accustomed to, but they were few and far between. But it was more than that.

This book felt unfinished. It wandered and jumped didn't flow as well as I wanted it to. It tried a bit too hard to be hip to current culture in the modern-day sections (perhaps Allende should stick to historical fiction?). It felt like whole chapters were missing, chapters that would make me care more about these characters and help me understand the connection between them.

It's not that the book was bad, really. The romance was lovely, if a little unorthodox. But some of the backstory was a but too tragic with no real justification for all the suffering. Maybe it could have worked with stronger writing, but the child pornography just seemed out of place in a book that was trying to be more about the Japanese concentration camps during WWII. There was just a disconnect that kept this book from being great. And after the greatness of her other books, it was more disappointing that it ought to have been.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Shadows of Self

Let's dive right into the biggest problem I had with this book, which is Sanderson's treatment of Lessie. Wax's lady-love, in a classic case of fridging, gets killed in the prologue of The Alloy of Law , giving Wax a reason to return to the big city and mope around for a while. She turns back up in the prologue of this book, which details how she and Wax met. And at first I was excited to get a bit more backstory. I wondered if maybe all the prologues would be about her, letting her be more than the awesome woman who died to give Wax some man-pain. This turned out not to be the case. Instead, the prologue was just there to remind us that she existed. Until it's revealed at the very end of the book that she's been alive all along, having faked her own death on God's orders. (It makes slightly more sense than that.) This comes up just in time for her to die in Wax's arms again, sending him into a fresh bout of grief plus bonus loss of faith in God. That'...
Read more

Specials

I have to admit that the conclusion to this trilogy felt a little flat to me. There were definitely some good things, and I still think the series as a whole is good and tackles interesting questions with some good nuance. I even liked the actual ending of the story. But so much of this book felt like a rehash of the second one that I felt a little bored by the end of it. Once again, Tally has had her brain rewired, and once again she sets out into the wilderness where he solitude helps her figure out what she actually wants. The love triangle sort of fizzles out and the stakes are revealed to be not nearly as high as it seemed. What felt like a worldwide conspiracy is mostly confined to one city, and Tally's role shifts. She does help save the world, but it's more about preventing a war than ushering a grand revolution. Which isn't to say that the revolution doesn't happen. But it's not the complete overthrow of society that the rebels wanted. And that's pr...
Read more

Parable of the Sower: The Graphic Novel

This is one of my favorite books, so I clearly had to read the graphic novel version. It's a good story to revisit every now and then, and this edition makes that a lot easier. Since so much of the information is conveyed through images, reading it is a lot quicker. Of course, this being an adaptation, a lot of things got left out. I know the story well enough to have recognized all the omissions. The story still works well, but I'll always think the original has more depth.   Overall, it's a good adaptation of a really important novel. And if the new format helps it reach new audiences, that can only be a good thing.
Read more