diappointing
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I have always loved Loius de Berniers` books, as witty, human, original, serious and funny at the same time, in short wonderful to read. But, alas, at last he seems to have reached what one politely calls midlife crisis and all his imagination seems to have slipped down to where this crisis normally takes place. We have to listen - just as the male character of the book - to endless gory and rather boring tales of Roza`s, a yugoslav former prostitute's, mostly sexual adventures, while the fortiish (not really so old) Chris gets more and more aroused and horny about her. The two like each other and love each other a bit, but the man, Chris, is so repressed that nothing happens except at the end where he gets stone drunk and spoils it all. One cannot really sympathize with either character.
Please, wonderful Louis de Berniers, keep writing your great stories and don't get into the cliché trap of middle aged men's single mindedness.
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Definetly worth a read...
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I think the way the story is written is done very well and the book is worth reading. Gets you hooked near the end and a sign of a good book is when you get an emmotional attachment and this is what it does. You get into the characters and can picture the scenes vivdly. short review i know but you get the jist, just buy it !
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Who said hackneyed claptrap cruising on his famous name? ...
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... because whoever it was, you had it right on the money. Louis de Berniers is a fabulously gifted writer, but he just wasn't trying for this dreadful effort.
No story or plot in itself, one would hope for a richness of character, but there is none, just a couple of one dimensional stereotypes and a load of wikipedia factoids about Tito's Yugoslavia and sleazy soho nightclubs. The scene setting - harking back to the bad old days of seventies Britian by linking in to news stories of the day - is terribly corny.
It gets one star simply because Amazon won't let me give it less. Come on Louis, I know the editors get on your back for output, but this crap really is devaluing your other excellent work by association.
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Simple slice
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Louis De Bernieres has carved out a complex story using really only two main characters who flash back using their own narration to their own contrasting lives. To me, though, it did not seem like a "proper novel" just like a one person play is more of a "performance" than a play. As the narrators by their own admission were making up some of their narration it left me feeling as if the read was all for nothing. Having said that, there were some powerful, moving and dramatic narrated scenes so I would recommend this book to anyone interested in the plight of immigrant young people in London, the 70s/80s and the selfishness/thoughtlessness of passive unhappily married middle-aged men.
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The power of a good story
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Chris, is a travelling salesman aged 40 in an unhappy marriage when he meets Roza, a young woman from Yugoslavia, in Archway, North London. She is standing at the side of the road when he approaches her believing her to be a prostitute, although, as he makes clear, he is not a man who has ever approached a prostitute before.
The year is 1979, Mrs Thatcher is about to take power in England and Marshall Tito will soon die in Yugoslavia. The tragic fragmentation of Yugoslavia is still some way off.
The story is told in the first person by the two characters - Chris and Roza, and in retrospect by the older Chris.
Chris becomes fascinated by Roza. She invites him to visit her as a friend and he comes back several times, in love and in lust as she tells him the events of her life since she was a little girl, the proud daughter of a second world-war partisan fighter.
There is a marked contrast between the passionate and open Roza and the anaemic, closed-down Chris; the vitality and violence of her life compared to the sheltered docility of the life that he has led. Over time and over coffee in the basement of a run-down house where nobody goes by their real name, his repressed lust turns to fascination and then love as he listens to the stories from her life. She at last has found someone who will listen to an account of the heights of joy along with the depths of degradation and humiliation she has experienced. They both work through the mistakes made and wrong paths taken before ending up here.
The painful embarrassment and sad misunderstanding of the ending when Chris the repressed Englishman gets drunk and expresses his feelings at last, leave a strong sense of loss that remains with the reader long after the last word has been read.
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