Bonnie Dundee?
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Dundee is a weird place and this book has discovered the best (perhaps the only) way to write about it. Kate Atkinson catches the tone of the place in the way for example, she presents us with the two old Dundee wifies and her gift for suggesting accent and dialect while not excluding the foreign reader is superb. Dundee was my father's town and to an extent, mine and the book is a bit of a personal nostalgia binge and may indeed overdo as others have said the 'here is a bit of crap creative writing'. But for the playfulness and humour, I found my second reading even better than the first. It is a ghost story and reminds us that all our pasts are made up, our past lives largely imaginary with various versions created to suit different people and different times of our lives. Enjoy.
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Was she having us on on?
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This book was so upsetting. I've been working my way backwards through the Kate Atkinson canon. "Case Histories" was really good. "One Good Turn" was the most readable literate book I'd ever read. "Emotionally Weird" was....absolute tosh. It was almost as if she was doing it as some sort of exercise, being deliberately obtuse to see if she could get away with it ("nice troos, emperor..."). The daughter-and-not-mother on the island are oh so dull, and you really don't care whether they exist or not. The student stuff in Dundee is fairly entertaining at times (and a friend who was a student in Dundee loved it), but not particularly imaginative and when the tedious Nora interrupts to point out how tedious everything is, one can only nod in agreement. I seriously considered not finishing this novel to make some sort of point, but couldn't work out what it was or to whom. But then, I suspect the author had a similar position.
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Disappointing
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"Nora says that it doesn't matter when you die, that this life is nothing but an illusion." Sadly, this is about as deep as "Emotionally Weird" gets. The book covers themes of family history (as do so very many books published in recent years - there are other themes, for goodness' sake), relationships, writing and storytelling through the eyes or narrative of an English literature student in Dundee in the 1970s. Our narrator, Effie, and her fellow students are following a creative-writing course, and Atkinson includes in the text, for reasons that can really only be padding, exerpts from their monumentally bad efforts, together with numerous digressions and interjections from Nora, ostensibly Effie's mother. The reader will be grateful for the fact that Atkinson has indicated all of these distractions from the main story by using a different typeface for each, making it much easier to skip them.
I enjoyed "Behind the Scenes at the Museum", finding it fresh, warm and humorous. "Human Croquet" and "Emotionally Weird" continue with the themes and ideas of this first novel, but both fail to engage in the same way. "Postmodern" tricks alone do not an interesting novel make.
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Unexciting tale of student life has a good ending
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The mystery of a woman's family background is bulked out with rambling tales of student life. It is well-written but unexciting. Having read "Case Histories", I was disappointed by "Emotionally Weird". The humour, about student life in Dundee in the 70's, was praised by the blurb but seemed contrived. It covered ground already visited by TV's "The Young Ones", and would be familiar to anyone who was a student at that time. The plot centres on the discussion with the mother about the girl's family background, but the book is extensively pulped out with the trivialities of life at Dundee University. Plot and characterisation take separate tracks: clever or contrived? Other threads appear as stories within stories, having different styles. Does this add anything? Not much apart reinforcing the air of pseudo-intellectualism of a minor university! In the end the plot is tied up with some flair, with an interesting and stylish ending. Kate Atkinson is good at this, and it saved an otherwise turgid novel from being a waste of time. From my limited reading of this author, try Case Histories first, and if you must read this one, make sure you finish it!
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Best Yet
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This is the best offering from Kate Atkinson by far and if you've ever been a student or even just bored out of your mind in a hot stuffy room somewhere you'll love this. In this twisted tale Nora reveals Effie's true parentage (for Effie's mother Nora is in fact a virgin.) The characters in this book are vivid and laugh-out-loud funny and the details even more so. I recently read Emotionally Wierd for the third time and it gets better and better. However if you expect a big finish you may be disapointed but, as far as I'm concerned, the conclusion perfectly mirrors the atmosphere throughout. Some classic gems include the meaning of life, a baby called Proteus and the perfectly observed madness that is predicate logic. Enjoy!
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