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2vsarqcom Vsarq vsarq — Saw at Browseabout. Also a newer book to look into.

Gary Ludbrook d4_design — I've long since come to terms with the fact that I'm a pedant, so let me start off by being as pedantic as possible: this isn't really a novel, despite what the cover and marketing say. It's a collection of short stories with some characters in common between the different sections, and a very very thin frame story connecting them. So maybe that's a bit more novelistic than, say, Dubliners, but still, this is a collection of short stories and I'm sticking to my guns on that. I point this out not to strengthen my application to join the formalism police (although seriously, guys, you should totally hire me) but because it points to my central dissatisfaction with the book, which is that all the conflict is raised and then resolved in the space of about twenty, thirty pages, and when you read the sections one after another, the structure animating each of them starts to look really the same: character is in a pretty bad, miserable place. Something happens that they hope will change their circumstances for the better, or that they fear will change their circumstances for the worse. After a bit of hemming and hawing, it turns out very little will change, and they're back to basically the same bad, miserable place. Above all of this is the specter of the newspaper's failing -- sorry, I assume you've read the blurb and know this is a book about an English-language newspaper based in Rome that's vaguely patterned on the IHT, yes? -- which you could argue is what provides the overarching structure and progression from one story to the next. But going in, unless you have no instinct for plot and the economy you have to know that the paper's fucked and going out of business in the last chapter. So there's little drama to be wrung out of this. This would be forgiveable -- what's a little repetition in a debut novel's thematics? -- if it wasn't all so miseryguts. First story: washed-up foreign correspondent is a failure as a parent, tries to lie his way to a cover story but instead gets cut loose. Last story: ineffectual publisher unhappily has to fire everybody, and his beloved dog gets killed. In between, we have a lot of adultery, people being afraid to cut their losses or cutting them way too soon, incredibly cruel acts of revenge, and people failing their way through their lives. For the most part, these are not appealing people to read about, and sliding in just long enough to see the world walk all over them but not long enough to develop a humanistic affection for them, threatens to turn the book into so much misery tourism. In theory, the antidote to all of this would be the news: journalism's a proud profession, for all its troubles, and flawed people making themselves unhappy while doing a public service would make for a good story. But this doesn't quite come off, because Rachman's almost too eager to make the newspaper's coverage irrelevant; they're being pushed out by the 24 hour news channels and on-demand news on the internet (the newspaper doesn't even have a website), and they're stuck trying to eke out their survival by selling pointless profiles and warmed-over content to a dwindling subscriber base. If we're not in Myth of Sisyphus territory -- every day, you must push out a edition at great effort only to have to do it again tomorrow, with no lasting effect or any value to the labor at all -- at least we're pretty damn close. For all that, these are flaws that are easy to overlook when you're just barreling through what's a short, tightly-written book. The prose is supple, a few of the characters really are pretty appealing, and the story told in the short excerpts between chapters, of a rich man who's let a woman he loves slip away and builds the newspaper -- and an art collection -- as a monument to her, is poignant and well-written. That's the novel I wanted to read, not just lingering over the fallout as the monument inevitably crumbles away to nothing. If that same balance had been struck in the main body of the book, setting up some value and dignity for the characters to give meaning to their sadness and failures, I'd be writing a different review entirely.