David Szalay: All That Man Is (2016, Graywolf Press)
272 pages
English language
Published July 10, 2016 by Graywolf Press.
Here are nine men. Each of them is at a different stage in life, each of them is away from home, and each of them is striving - in the suburbs of Prague, in an over-developed Alpine village, beside a Belgian motorway, in a crap Cypriot hotel - to understand just what it means to be alive, here and now. Vibrating with detail and intelligence, pathos and surprise, All That Man Is is a portrait of contemporary manhood, contemporary Europe and contemporary life from a British writer of supreme gifts - the master of a new kind of realism.
A sequence of stories about the disappointing, unfulfilling experiences of a set of men. All shallow, uninteresting characters that I found I could not like or dislike enough to care about. The pretentious title does nothing to add weight or significance to the text.
In the end, reading the book was also a disappointing, unfulfilling experience.
Ville gitt den en klar femmer hvis det ikke var for at femmere skal sitte veldig langt inne. Dette er en ekstremt tankevekkende bok som kommer til å vokse og vokse inn på meg. Tenk deg at forfatteren akkurat nå kom inn i livet ditt, begynte å skrive om deg, og så plutselig om 14 dager narre sluttet å skrive igjen. Sånn er denne boken, ni menn, ni bruddstykker fra ni liv i ulike livsfaser hvor alle - menn - stiller samme spørsmål: Hva er alt dette strevet - hva er en mann?
Sterkt!
