Jens reviewed Remembering Babylon by David Malouf
Review of 'Remembering Babylon' on 'Goodreads'
3 stars
Plot sounds intriguing, book won awards, author is gay - this checked a lot of my metaphorical boxes, so I dove in.
And here I was, somewhat lost in the extremely long sentences with a million subordinate clauses that left me dizzy at times. The writing was so dense that I had to re-read many paragraphs or even whole pages to remind myself (or discover in the first place) what was even going on. Frustratingly I seem to have missed a few crucial details, because every now and then I did not manage to find out what had just happened.
The sparse characterization of some figures didn’t help much in this regard. Maybe it was too implicit for me, maybe I didn’t catch some things because I found the writing too dense - either way, some aspects remained elusive. Or maybe I just didn’t get it.
The plot and its …
Plot sounds intriguing, book won awards, author is gay - this checked a lot of my metaphorical boxes, so I dove in.
And here I was, somewhat lost in the extremely long sentences with a million subordinate clauses that left me dizzy at times. The writing was so dense that I had to re-read many paragraphs or even whole pages to remind myself (or discover in the first place) what was even going on. Frustratingly I seem to have missed a few crucial details, because every now and then I did not manage to find out what had just happened.
The sparse characterization of some figures didn’t help much in this regard. Maybe it was too implicit for me, maybe I didn’t catch some things because I found the writing too dense - either way, some aspects remained elusive. Or maybe I just didn’t get it.
The plot and its development are thought-provoking in the best sense of the word. There is a lot to unpack, the parallels to today are shocking, and this is certainly a very good book.
Unfortunately my reading pleasure was diminished by how much work I had to put into this rather short book. it just wasn’t quite right for me this time around.