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Next month's Family Book Club book is Skios by Michael Frayn, picked apparently because the selector thinks it will make me 'go ballistic'. Hmmm...
I deliberately didn't take it on retreat with me during the week, despite the looming deadline, because I didn't want to be annoyed during my holiday, and I approached it with some resentment last night, as it meant setting aside another book I've been very much enjoying so far. However, having started Skios at 22:30 last night, I finished it around noon today and am now free to go back to my regularly scheduled reading.
As evidenced by this, it's an easy read and quite short. It seems in the first half to be parodying holiday romcoms, but not very successfully as it initially came across merely as vapid and uninteresting in the first half. It then quickly turns into a farce, with similar-looking suitcases being bandied about, people taking on other people's identities (both on purpose and by accident) and an awful lot of misunderstandings. I found the Chaucerian sexcapades off-putting, and little of the running about amusing.
The book got briefly interesting about halfway through, with an unexpected and quite profound exploration of personal identity and how it relates to external circumstances and context. And then it devolved back into farce, concluding with a great deal of very unfunny violence and very unsatisfactory endings for all involved.
I only really liked one of the characters, and he very much did not deserve what happened to him at the end, so overall, I would say - yeuch! I look forward to the book club discussion, though!
I deliberately didn't take it on retreat with me during the week, despite the looming deadline, because I didn't want to be annoyed during my holiday, and I approached it with some resentment last night, as it meant setting aside another book I've been very much enjoying so far. However, having started Skios at 22:30 last night, I finished it around noon today and am now free to go back to my regularly scheduled reading.
As evidenced by this, it's an easy read and quite short. It seems in the first half to be parodying holiday romcoms, but not very successfully as it initially came across merely as vapid and uninteresting in the first half. It then quickly turns into a farce, with similar-looking suitcases being bandied about, people taking on other people's identities (both on purpose and by accident) and an awful lot of misunderstandings. I found the Chaucerian sexcapades off-putting, and little of the running about amusing.
The book got briefly interesting about halfway through, with an unexpected and quite profound exploration of personal identity and how it relates to external circumstances and context. And then it devolved back into farce, concluding with a great deal of very unfunny violence and very unsatisfactory endings for all involved.
I only really liked one of the characters, and he very much did not deserve what happened to him at the end, so overall, I would say - yeuch! I look forward to the book club discussion, though!
