basically it all feels like the novel is pandering to its assumed reader (middle class, sheltered, literary). Myriam Gurba gets this part of the novel exactly right: Lydia is a "pearl-clutching" American tourist in her own country.https://tropicsofmeta.com/2019/12/12/pendeja-you-aint-steinbeck-my-bronca-with-fake-ass-social-justice-literature/amp/#_ftn1 …
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La Bestia at last! But wait, first Lydia has to explain what she's learned on the internet and then she sees some migrants from Honduras jump on. "Now his body is caught, suspended. This. This is the moment of paramount risk. The arms attached, caught, suspended."
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Description is OK, but lacks the kind of emotional intensity Change-rae Lee brings to a similar description of refugees hopping on a train during the Korean War in The Surrendered.
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About halfway through now: zzzzz
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There’s something repulsive about the omniscient narrator. The God-view means we always know what every character is thinking and knowing. It leads to a lot of exposition, but worse makes everyone’s traumatic experience so easily held up to view.
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They are traveling w 2 sisters, one exceptionally beautiful and a sufferer of terrible sexual violence. I refuse to go into the details, but the God-narrator lays it all out without any reluctance. There’s no self-reflection about the dangers of telling this kind of story.
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I think I audibly said, ugh. Lydia’s husband wrote an article about the boss and when the boss’s daughter read it she killed herself. This book is pure melodrama with a strong sentimental base.
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Over 250 pgs in, & novel shows little skill in dialogue, character development, or world building. Plot is both contrived and predictable, even dull. But what it's v good at is offering vivid descriptions of action. And it has a lot of it!
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Replying to @minhyoungsong
I remember how Dan Brown novels got critically trashed but still sold tons...I guess I’m going to have to read his and her books just to understand their narrative appeal. But I guess what the critic sees as dullness many readers do not.
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Replying to @viet_t_nguyen @minhyoungsong
The influence of screenwriting is everywhere in mass-market fiction today. And screenwriting aims to translate action and images into bare-bones prose. Even an incoherent plot still puts butts in seats, as long as the action is thrilling, and the screen full of eye-candy.
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When an audience is used to this sort of storytelling, it accepts the manifold and glaring literary offenses of a Dan Brown with a mere shrug. Plots stolen from notorious plot thieves (often with the previous owners' names still affixed), and painfully hackneyed characters? Yawn.
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It is, alas, just as Edmund Burke informed us, in his celebrated essay ON THE SUBLIME AND BEAUTIFUL: "Custom reconciles us to everything."
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