Thursday, May 28, 2009

Just finished reading #16

The sorrows of an American - Siri Hustvedt
Before I started to write this I decided to check out a few reviews of the book. They were very complimentary which was nice. I found the book interesting and enveloping but thought the plot and range of characters was very complex. Thankfully the other reviewers did too. Phew. I read slowly and with this book it took a week to read the first seven pages. That is more about being exhausted at night than being a pedestrian reader. I read somewhere that slow readers retain less information. True about me. I digress.

Erik, the main character, is a psychiatrist who is dealing with grief over his father's death and the break up of his marriage, finding family secrets, supporting his grieving sister whose famous and fallible historian husband has also died and falling in unrequited but sensible love with Miranda, solo mother in the flat below. Add a raft of patients, a movie star, stalker photographer boyfriend (of Miranda) a chubby sweating friend, a bunch of oddball family members in Minnesota and a darling little girl, Eggy, and you have a really complicated and slightly over blown plot. In saying this, I got the characters on a surface level although I believe there was much more going on in their heads. I must have missed those bits. I also forgot who some of the characters were by the time they popped up again. Oh yes, Erik and his sister Inge are of Norwegian heritage.

In saying this I did enjoy this book, obviously from an entry level perspective, and loved the writing. Siri is a stunner in the sentence structure zone. If you think this is a book you would like to read then log onto your library catalogue and get yourself a copy.

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