Books, life the universe

Sunday 2 August 2009

I gave up

Not on anything important but on The Russuan Dreambook of Colour and Flight by Gina Ochsner. The cover is attractive but the contents aren't - well not in my opinion. It centres round a run down an apartment block with a pile of rubbish in the courtyard, a rotting corpse which keeps appearing as a ghost to various people, feral children living in the courtyard and to cap it all an outside lavatory. Very realist literature.

It also features a former soldier who wanders around in a motorcycle helmet, a lady who charges for the use of the loo, Tanya who works in the local museum where all the exhibits have been made by the staff and Olga who works in a newspaper office rewriting news items into an acceptable format. There is virtually no plot. I read every word for the first 150 pages and skimmed the rest. As far as I was concerned it failed dismally as entertainment even though it has received good reviews.

2 comments:

Anne Brooke said...

Sounds terrifying!! I think I'll give it a miss ...

==:O

Axxx

Jilly said...

The writing was good - just the subject matter left me sort of looking for a plot. Sometimes books work without plots - this didn't. It made me think of Zola (name dropping here!) but without his gift for a gripping story.