The Surfacing by Cormac James
My rating: 3/5 cats
To them*, that’s who we’ll always be, he told her. Children. No matter what we do. No matter how far we go. Beyond a certain point, the passage of time can do no more for us. We stay young, and they grow older, and we lose sight of each other in the end.
this is a first—i find i don’t really have much to say about this book. this is on the lower end of my three-star cat reads, which surprised and saddened me. i’m not sure why i didn’t get as much out of this book as other readers seem to have. i thought it was beautifully written, but also very—dare i confess?—boring. the descriptive passages were gorgeous, but i thought the characters were flat, and there’s a lot of time just spent…waiting. which, considering the subject matter, is completely appropriate, but i have read several similarly-themed books both fiction and non- that i didn’t find boring.
up there in the blurbs, colum mccann calls this book “hypnotic,” and i think that’s what happened to me—i was hypnotized. but not in a fun way where i squawked like a chicken whenever someone said “purple” or something. just hypnotized the way they do in sleep clinics to effect soporific results. i didn’t see the harrowing tale of psychological fortitude against impossible odds side of this. regrettably, all i experienced was tedium occasionally enlivened by some exquisite landscape prose. and one excellent piece of advice:
That is why a man must never listen to reason. He must merely exercise his will unceasingly, and only afterward stop to consider what he has achieved.
and i will add to that the advice that i should also not be listened to, because i clearly missed something in this book. i assume i will be told as much in the thread following this review, by someone deploying a very smug tone, and i’m fine with that.
* where “them” refers to “our parents.”
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