Rating: 2/5
Review:
Not for me
I made it about a third of the way through Asymmetry before
deciding that life was too short and giving up.
I just became thoroughly bored and rather irritated.
It's all very well written, but it had that
style-over-substance feel that, frankly, just annoys me. The annoyance isn't as
extreme as with Satin Island, for example, which made me want to hunt down the
author and give him a good slap, but it has the same sense of a writer implying
that the reader needs to be exceptionally clever and knowledgeable to be worthy
of reading their brilliant work, while not actually saying anything very
insightful or original (or possibly anything at all). There just seems to be page after page of
fine writing, convincing dialogue, well-painted background and so on, but which
added up to very little as far as I could see.
I also found a distinct air of intellectual snobbery about
it. Lengthy, unattributed passages from
books appear and then vanish with little clue as to their source (or
relevance), or they go to a concert about which we are told nothing in advance
and then get, "…she flung up her wrists, flared her nostrils, and the
Hammerklavier was sprung from its cage…"
Deliberately structuring the narrative like this so that the reader is
excluded if they don't recognise cultural references seems to me to have a
self-congratulatory tone that I really don't like. I make no claim to be especially cultured;
I've read enough Primo Levi to recognise a passage of his, I know and like
Beethoven's piano music and so on, but there was plenty here that I didn't know
and couldn't place. I'm always very
happy to learn more, but I am not willing to be condescended to.
A friend of mine tried to encourage me to continue by saying
that she "found Part 1 the hardest to wade through" which, frankly, didn't
seem like the strongest of motivations to carry on. It's possible that the later sections would
have entranced and delighted me, but having stuck at it as long as I could, I
couldn't be bothered to find out. I have
given the book two stars rather than one because it is well written, but I'm afraid
Asymmetry was definitely not for me.
(My thanks to Granta for an ARC via NetGalley.)
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