| I finished Darconville's Cat a while ago but haven't had the urge to compose my thoughts until now, mainly because my thoughts are a bit mixed. I admire its ambition, but I would have expected a book of such ambition to inspire a more definitive reaction in me. I liked it, I think. I was alternately impressed and annoyed at Theroux's ridiculous vocabulary. Still, the esoteric words were all appropriately esoteric--used in meaningful context, that is--unlike, say, Cormac McCarthy's word choices in Blood Meridian. The book is about love and hate, but it was much better at evoking the latter. Unfortunately, five hundred out of the six hundred pages seem more weighted towards love. There were some extremely memorable characters, scenes, chapters, rants, displays of erudition... But not much narrative momentum. Perhaps a little Proustian in its tendency to linger on a given scene. My biggest problem was that it didn't feel very tight on the macro scale. I would guess that Theroux is an author who labors over a page for a week and then moves on without ever bothering to look back at that page again. He reuses a few jokes, for instance, and I had the sense that he'd simply forgotten that he'd already used them rather than there being any purpose to it. All things considered, I'd say it's a great book in its way, but I'm not inspired to hunt down the rest of his work (almost all of which is out of print). I'd recommend it to fans of Nabokov, Proust, and maybe Pynchon, though it's actually pretty unique. I give it seven meows. |
