My rating: 2 of 5 stars
For the sake of brevity, so you can skip my review: did not like this book. Did not enjoy it. Don’t like dream sequences, stream-of-consciousness rambling, random imagery catalogs, pointless meandering. But that’s just me, and if pointless meandering is your cup of tea, you might enjoy the book. No, really: there’s definitely an expertise here, a sense of balance. Some people don’t get “abstract” art (I’m one of them) but we at least recognize that a defter hand than our own created the piece.
Which is not to say, strictly, that Narcopolis is merely “abstract.” This is neither Finnegan’s Wake nor simply the nightmare chapter from Ulysses. There are stories here, of a sort, narrative, as it were. But for me, it’s all a little too self-indulgent, too drugged up and defecated and…. and here only the “F” word will do, which I hesitate to use in this review. But no other synonym suffices.
Maybe I can’t identify, and that’s the problem. I have no perspective on this kind of degradation, very little interest, even, and certainly no patience. I’d love to go back in time and give my younger self, the one who enjoyed Trainspotting, this book, and see if I would have liked it more then.
This book was shortlisted for the Booker prize, which says more to me about the judges than the prize itself. I shouldn’t judge. I should allow for their greater wisdom, insight, patience, and most of all, independence. They’re not picking books strictly as a list of recommended reads. So be it. That I decided to read through the list was my own folly, and, I am realizing, an arbitrary one at that.
Which is my take away. This book took me way too long to read, because I couldn’t get into it. Readers talk about not just what a particular books does but what the art of reading, in general, provides. And this one provided me a reminder: I don’t have to read every darn thing, not even the ones I said I would read, if my reasons for doing so where based on nothing more than a whim.