My review of this novel is now online, over at The Book Book blog.
I don’t normally write reviews of books which I don’t recommend. I don’t even like to. It’s possible to have fun with a writing a bad review, yes, a sort of malicious glee. But the fun is diminished — especially in reviewing a debut novel, like Enlightenment — by knowing what the author often had to go through for his or her book to see the light of day. So many good books await our attention, after all: why beat up on one that didn’t succeed for me?
Enlightenment was a special case. I began it with — and was for a while sustained by — high hopes. The exotic, almost completely unfamiliar setting (contemporary Turkey); the tangled web of international relationships both during the Cold War and post-9/11; the jacket copy description; even the cover — it all said that the book would appeal to me, a thought-provoking relief from my usual fare.
But wow, I didn’t like Enlightenment much at all.
And I was disturbed that I didn’t like it. When I finished it I checked up on the bona fides of the jacket blurbs — maybe they’d just been highly selective, y’know? Not only did it receive high critical praise, but reviewers often praised it for elements which I thought to be missing, or at best unconvincing.
So I don’t know. Maybe I was just in a weird psychological place for the first quarter of the year. Whatever the reason, frankly, I’m not even convinced by my own review — so do read it skeptically.
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