This was just not the book for me.
With reviews and snippets such as “A big, genre-bending delight...”
and “A master of ingenious plotting”, I thought that it would be
worth a read. Granted, this was an impulse buy because I had seen it
advertised enough on my Goodreads sidebar so the fact that my
interest in it wasn't stellar shouldn't be too surprising since its a
novel I wouldn't normally pick up. Though, it went a long way to
prove to me that sidebar advertising does work (I did buy it after
all) and that the snippets and reviews on book jackets really are
complete and utter bullshit. Oh the joys of taking classes where we
find out that most of these little blurbs are endorsements simply
meant to get you to buy the book itself. My little bubble that had
me naively assuming otherwise has burst.
Anyway, Map of Time truly
did start off well. It was jarring at first with the breakdown of
the fourth wall and I found myself excited and intrigued at the idea
that the narrator in this book had a type of knowledge that was all
encompassing. This trick soon got old as we moved through the novel.
With a constant switch between characters that we never stuck with
long enough to care about or get to know, the narrator jumps from
time period to person to story that may or may have not happened,
jolting the reader out of a moment that was just about to gain
momentum and placing them at another standstill. I'm assuming this
was to create tension and interest as opposed to the typical ABC's of
a linear novel but it did not. Its a tactic that I think would have
worked beautifully if it had been used more sparingly but instead,
Felix J. Palma took this single idea and decided to put it on a
roller coaster that stopped being fun about twelve corkscrews ago.
That being said, when Palma does
write well, he writes well.
“This
time he was sure he had made the right decision, because he had
decided not to decide. There would be no more mistakes in the future
because there would be no more future. He was going to destroy it
completely by putting one of those guns to his temple....
obliterating the future was the only way for him to eradicate the
past.”
I wanted more of that. This rawness. This dry humor and sarcasm that
you believe is probably being delivered to you with a smirk. Maybe
there were more passages like this but I found my eyes probably would
have blurred over them since for most of the book I felt like I was
falling into a sleepy haze despite the coffee in my hand.
That leads to my next point; Maybe this novel was simply not for me.
I can recognize that it had beautiful prose and maybe this jumping
tactic used will work for someone else. But for me, it was overdone.
On top of that, there wasn't enough dialogue and I am a dialogue
whore. So, in a novel with twenty plus pages of block text, I can
understand why I was zoning out at times or trying to skip forward to
the action. So, if you are a reader that likes inner monologue (think
Portrait of an Artist but maybe less depressing?) and
stream of consciousness, then I would actually highly recommend this
book. If you a person who like character development and a meaty
story, I would say to stay away. As a non linear novel, I had high
hopes for it (I love non linear, the beginning is the middle and the
end is the beginning type stories) but I felt like it didn't deliver
and instead was a valiant attempt at an out of the box story but fell
shy of it.
Also, H.G Wells was a time traveling maniac who helped create a time
machine that inevitably was kind of dysfunctional since it could only
travel to one period in time.
Anyone else read this? Anyone even know anyone else who has read
this?
To see what else I'm reading this month and some other reviews, go here: http://papertales4u.blogspot.com/2013/06/june-book-reads.html
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