Flecker’s Magic by Norman H. MatsonMy rating: 0 of 5 stars
Short, and yet it seems much longer than it needs to be at times. This is because the main character, a 21-year-old struggling American artist living in Paris, spends so much time introspecting and philosophizing. He is dithering about what to wish for, having been given a ring by a young woman who says she's a witch (and can back it up by performing remarkable feats), and told that it will grant him one wish.
He has a vivid imagination, and can see the downsides of each wish he thinks of, which at least puts him ahead of most fictional people who are granted wishes - but it also means that he just wanders along through his life, procrastinating the decision while the deadline he's been given looms closer. He eats (very well; he's not a starving artist), he philosophizes, he paints, he sleeps, he havers, he dithers, he blathers. An old witch turns up a few times and advises him to wish for happiness, but, disgusted by her, he's also repelled by the idea (and worried that she might be the same person as the young witch, who he's fallen for, in the way of young men).
He fails to make a decision, and then the book goes into a series of long conversations which get increasingly nonsensical and self-indulgently pointless, and at that point I gave up on it. I can see it being interesting if you were around the main character's age and still looking for a philosophy of life, though even then, the philosophies of life it presents are diffuse, out-of-date and sometimes surreal. But for me, it wasn't interesting.
View all my reviews
No comments:
Post a Comment