- Hardcover: 320 pages
- Publisher: Picador (7 Mar 2008)
- Language English
- ISBN-10: 0330450360
- ISBN-13: 978-0330450362
- Product Dimensions: 9 x 6 x 1 cm
- Average Customer Review: 4.3 out of 5 stars See all reviews (15 customer reviews)
- Amazon Bestsellers Rank: 1,089,069 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
Little Monsters
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More About the Author
Product Description
Literary blogger, John Self
'Charles Lambert's Little Monsters is a first novel which is more than just a `promising debut'.'
Good Housekeeping
'This is the story of a young girl ripped apart by grief...finding the stability she craves in her Uncle Joey'
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Most Helpful Customer Reviews
8 of 8 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Little Monsters by Charles Lambert,
By
This review is from: Little Monsters (Hardcover)
Little Monsters starts off with a tremendous bang, grabbing the reader's attention with its first sentence, and then manages somehow to maintain that effect on pretty much every page thereafter. The novel is written very economically, yet the author, nonetheless, seems to say everything that needs saying. I particularly admired the practiced and stylish way he weaves the time strands together (can this really be his first novel?) so that the story conveys the crippling effect of confused and uncertain memories on the lives of the main characters without the story itself becoming in any way confusing or unnecessarily difficult for the reader. There were too many individual passages that I particularly admired for me to list them all, but examples (in random order) are Jozef's life installation, which becomes gradually more opaque as it becomes crowded with life's experiences - I suppose you can only say you know yourself when you don't actually know very much at all; the evocation of the 1960's pub where much of the novel dealing with the life of the young Carol is set; the idea that art is there to ask questions about life and not simply to provide answers, and the way this ties in with Flavio's remark to Carol that life is black and white only for the young, those who haven't yet had time to accumulate much detail in their experience of life (this may sound very old and jaundiced to all you youngsters out there, but don't let that put you off reading the novel). Little Monsters is a book I would recommend to anyone, and I'm already looking forward to reading the next product of Charles Lambert's pen.
4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Absolutely enthralling!,
By
This review is from: Little Monsters (Hardcover)
This beautifully written novel grabs the reader by the throat on the first page and does not let go. An enthralling storyline, evocative sense of place, characters that are fully rounded and real. This is a very impressive debut. I look forward to Charles Lambert's next work!
4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Ancestors,
By
This review is from: Little Monsters (Hardcover)
A quietly fantastic novel. I found it, first, so surprising: characters, story, moral direction, delicacy of insight into alterity, and all the forms of immigration and exile, emotional (including that of near-orphancy), political, geographical -- all manage to avoid the obvious, or even expected, though the plot twists were always cohesive and never cheap. I found the young anti-heroine strange and strangely challenging, she and Joe beautiful fleshings out of near-absolute good (there are aspects of a more articulate Jo in Great Expectations, or gauche, good Russian heroes) and something approaching evil (like Kevin in Shriver's We Need to Talk About Kevin'). The small girl's status unsettled me: she challenges a few post-globalised reactions, including the evilly ready-made judgments in us of aspects of immigration which test our views of the need to share our world. I liked her struggle out of the water onto the beach, like the first amphibian, a life force that has to be found a place. Jo I just loved. There's also a good dog (as it were), and I always respect people who can write animals convincingly into novels. This one is a sort of objective correlative, or perhaps just test, for a nucleus of characters, a couple of encounters coming near real horror (`Kevin' again). I generally pounce on `I live abroad you know' novels, but though the author and I clearly share a similar situation, I found no irritating, insider, I-live-there nudging, and loved how the Chinese boxes of the different characters' migrating always left the view slightly skewed, requiring the reader to do some work and decision-making of her own. Again, nothing obvious in a context screaming out for it. My only mild dissent is with the opening sentence, which momentarily seems to set a tone the rest of the novel rightly (I think) refuses to follow. But that's a minor niggle indeed. It was wonderful.
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