Most Helpful Customer Reviews
|
|
19 of 22 people found the following review helpful:
Worth a read, 6 April 2007
There are already in depth reviews on this which I do not disagree with so it seems a waste of time for all to rewrite the same opinion in my own words.
What I will say is, like most people I have a job. It is in no way connected to the 'Book world' and I read during my commute to work on the train. I judge a book on how much I am looking forward to sitting down and getting it out of my bag. This one started slowly, got alot better for the middle third then never really finished as such. It was a good story and I can't say I didn't enjoy it. It is not excellent and will be easily forgotten. My current book (The Husband - DEAN KOONTZ) has already gripped me enough to wipe Restless from my mind. If you are looking for a small selection of great books, then this won't be on your list. If you read everyday, give this one a go. It'll pass the time.
One important thing I would like to concur with is the complete waste of time the character, Ruth Gilmartin is. If it was just the story of Eva I think it would have been much better. I personally found myself tutting whenever I found my new chapter to be Ruth's and used to check to see how many pages of her I had to endure before I could get back to the main story of Eva Delectorskaya.
Hope this helps.
Keep up the reading!!
|
|
|
19 of 22 people found the following review helpful:
Entertaining, but not his best, 29 Mar 2007
As a fan of both Boyd (An Ice Cream War & Any Human Heart, especially) and WWII spy fiction (Alan Furst being the master) I looked forward to this. And it is indeed a page turner, the 1940s part of the narrative being particularly gripping.
It's the 1970s stuff with the daughter that lets it down. Too many pointless characters and dead ends (the Iranian protesters, the German hippies, etc.). I wasn't around in the 40s, so I can't speak for its authenticity there, but some of the 70s scenes are simply anachronistic - a history prof with a computer on his desk in 1976? No way. And I can only assume that Boyd has no children, because I have NEVER heard a pre-school aged kid speak the way that "Jochen" does - he sounds like a very well-educated 40-year old!
Worth reading, but it won't go down as one of his best.
|
|
|
14 of 16 people found the following review helpful:
tough but tremendously readable, 5 Mar 2007
'Restless' is a confident, pacey novel by a brilliantly mature writer. Switching between seventies Oxford, pre-war Europe and a US on the point of entering the second world war, it builds and maintains an impressive, page-turning momentum. Much has been made of Boyd writing as a woman but it doesn't seem to matter; there is little sex or eroticism in the novel (for which much thanks), but much passion and longing, and maybe this serves to illustrate that, at the emotional level, there is less difference between the sexes than we like to imagine. More problematic is the sketchiness of much of the characterization (though personally I had no difficulty fleshing out the characters for myself) and the oddness of the structure - Eva's story is presented as the manuscript of a memoir which she has been writing, but really doesn't read as such. Ruth (Eva's daughter) doesn't add much to the overall story and it's hard to see why it couldn't have been written straight, as a first person narrative... or as a simple memoir, a form for which Boyd has shown fondness in the past. In the end though, the novel is easily strong enough to overcome such problems, creating an almost tangible sense of gnawing unease, paranoia and often nameless terror which begins almost as a game for Eva but ends by almost choking the lives of both her and her daughter. Better than I'm making it sound, a tough but tremendously readable novel.
|
|
|
Most Recent Customer Reviews
|
(21)
£4.26
(51)
£4.99
(20)
£4.99
(79)
£4.79
See all Product Description
(
