I have been very quiet here. A lot has been happening in my life – both personal and professional. A bit more than a year ago I changed jobs and it’s been a great decision so far. And I’ve missed tremendously writing on here, but I also didn’t want to half-arse drop some random content which I didn’t have time to properly research and develop.
I’ve low-key introduced a very different type of content over on the links, but event for that more creative side, I haven’t had much time lately to “create content”. The good part is that I remain creative with my bullet journal.
This all is to say, that while I try to herd the proverbial cats that are my hobbies, I’ve been missing writing over here tremendously. SO, I decided that since I’m the boss around here (yes this lustrous production here is all my doing, believe it or not) I can use it as an outlet for many of my hobbies.
Something (almost) new=a book review
So here are some thoughts on a fiction book, I just finished reading. (This will probably contain some spoilers.)
I didn’t expect much from this book, but I loved it. I loved it maybe exactly because of the unrealistic flaws of its plot.
If I can describe the plot, omitting spoilers for now, it will be with the Heraclitus quote: Change is the only constant in life. For a story about a Count
under house arrest, over the time span of decades (and 500 pages) to not become repetitive and boring, is an achievement!
I find it especially unbelievable that the main character – a former person, a Count – was never brought to a gulag or a detention camp, because that’s what the Bolsheviks did and they didn’t necessarily need a reason to do so. I found it also less than likely that, once a Count, a person “born with a silver spoon” would go as far as to become a head waiter in the restaurant of the hotel he’s imprisoned in. And yet – the way the story was written, and the characters presented, I wanted to accept those glitches in the fabric of the book’s universe as at least plausible. In my book, this is good writing, even if it’s technically flawed. After all, while the novel is historical in nature, it is still fiction, so liberties of this sort actually didn’t bother me much if at all.
Overall, I would gladly recommend this book to anyone who likes historical fiction about an extremely depressing period of history but told from the always-hopeful point of view only someone with means could maintain in such dark times.
Here come the spoilers!
I couldn’t have been happier that both the Count and his “daughter” succeeded in escaping in the end, because I needed a happy ending story and because even from the Bolsheviks, people sometimes managed to escape!
I could be tempted to think that the book is very much “an American good ending guaranteed” type of story. However, it reads like anything but! I was pleasantly surprised that no story line was left dangling, nor the endings of either were rushed.
