{"id":408,"date":"2012-04-24T07:36:38","date_gmt":"2012-04-24T15:36:38","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.bukkhead.com\/blog\/?p=408"},"modified":"2012-04-24T07:36:38","modified_gmt":"2012-04-24T15:36:38","slug":"the-book-of-air-and-shadows-review-on-goodreads","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.bukkhead.com\/blog\/2012\/04\/24\/the-book-of-air-and-shadows-review-on-goodreads\/","title":{"rendered":"The Book of Air and Shadows– review on Goodreads"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"The<\/a>The Book of Air and Shadows<\/a> by Michael Gruber<\/a><\/p>\n

My rating: 4 of 5 stars<\/a><\/p>\n

This is the novel I wish I had read, a few weeks ago when I was binging and I read three books in one week, as opposed to taking almost two weeks to read this one book. It was good, and would have been better, I think, if I had torn into it and taken vicious sloppy bites instead of the nibbling I did, barely nutritious. Maybe I\u2019ll get off my high horse and read it again someday. One can only hope.<\/p>\n

Which as screeds go is not very compelling, I know: we live in a nation where propaganda decries\/lionizes extremes, and books that are good are supposed to be so<\/em> good that we can’t<\/em> put them down (insert several sophomoric exclamation points here). So ask yourself if a work is separate from the viewer. My position in the past on the whole \u201cbeauty is in the eye of the beholder\u201d thing has been that nothing exists that we don\u2019t internalize, but let me temper that stance, as it were, by suggesting that self-awareness can warp the eye that beholds.<\/p>\n

Look, what I\u2019m trying to say is I really liked The Book of Air and Shadows<\/em>. It\u2019s part Da Vinci Code<\/em>, part Maltese Falcon<\/em> (one character won\u2019t stop talking about how life is a movie, and makes many self-references to how what he\u2019s going through is very Maltese Falcon<\/em>– or Chinatown<\/em>– like). It\u2019s about a manuscript, and old letters, and book binding, and Shakespeare and scholarship. It\u2019s not about books, per se, but the title can\u2019t help remind one of Zafron\u2019s The Shadow of the Wind<\/em>, and there\u2019s similarities there, too. Hell, toss in some similarities to The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo<\/em> (the research bits) and while you\u2019re at it, The Name of the Rose<\/em>.<\/p>\n

This is not<\/em> to say the book is a \u201ctour de force,\u201d no. I\u2019m the one beholding all those other books in here, my own experiences and takes on them, and I\u2019m not trying to say Michael Gruber was trying to cram them all into one novel. He\u2019s basically written a mystery, a twisted plot, flawed heroes, femme fatales, Madonna figures, the mafia, and some existential angst in the guise of reformed religion and the meaning of art. It\u2019s juicy stuff, I tell you. Please, don\u2019t do what I did and take your time. Read it all at once.<\/p>\n

The novel\u2019s divided along three character lines: epistolary sections from a 17th century soldier-turned-spy, third-person narration over the shoulder of a book-shop clerk\/wannabe filmmaker, and first-person narration of a philandering lawyer\/weightlifter. There\u2019s an intriguing mix of styles in there, including what I\u2019ve come to call, lately, the Jonathan Franzen tell-don\u2019t-show style (and that\u2019s a compliment, by the way.) You know what I mean- the way people tell stories to each other without trying to get all poetic and descriptive. Actually, the last quarter of the novel takes on that mien almost to a fault, but like I said, I took too damn long to read the book, so maybe my beholding eye was just weary at that point.<\/p>\n

And it turns out the writer is from Seattle. I have no idea of that sways your wanting to read this in the least\u2014if it does, please ignore this last paragraph.<\/p>\n

View all my reviews<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The Book of Air and Shadows by Michael Gruber My rating: 4 of 5 stars This is the novel I wish I had read, a few weeks ago when I was binging and I read three books in one week, as opposed to taking almost two weeks to read this one book. It was good, … <\/p>\n

Continue reading “The Book of Air and Shadows– review on Goodreads”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[6],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-408","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-reviews"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p24y52-6A","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bukkhead.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/408","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bukkhead.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bukkhead.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bukkhead.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bukkhead.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=408"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.bukkhead.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/408\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bukkhead.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=408"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bukkhead.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=408"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bukkhead.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=408"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}