{"id":497,"date":"2012-10-23T05:49:13","date_gmt":"2012-10-23T13:49:13","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.bukkhead.com\/blog\/?p=497"},"modified":"2012-10-23T05:49:13","modified_gmt":"2012-10-23T13:49:13","slug":"swimming-home-review-on-goodreads","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.bukkhead.com\/blog\/2012\/10\/23\/swimming-home-review-on-goodreads\/","title":{"rendered":"Swimming Home– review on Goodreads"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"Swimming<\/a>Swimming Home<\/a> by Deborah Levy<\/a><\/p>\n

My rating: 3 of 5 stars<\/a><\/p>\n

It took me 28 days to read a book I didn’t enjoy. It took me about 18 hours to get through Swimming Home<\/em>, so what does that say? One thing it says: short book. \u201cSlender\u201d is the word I see other reviewers use. Somebody\u2019s probably got something to say about modern attention spans and novels these days, although I wonder if it\u2019s more a matter of readers being smarter than they use to be. I\u2019m rationalizing, trying to justify the book\u2019s brevity, to justify my enjoyment of it. I don\u2019 know the author very well, so who\u2019s to say: in another writer\u2019s hands, there would have been more back story, more history. And that would have been a different novel.<\/p>\n

Five people on holiday, each a stranger to the others thanks to the strangeness that intimacy breeds. And then another stranger arrives, stranger than them all, and a new intimacy opens everything up. A tried and true formula, with two possible outcomes: the solid foundation survives, or the crumbling foundation founders. This is a short novel, so you can probably guess the ending.<\/p>\n

There\u2019s language and emotion, but not too much to get in the way. There\u2019s economy of scene, nearly but not quite absurd. Maybe that\u2019s how they do things in Europe these days, maybe I\u2019m not worldly enough to know how vacationing Englanders behave in southern France. It was a bit alien though, and I was able to keep the characters at arm\u2019s length enough to keep from being absorbed. A short novel, too brief to immerse yourself in, despite all the obvious symbolism.<\/p>\n

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

Swimming Home by Deborah Levy My rating: 3 of 5 stars It took me 28 days to read a book I didn’t enjoy. It took me about 18 hours to get through Swimming Home, so what does that say? One thing it says: short book. \u201cSlender\u201d is the word I see other reviewers use. Somebody\u2019s … <\/p>\n

Continue reading “Swimming Home– 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-497","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-reviews"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p24y52-81","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bukkhead.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/497","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=497"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.bukkhead.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/497\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bukkhead.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=497"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bukkhead.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=497"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bukkhead.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=497"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}