A blot on the landscape?

Leaving behind a world of class divisions and clever caricatures, we crossed the boundary of the worlds and entered the fantasy land of Inkheart. Cosimo and I both like a lot of children’s fantasy – but not this one. In contrast to our previous read, this book was finished, but perhaps shouldn’t have been. The plot was clever, but the execution poor. The idea is that a writer’s stories become real and his characters turn on him, with both travelling back and forth between the real world and the story world. It should have been fun, but the characters were so uncompelling that, in contrast to Gogol, they left you wanting to put the book down rather than pick it up. The dangers never felt at all real, and the main villain never provided the menace (or the intelligence) that the role required. The language was also turgid, and we waded through it to the end and then thankfully turned our attention to The Hall of a Thousand Columns.

In quest of Russian souls

This blog has already come back from the brink once, now it’s had a near death experience – but it’s undergoing a resurrection. Fortunately our reading has not been going as slowly as our blogging – but we’re now testing out a new rule: not to start a new book until we’ve blogged the last one. We’ll see how that goes.

Taking up from where we left off for now, we left the wilds of the Deep South and crossed to rural Russia, where we followed Chichikov, a 19^th Century Russian social climber in his pursuit of serfs – dead serfs to be precise. Now I do not have a Russian soul and have rarely truly enjoyed (though I have appreciated) any Russian book. Gogol’s Dead Souls was an exception. The book was clever, funny and an easy read – although it also contains some quite sharp social commentary. The knowledge that it was never completed had put me off reading it for years by, but this is actually largely irrelevant. The fundamental premise of the book is both brilliant and bizarre. It centres on Chichikov’s efforts to exploit a buerocratic loophole, enabling him to build up his estate and thereby his social status by acquiring dead serfs. It is more character than plot driven however and what makes it memorable and amusing are the larger than life characters that Chichikov encounters – and this is the reason that it doesn’t really matter that the book was never finished. Also, his message about the flaws of the stratified Russian society of his time comes through loud and clear.