orbis quintus

Bad idea. It is what it is. The ingredients are laid on the table… Dumas and Dickens with a taste of Borges thrown in for flavor, and heavy on Dan Brown for base thickening.

It’s cliched as can be. The spunky teen girl who aspires to be a writer that appears halfway through the book almost caused me to abandon the book altogether. Her exchanges of dialogue with the protagonist were painful to read. Ruiz Zafon also runs the Chekhov’s gun technique into the ground. Almost nothing is introduced without it playing significance later in the story. There are no blind alleys or strange detours, and as pulpy as The Angel’s Game is intended, there ought to be a few in there. It feels like the basic skeleton of a story, without the flourishes added in, but The Angel’s Game is too long already. Pamuk’s The Black Book is more along the lines of what i would hope for, as selfish and irrational of an expectation that is.

Grand Guignol, my foot. There wasn’t a hint of insanity anywhere in there.

Martín’s great work Lux Aeterna was pure MacGuffin. Ruiz Zafon only made the sparsest hints at what it contained, and to have it drive a woman into a bland, generic insanity… bah. I am only cheating myself, aren’t i? I should have finished Daniel Paul Screber’s Memoir of My Nervous Illness by now, right?