Reviews for ABC

The average rating for ABC based on 2 reviews is 1.5 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2009-06-03 00:00:00 Richard Hoodenpyle An intriguing concept marred by poor execution, flat characters, and bad dialogue. I read the book because of its review in the Washington Post. This is what it said: "Readers in search of an intricately plotted, neatly ordered novel that disgorges camera-ready truths and platitudes should seek it elsewhere. ABC's narrative is propulsive but undeniably eccentric. Its mismatched band of "death-obsessed and death-bound friends" is a 21st-century variant on The Wizard of Oz, drawn together by grief, global tragedy and their bizarre, shared passion for etymology. Plante's prose is careful, measured; his dialogue tends to be stilted and unnatural. But in an odd way this suits ABC's tone, which is both utterly contemporary--Gerard's companions mourn loved ones lost to terrorism, drug addiction, the war in Chechnya--and as timeless as a folk tale. Plante is less interested in closure (a fictional construct if ever there was one) than in immanence. The correspondences between his characters' histories, between the strange groupings of objects that Gerard sees everywhere--broken toys, crumpled rags, fragments of carved stone--are inexplicable, seemingly random yet charged with an eerie, almost rapturous sense of meaning, of beauty and poignancy, impermanence and, yes, eternity. Because what is an alphabet, really, but a means of expressing what is inexpressible: the sum of all human history and experience and longing? "They were aware of this," Plante writes, "aware of every single object as an icon of some greater meaning than each object had in itself." ABC is a daring book, and, despite its exploration of grief, an exhilarating one, unafraid of confronting the sort of philosophical issues that the late Ingmar Bergman did in his films. As Gerard's friend muses near the end of this exceptional novel, "We live in an unreal world, but it is only in the unreal world that meaning can be found for the real world, if meaning matters at all." Sounds interesting, no? Sorry, but the pathos was more bathos and the only thing exceptional about this novel was how inadvertently hilarious all the pretention to spiritual meaning was. Here are some gems: The dead had disappeared with the rain, disappeared, maybe, because their anticipation of something occuring was disappointed. The dead could be badly let down by the living. "I believe the most amazing terrestrial phenomenon is the occurence of the idea of the universal, which idea may, just may, inspire love." The vast longing of the dead, aware of the world's horrors far beyond the awareness of the living, could only be realised for them by the living. The living are compelled by the dead, even to the point of madness.

Review # 2 was written on 2020-08-27 00:00:00 Christie Sposeto I had a very difficult time following all of the intended attributes of this story.