Reviews for Camouflage

The average rating for Camouflage based on 2 reviews is 3.5 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2011-01-07 00:00:00 Shahen Sami Iain Banks' Crow Road begins thus: 'It was the day my grandmother exploded.' Why this is a famous opening baffles me. It is vulgar, too brash. It is an opening by a writer that wants the reader to look at him, not the words on the page. It shows off. Murray Bail's short story 'Camouflage' begins thus: 'All things considered, piano-tuning is a harmless profession.' Now that's a great opening gambit. 'Camouflage' and 'The Seduction of My Sister'. Two trifles, both about flying in odd ways. Impossible to put down, to be read in moments. You end reluctantly, wishing for more, like the end of a dessert that wasn't quite large enough, or sex sometimes. Exquisite.

Review # 2 was written on 2018-12-31 00:00:00 Alex Hobbs More writing experiments at times than stories, and even one of the most story-esque pieces, "A,B,C..." begins and is peppered with pseudo-clever symbol and signifier discussion. Words are on the page. Letters typed. This word is made of letters. That sort of stuff. But over all, these are stories without real clarity. "The Seduction of my Sister" is about throwing a garage worth of items at a new neighbor as some sort of game. "The Partitions" seems to be about a crew of folks having a race over office partitions that never end and looking into cubicles. "The Drover's Wife" creates a (somewhat mundane) story out of a painting, while "Zoellner's Definition" reads like a doctor's chart turned into a dictionary/encyclopedia hybrid. And so, it often feels as though the author is as Ian Malcolm describes: so concerned with whether he COULD that he didn't think about whether he SHOULD. Any intrigue these oddities and experiments could hold tends to be dissolved in the fact that there is no story to be found.