Reviews for Poor Quail

The average rating for Poor Quail based on 2 reviews is 2 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2018-07-04 00:00:00 Chad Bollinger on one level here, as in fong, it seems we've got sort of an allegory of how the cold war played out in africa, w/ miss poole & heather fighting a proxy war via their servants that's heavy on the collateral damage. also in keeping w/ fong the descriptions are consistently amazing: you can imagine paul t. like his brother alex plucking nouns & adjectives w/ tweezers and placing them just so on the page. imo the women characters' internalized misogyny doesn't make the text misogynistic, nor does the white characters' racism make the text racist (they're prima facie monstrous); what's harder to absolve is the dearth of interiority allowed the african chars here. interested to hear what more readers think!!

Review # 2 was written on 2010-04-17 00:00:00 Don Jinkins I liked Girls at Play in much the same way as I like a lot of Kingsley Amis' second rung novels, in that I wouldn't recommend them to someone who wasn't already familiar with the author, and, in spite of enjoying it quite a lot myself, wouldn't necessarily expect anybody else to do so. It's not a fun book and it's not a trendy book, and it requires us to meet Theroux further than halfway to get anything out of it. It's exactly the sort of book that wouldn't be a best-seller. The Mosquito Coast and The Old Patagonian Express are Paul Theroux's classics (do you put an 's' after the apostrophe if the name ends in an 'x'?), and they're where he writes the most universally, with the least amount of self-indulgence and a maximum of keeping his audience in mind. Like Amis, like Evelyn Waugh and Malcolm Bradbury, and like a lot of other prolific writers, Theroux however has a large number of novels which seem to have been knocked off more for his own amusement than anything else. So, in Girls at Play, you effectively get a lot of things that he cares, worries or fantasises about, and you get a lot of his own thinly veiled opinions and prejudices. In this, this book appears to be more a product of the author's personality rather than his imagination; he has not separated himself from the world of his novel. I've read enough Paul Theroux by now, and I've come to respect and sympathise with his world view, so there's enough in this book - mostly the descriptions, the armchair psychology and the occasional social commentary - that kept me interested throughout. Others may find it a little jarring, unfocussed and haphazard in places, the ending a little too brutal, the characters flat and stereotypical sometimes, and the whole thing a little too insular to be truly enjoyable. These things don't particularly bother me, but, as criticisms, would be fair too. Recommended, but with a small 'r', and only after you've done his travel books or Mosquito Coast already.