Reviews for The Insult

The average rating for The Insult based on 2 reviews is 4.5 stars.

Review # 1 was written on 2013-10-27 00:00:00 Jordan Favell Absolute blindness is rare. There's usually some suggestion of movement, some sense of light and shade. Not in my case. What I 'saw' was depthless and impenetrable...There were no gradations in the blankness, no fluctuations of any kind. It was what depression would like, I thought, if you had to externalize it. This was a spontaneous purchase for me - I knew nothing about the book or its author, but decided to give him a try because I was intrigued. I'm very glad that I did, as it turned out to be one of the stranger and certainly more interesting novels that I recently read. The Insult opens with the main protagonist and narrator, Martin Blom, waking up in a hospital and being informed that he was shot in the head, and has suffered a cerebral insult which resulted in complete blindness. Blom's neurosurgeon, Bruno Visser, informs him that the loss of vision is permanent and irreversible - there is no chance of a recovery, and no operation or treatment which could give him at least a portion of his sight back. Visser tells Blom that if the bulled passed milimeters lower he would have been killed instantly - and that he will experience shock, depression, self-pity and even have suicidal thoughts before his long rehabilitation will be complete, and before he will eventually be able to exist among other people again. A titanium plate has been inserted into his skull to cover the hole left by the shot. There were no witnesses. Martin begins the long and slow walk on the rough road leading towards his new life as a blind man - laboriously learning to life without depending on sight, as he did every minute before he was deprived of it. Until one day, when Martin is practicing with his new white cane in the hospital gardens, something incredible and inexplicable happens... This is a tough novel to review, as I believe that the best way to read it is to approach it without any knowledge about it - blindly, if you'll excuse the expression. Still, a review needs to be written, so I will do my best to not spoil it and encourage you to give it a shot (I am so bad). Thomson is a very good writer - and refreshingly so. In the age of overwritten monstrosities or books which are overtly bare in their prose he achieves an elegant balance between both: he is descriptive, but not overtly so, and has a genuine talent for creating original and apt metaphor and similes, and images which are effective and memorable - which really is quite a feat in a novel about a and narrated by a blinded man. His writing is elegant and subdued, and there is a sense of carefulness and restraint in his sentences - although they are short and written in language styled to be ordinary, they give an air of being trimmed down or unnecessary fat and throwaway words, their structure chosen with delicate attention. It's refreshing to read a writer whose prose flows smoothly, but who pays attention to his craft and is a pleasure to read on the sentence level. Thomson delights in playing hide and seek with the reader; the time when the novel takes place is very vague, and thanks to careful avoidance of any cultural or technological details The Insult could take place both in the 70's and in the 90's. The country where it is set is unnamed; it can't be England as it is said to have a president, and the characters' names sound foreign - Blom, Visser, Slatnick, Salenko, Kolan. There is a city where much of the novel takes place which features a hotel Kosminsky, and the city itself has numbered districts - much like Paris. But there is a certain grimness hanging around the place, typical to the ravaged natios of the former Eastern Bloc. If this is true, then the mountains which the novel also describes could well be the Carpathians. The biggest flaw of The Insult is a complete shift of focus around halfway through - where Martin's narrative switches from his perspective to that of another character. The novel is still narrated in the first person, but the story is entirely different, although tied to Martin's - it's as if Thomson dreamed up two different books, and thought of a way to merge them into one. The novel shifts from being a surreal and hypnotic story about different ways of observing the world to a surreal and unnerving detective story, with a saga of a troubled family thrown in. This makes The Insult lose the almost unbreakable grip that it had on this reader - although it's still compelling and well-written, Thomson has pretty much abandoned the fascinating and exciting possibilities which he teased us with in the first act, and his plot starts wandering. Although it's sparkled with great scenes, it never manages to match the impression left by the beginning of the novel. Still, despite its flaws, I believe that the novel is definitely worth reading - it is exciting, it is well-written, and it's dark in a quirky way. Rupert Thomson has been called an English Paul Auster, and the comparison is not entirely without any merits - Thomson's book shares the same interest in the detective story as the novels of The New York Trilogy, and both writers enjoy filling their worlds with strange events and protagonists and touch on the existential question of identity. Thomson creates a brilliant first act and his writing is a pleasure to read throughout the whole book, and I'm very glad that I have read it and that I also picked up his debut, Dreams Of Leaving, which I hope to read very soon.

Review # 2 was written on 2009-03-29 00:00:00 Veronica Urrego This book was VERY interesting...I read it before I started working in the eyecare field, and thought it was fascinating. Reading it AFTER I got into this field gave it a whole new depth. Loved it.