What a very interesting, and very good, novel. Actually, I didn't expect to enjoy it and started reading quite ready to abandon it partway through if it didn't grab me - the bits and pieces I'd read about the book had given me a sense of its high concept (unnamed narrator in an unnamed town where not much happens and absurdity is plentiful and unremarked-upon) and I found it hard to imagine how that could hold my interest over an entire novel. Yet somehow it does, in sentence after sentence of exemplarily plain description and observation, section after section of things not happening, or happening and seeming to indicate something significant but without being treated at all that way, with the barest of through-lines both plot and character-wise.
To me it felt haunted by Borges, Kafka, Calvino (specifically Invisible Cities) and Camus; at the same time Michel's Patisseries, Woolworths, Big W and other stalwarts of (mundane, consumerist) Australian life are integral to its fabric, not to mention pubs, insularity, excessive drinking, McDonald's value meals, and the prospect of being bashed for no reason by a guy called Steve. It sustains its curious register the whole time, and is remarkably easy to read, given the lack of conventional hooks it offers. And of course there are those holes. Great stuff.
To me it felt haunted by Borges, Kafka, Calvino (specifically Invisible Cities) and Camus; at the same time Michel's Patisseries, Woolworths, Big W and other stalwarts of (mundane, consumerist) Australian life are integral to its fabric, not to mention pubs, insularity, excessive drinking, McDonald's value meals, and the prospect of being bashed for no reason by a guy called Steve. It sustains its curious register the whole time, and is remarkably easy to read, given the lack of conventional hooks it offers. And of course there are those holes. Great stuff.
