Natalya Talks

WARNING: this review contain spoilers.  It is also long. Think of it as a dissection of the state of the genre, through the lens of this book.  Blogger also struggles with formatting posts this large, so I apologise if there are any issues.  

I started reading Hero of Our Time two days after starting Interview with the Vampire . As such, I was reading them alongside each other, and indeed finished them only a day apart. The day I finished Hero of Our Time I began my third rewatch of the AMC television adaption of Interview with the Vampire , and soon after began reading The Vampire Lestat. This may have influenced my reading of this Russian classic. Or maybe it’s just me. I relish in seeing bisexuals in empty corners. This is all to say, Grigori Aleksandrovich Pechorin is a bit Lestat-coded. Plainly speaking, I had a great lot of fun interpreting Pechorin as kind of a combination disaster/evil bisexual. But let’s get the review out of the way before I get to the titular delusion. What this book is most famous for is 1) Pechorin, a satirical depiction of a superfluous/Byronic hero, and 2) stunning descriptions of the Caucasus. On the latter, this is absolutely where the book stands out. Lermontov’s spirit and adoration of th...

Everything--and I mean everything--about this book should be right up my alley, but it just does not hit, unfortunately. I wanted to like this book desperately , I cannot begin to say that enough. The synthesis of ideas and themes is incomplete; everything drags as scenes where what is happening differs minutely but what is being said thematically is frequently the same. The formalistic changes in style are sort of experimental, but rarely have much impact and often seem more like a half-edited first draft of a Tumblr post by a particularly edgy teenager than it does a series of strictly edited deliberate choices, which is what is needed to make this kind of non-conventional style work. The reasoning behind some of these stylistic choices is often unfathomable. Why is everything all one big paragraph? Why is dialogue neither partitioned by a line break nor notated by quotation marks? Why do we switch to the pronoun you here specifically; and what is the pattern? Why is this sentence br...