Patrick FlaneryReseñas

I am going to be honest- I was really excited about this book and had it on my Amazon queue for a while. I jumped up and down when NetGalley ok'd me to read the book for review. I am glad that I had a chance to read a Galley version rather than paying for the book because I probably would have put it down, felt cheated, and been upset that I paid for this book.

I am sorry to say that this book became a chore to read simply because I did not enjoy the narrator. When the entire book is narrated by a character that I do not enjoy, things become difficult.

Jeremy O'Keefe makes some really questionable choices which he seems justified in, but as I reader, I had to really question. Some of those choices involve spoilers, but I couldn't help but wonder- why are you so paranoid as you know exactly what you did. We live in an age and the book takes place in an age where if one associates with a certain group of people, even unknowingly, it becomes suspect, especially when living in NYC!

I did enjoy two aspects of the book- O'Keefe's feeling of neither belonging in England nor in the US. In England he is called too American, but in America, he is called too English. I also enjoyed the way his story changes just a bit each time he tells it.

My major problem was the Jeremy's voice in the book. In small doses, I could see where he is charming or pleasant to be around, but in large chunks, I wanted to depart from him. The problem is one cannot because he is the narrator.

I did wind up finishing the book, but I will say that it was more reading just to finish rather than caring. I think this one is going to be a "I love it!" Or "I hated it!" Type of book. Sadly, I fell on the latter side. While not hating it, I just didn't enjoy it and it was due to O'Keefe himself.

I received this book from NetGalley. I have to provide an honest review and inform the reader where I received the book from.

Ughhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh so boring I had to DNF it. No stars.

I think there ought to be a term for the thing that happens to your brain when a book hits your center of delight. It’s more than just enjoyment of a good plot, writing or a device or even characters. Some books have only one of those, not all four and my center of delight is a chord, not a single note. I’m intrigued, entertained, loving the many-layered connections and the fiction-within-a-fiction device the author uses to expand points that the main narrative couldn’t hold. Yes, I enjoy the books I read - all of them, but not on this expansive level.

Flanery tells the story through a narrator, Desmond, looking back to 1950 when he was forced to leave the US because of the McCarthy/Hoover House Committee on Un-American Activities. He’s a novelist & screenwriter whose latest script is in production with John Marsh as director. They’re old friends, but John’s wife Mary is planning to testify that Desmond as a probable Red. Oh and Mary is playing the female lead in the movie. Nice. But it gets worse, the male lead is being played by Desmond’s boyfriend, Myles. So not only is he possibly a Communist, he’s definitely a pervert by the standards of the time and even separately either charge will land him in prison. He has plans to leave, but can’t tell anyone, especially Myles, until the very last minute, and maybe not even then. He doesn’t want to endanger Myles’s career or reputation now that he has entered into a ‘lavender marriage’ with a mutual friend, Helen, who is also in the movie. She married Myles to give him ‘cover’ and also herself since she, too, is gay.

There is a lot of philosophizing and agonizing over what this was like to go through and while I’d like to say it’s heavy handed - it isn’t. Really, can you be heavy enough when it comes to this kind of bigotry and stripping of a person’s Constitutional rights? The fact that the people doing it couldn’t see they were no better than the Commies and Fascists they so claimed to hate. That they were destroying the fabric of freedom itself and denying the Constitution they so claimed to love. It would be merely sad if it weren’t still happening today, but it is and so it’s worse. It’s rage-inducing with a lovely side of frustration.

But it isn’t all negative - there are moments of joy, love and beauty that shine just as brightly. The relationships Desmond has are good and positive and they nourish him when he can’t have the one he wants, or can’t have it publicly.

Interspersed with his memories of 1950 framed by his present situation, is the script in its entirety. I seriously want to see this movie. It’s kind of noir-ish and James M. Cain-ish. Deftly done. At the end of each script section we see memos that go back and forth between John and Desmond and a slimy executive bent on removing anything offensive, non-Patriotic or even remotely sexy “to the point that no virile man could ever hope to be aroused to action or perversion or even mild onanistic pleasure by anything he sees in our castrated little picture.” p 208

Another device is the use of Desmond’s short stories based around pieces of things that happen to him such as one about the Marsh’s housekeeper being interrupted by two men who have been staking out the Marsh house and tailing John and Desmond around sometimes. She’s preparing for a party the Marsh’s are given and calls John to tell him that they’re in the house. Desmond overhears John’s part of the conversation only and he writes a story where she is forced to spy on the Marshes because she’s really a German who has flown her country by way of England where she’s turned into a double-agent. Under threat of exposure, she agrees.

Both the script and the stories allude to Desmond’s situation back in the day and before that. They are mostly fictional, but shine light into a lot of dark areas.

Oh it’s fabulous and it will probably end up in my top 5 for the year.

So evidently, that moratorium on reading books with male academic protagonists isn't going so well. I have heard of the principle of "write what you know", but this is really boring and I think male academics need to get some imagination.

The book itself is an alright read; it's basically Atonement in South Africa, though. At least, from what I can recall of that book they have a lot in common. The title, obviously. The concentration on wealthy white people. (Although to be fair to McEwan, Atonement is the book of his I remember being less obsessed with wealthy white people than usual. At least, I don't remember getting frustrated by how much I didn't care about any of his eye-rolling self-absorbed walking moneybags the way I did with his other books…)

This novel centres on an elderly white South African author, Clare Wald, and her biographer Sam Leroux – also a white South African, but having been living in New York for a very long time. Their relationship goes back a long way before that, but to explain it would spoil the plot. It's a novel about history, truth, memory… but also a novel where the only black characters are domestic workers, thieves, and obnoxious police officers, which I found more than a little problematic. I mean sure, from what I've heard, white South Africans prefer to live in isolated communities and see as little of people of colour as possible (except as servants), and my complaint isn't that Flanery should have written white South Africans to be more inclusive than they really are. It's more that I don't understand how he expects me to care about anyone in this novel. I find it really hard to sympathise with these characters with more money than they know what to do with and domestic staff to do their chores. I found it especially hard to sympathise with Clare Wald feeling so guilty about (view spoiler). She did good! What the hell is she so upset about? Jeez…

There are some other aspects of the plot I didn't find very satisfying – the eventual explanation of what happened to Laura, Clare's daughter, for example. (view spoiler) You could describe this novel as a mystery novel, with Laura's fate being the matter under investigation, except that the denouement is hearsay, untrustworthy and unclear. I get that that happens a lot in real life, that real mysteries are never explained. But I don't read mystery novels to get the kind of lack of answers I can get in real life.

Despite all of this, I kind of enjoyed the novel, though. Lacking an emotional investment in any of the characters, I took it as a mystery and ended up disappointed, but until the disappointment it was hard to put down. The differing versions of the same events were intriguing. I wanted to get to the 'truth'. Alas… (Jun 2016)½

Twenty pages in and I hated this book. Just so pedantic, I couldn't keep from wondering what a bore the author must be. Then is struck me that the author may not be the pedant (he may be, who knows), but the main character certainly is. After about 50 pages I actually began to care about this officious man. After about 100, what the hell was going on with him and I couldn't put it down. After all that, it wraps up a little too conveniently. Still, a very decent page turner.½

I enjoyed the elegant voice in this novel. The voice is erudite, assured, educated, and possesses perfect diction and cadence...in short it sounds exactly like an American man whose career has been in academia, and who has returned to the US after a long time living in the U.K., which is exactly who the narrator is. I have to say how refreshing it was to read a book in this voice, after reading so many novels where the narrator is breathlessly speaking in present tense, or is a five year old child, or is some other approximation of a speaking person that has nothing to do with written diction. Having a narrator communicating at this level of diction felt like a clever choice to me, where the suspenseful and unpredictable elements of the story felt unusually charged with logic, and where I never knew whether to trust the story or not.

Paranoids should greatly avoid this novel; one should not feed their manias. The rest of us get a lesson on how pervasive the surveillance society is. Much of what Flanery writes exists today (I know my keystrokes are incorporated into some or many corporate databases) and its not a far stretch of time until all the mechanisms Flanery presents are real ("You're imagining a world where even thought is a matter of public record. It's grotesque"). Not exactly a literary work of art but one that is very absorbing. Our protagonist is a dubious narrator, at best.½

This book was tremendously well written! I loved the four-pronged narrative and the divergence in each story. South Africa itself felt like another character, the way it affected so many decisions and brought up such a host of emotions in the human characters. The themes of guilt, loss, and entrapment were thoroughly explored in Sam and Clare, and the relationship between the two of them felt genuine. How much do you let another person know that you know? When can you trust enough? Who will be the first to speak? I will be on the lookout for more books by Patrick Flanery.

* I received this book for free from Goodreads First Reads.

Dense but very well done. The novel provided food for thought about surveillance in the United States. The book was driven by character development rather than by plot, and that is fine with me. The density of the writing makes sense considering that it is "written" by the main character who is an academic. Academics are the champs of convoluted writing. I thought that the at times convoluted writing in the novel was a nice touch to stay true to that detail.½

I don't like when books don't give a clear conclusion to a story unless it is part of a series or trilogy and then still I feel somethings get wrapped up. This one felt slow paced, it left way too many questions and for the subject of surveillance, I thought there would be more suspense. I had no sympathy for Jeremy O'Keefe who was a pompous ass who has an affair with his student even though he knows it is wrong. Sorry but even though he said she initiated it, that is wrong, he did and he knew better. This was just okay. The think I liked the most about it was the cover art.

I received this through LibraryThing.

Jeremy O'Keefe is a professor, recently returned to NY after teaching abroad at Oxford for over a decade. Shortly after his arrival, he begins to feel like he is being followed and mysterious packages start to arrive. Is he crazy or is he being followed?

Spoiler!! It turns out, Jeremy is under heavy surveillance. The "why" of it doesn't even enter until 2/3 of the way through the book. Still it makes one wonder just how much of our "private" information is up for public viewing, or at least viewing by the powers that be. A valid question, but one that I didn't really want to explore via this book: it took way too long to meander there and it didn't help that I never liked the main character. Not a favorite.½

Okay I made the bad mistake of reading some reviews on this book so I kept putting of reading. Most of the reviews are not that good but i really liked this book. I looked forward to hearing the story unfold in the life of the professor and the intrusion into his life. Things that happen in his life make him wonder is this really happening or am I going crazy? It makes you realize how little privacy you have in everyday life with all the electronic gadgets, gps tracking and internet. Who's watching you right now?

Interesting concept, but I felt the writing could have been a little tighter. Sometimes it was confusing trying to figure out how things go together, but overall I did enjoy it.

I have Pearl-ruled I Am No One, Patrick Flanery's latest novel, with great reluctance, as I found his Absolution to be one of the best novels of the 21st century I have read. I revisited my review of Absolution, and find that the strengths I noted in that novel were distinctly absent in I Am No One, at least as far as I took it. His sentences feel padded, wordy and awkward; his character belabors certain points ad nauseam to no apparent end; there is only the vaguest hint of what it's "about" and damn all has happened by page 78, where I gave up on it. I requested this last month from the ER list, but did not win it, and therefore grabbed it from the library. I note some of the LT reviews mention that "it gets better", or "the middle part is brilliant". Well, I just don't have the time or inclination to wade through the sludgy bits to get there, so I'm glad I do not feel obliged to finish it for the review.
August 2016

The premise of this book is a good one: an American professor of history who had been living in the UK returns to the States to take a new job in New York and finds himself the subject of what seems to be intense surveillance. Is he really being watched or is he imagining things? Started off well and the writing was good, but just feel down a bit on the execution end of things. And the ending was a bit half-finished. Close, but no cigar.

This book had a good thriller aspect but seemed cut off mid story. I wish they'd continued. Not sure if this is supposed to be a series or just not well wrapped-up.

This has a great hook. A man receives boxes of material about himself indicating his life is the subject of surveillance. There are hints at many interesting directions this might go, including fables kafkaesque absurdism, political intrigue, or psychological deterioration. However, the area that the novel is weakest (the protagonist's romantic relationships) eventually becomes the focus. While its concluding pages introduce some kind of interesting philosophical/political ideas, they don't make up for huge stretches that are either boring or intentionally obscure. They point towards payoffs, but don't even have an effective anti-climax, they just peter out.

I was a huge fan of Absolution and thought Fallen Land was a $%%^& mess. I had low expectations for this one and at first, it met them but things improved about a third of the way in.

An academic, teaching in NYC, begins to receive packages containing paper files of every digital connection he has made , whether by phone or by computer. It appears that someone is sending and responding to his emails . In addition, he runs into the same man over and over - a young man who initially initiated a conversation with him in a coffee shop. Although at first, the academic insists he is totally innocent, there are events in his past that could make him the target of government surveillance; information about these unfold very slowly and I will say occasionally thrillingly in a kind of Graham Greene way over the last two thirds of the novel.

Surveillance, lack of privacy, and the school to prison pipeline were all issues in Fallen Land as well but here are dealt with much more artfully.

Still, I think Flanery has exhausted this issue and needs to move on.

I love the books sparkly cover art though.

This was so promising and wound up being such a mess, I'm not sure what to say, especially since I thought Absolution, his first novel, was very very strong. As a dystopian piece of fiction about the rise of the surveillance security state and the infiltration of the penal system on education, there's some real brilliance here. But at 400 pages, many sloggy passages, a Magical Negro and a precocious child, not one but two adults who suffered abusive childhoods.........it's simply too much.

When it's good it's good but when it's bad, it's a real stinker. Very disappointing.

Great writing by an exciting new voice. Multiple narratives tell the story about a well-known but reclusive writer Clare Wald and her official biographer Sam Leroux who has come back to Cape Town after many years in New York. There are ties that connect that these two and parts of the book reads like a literary thriller as we race to end, trying to figure out who remembers what about the other. But there are lots of big ideas - reconciliation, forgiveness, and the violence of post-Apartheid south Africa. Stunning debut.

This book had a very creepy premise to it but it would have helped if the main character had been more likeable. As it is he pretty much knew that some of his past Oxford actions were coming to back to haunt him in the form of a student he had a relationship with and another whom he can't remember who wants to make a point on how ordinary people are being watched by organizations that can misconstrue the gathered data. Slow going and Jeffrey keeps over thinking everything which consumes too many pages. Is he imagining it all? Are the people he knows and are related to, real, all they appear to be, or just part of his imagination. Too much of that.

I abandoned this book after listening for three hours. I had to save myself from these monologues by one of the most pompous, boring men on earth. By the time I fled from this book I had not learned who or why anyone would be observing the life of this tedious man, but I pity anyone who had that job.

I received a free copy of this book from the publisher however I wound up borrowing and listening to the audiobook from the library.

I got this book thru LibraryThing's Early Review program. Initially this was a very engaging book. A college professor comes back to the US from an extended teaching gig in England. He reconnects with his estanged daughter, settles into his new life and job, but then has a memory gap/fugue. He misses an appointment with a student, but finds that he had sent an email rescheduling it, and has no memory of doing so. I thought it was going to be some sort of medical/Alzheimers family drama. Then he gets an anonymous box that contains hardcopies of all of his internet activity going back years. Where is this going, I ask myself?

Someone is watching him, but who and why. The book flashes back and forth between the present and to his time in the UK, where he has an affair with an Egyptian grad student, whose brother maybe part of a terrorist organization. On the surface, it should be excellent fodder for drama, sex, intrique, modern politics, tension in the Middle East. But for me, it just kind of rambled along. I finished it, but I really didn't connect with the characters and the open ended ending didn't leave me wanting more.

6/10

S: 9/22/16 - F: 10/13/16 (22 Days)

To know that we are being passively observed is such a fundamental part of our culture that we hardly notice anymore. But, what if passive became active, wouldn’t the same feelings of notional security become malignant and darkly invasive? This is what happens to Jeremy O’Keefe. He has secrets, of course. When he begins receiving what appears to be proof that he is not only being watched and possibly targeted for far more sinister business, his life becomes more complicated than he could ever have imagined in his worst thoughts of conspiracy.

This book is Patrick Flanery taking a dignified stroll through Grand Central Park. There is a low-grade pervasive sense of danger, but really, the people, the fall colors, the crisp air and the tweed are suffocating and…stately. It just walks from cover to cover, without raising the heart rate.

Patrick Flanery is a lovely writer who uses language to create imagery very well. I just can’t get behind this one. Don’t let that stop you from giving it a try, it may be your cup of tea. It is well-written, just not sparky enough for my taste. I did love the cover!

A copy was received by the publisher in exchange for an honest review. This review and more at annevolmering.com.

I am No One, aka Paranoid Middle-Aged Professor, (Who Also Happens to Be White and Privileged, in an era of Surveillance and Terrorism). Sounds promising, right? Ah, not so fast...

An American college professor spends a decade working in England and finally returns to NYC, but the city has changed, in the 9/11 aftermath. There is more suspicion and paranoia, fueled by the professor's own mental uncertainty. Are there people stalking him? Is he on the government's watch-list? Or is his mind just slipping?

Good premise. Lack-luster pacing. Tries for atmospheric dread. Fails. There must be a cautionary tale buried in here somewhere but did the author have to bore the reader to tears, as he delivers it for 350 pages? It may have worked better
as a short story or a novella.½