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Patrick Flanery

Autor de I Am No One

6+ Obras 741 Miembros 187 Reseñas 2 Preferidas

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Incluye el nombre: Flanery Patrick

Créditos de la imagen: Photograph taken by Andrew van der Vlies

Obras de Patrick Flanery

I Am No One (2016) 332 copias
Absolution (2012) 267 copias
Fallen Land: A Novel (2013) 128 copias
Night for day (2019) 9 copias
Night for Day 1 copia

Obras relacionadas

Granta 136: Legacies of Love (2013) — Contribuidor — 47 copias

Etiquetado

Conocimiento común

Fecha de nacimiento
1975
Género
male
Nacionalidad
USA
Lugar de nacimiento
California, USA
Lugares de residencia
Omaha, Nebraska, USA
London, England, UK
Educación
Oxford University

Miembros

Reseñas

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.
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Denunciada
Nerdyrev1 | 127 reseñas más. | Nov 23, 2022 |
Ughhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh so boring I had to DNF it. No stars.
 
Denunciada
Jinjer | 38 reseñas más. | Aug 12, 2022 |
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.
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Denunciada
Bookmarque | Jul 5, 2020 |
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)
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½
 
Denunciada
Jayeless | 38 reseñas más. | May 28, 2020 |

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1
Miembros
741
Popularidad
#34,276
Valoración
½ 3.3
Reseñas
187
ISBNs
53
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