Once in a while it happens to read books that I hate from all the possible respects. Seldom, indeed, but it happens nevertheless. Or better said, it happened again.
I have a reserved relationship with the books by Emma Donoghue. I was not embracing the enthusiasm of those clapping their hands for The Room, but I´ve found The Wonder fascinating, although at a limited extent. However, The Pull of Stars, a 1st person account of a nurse working in the middle of 1918 flu pandemic in Dublin was hard to read, almost insufferable.
The book was written in 2018-2019 but published in 2020, when the world was facing a different pandemic. If I would have not know the time of the writing, I would have bet that in fact it was written in a hurry in 2020, as it sounded very much as an unfolding pandemic story. This is because probably the ambiance was dark and dungeon-like and definitely describing the medical limitations at the time, but the mood and medical insights, including the wearing of masks, was so 2020.
The nurse, Julia, is observing everything, sharing it in a first time person, expressing herself in short sentences. The frequency of ´I´s is overwhelming and it does not add anything to the story, creating sometimes the feeling of a very basic, school-composition like kind of writing interventions.
The only part that I really found interesting was dedicated to some medical procedures but I bet such informations can be easily learned from proper medical sources.
I hope The Pull of Stars is my first and last bad book experience for this year. I do have another book by Donoghue on my TBR and probably will read it again, but maybe it will be better.
Rating: 2 stars
No comments:
Post a Comment