Finally Finished

I've been reading this book off and on for almost a year now. It took me awhile to figure out why I didn't like it, and then once I figured it out it wasn't such bad reading. Plus, the book is well over 600 pages and difficult to fit in my small suitcase I take for business trips. So, for a year I lugged this baby around, trying to make progress. Last night I finished it.

The book is "Seven Types of Ambiguity" by Elliot Perlman. The book is a fictional account of a well-read unemployed professor, Simon, who is obsessed with his girlfriend from college. So obsessed that some ten years later, he has invaded her life, yet she remains unaware until he decides to kidnap her son under the guise that she has given him permission to take him from school because they are having an affair.

This professor often quotes from Empson's "Seven Types of Ambiguity" which is a real book that analyzes poetry, stating that good poetry consists of 7 elements. Anyway, the reason the book by Perlman was so annoying to me is that it's composed of seven parts, each written from the perspective of a different character in the novel. Each with his/her own style and perspective. The main character is quite pompous. One of those high and mighty literary types, and it comes through in his section. The writing style in this section requires way too much thinking. I usually prefer novels I can fly through because I'm into the story, not where I have to weed through long sentences with multiple thought directions, like:

"Deconstructionism or postmodernism, insofar as it pertains to language, is a doctrine originating with Derrida and others that asserts that every lingual statement, they call this a 'text,' has a large number of meanings rather than 'a' meaning, that every text is essentially ambiguous."

And uncommon words or phrases, like:

Cassus belli
Mellifluous
Fecund

I just wanted to find out what was going to happen to Simon, the little boy, and the ex-girlfriend. The end of the novel does reveal the outcome for two of those three. And I guess that's not so bad.