By M&C News Aug 8, 2007, 14:23 GMT
Before, by Irini Spanidou, has been criticized in The New York Times as being, ‘disappointing’. The critic goes on to say, “In this disappointing novel, however, her failure to make Beatrice a credible individual leaves a gaping black hole at the center of the story.”
Set in New York City in the 1970s, the book is about a 25 year-old woman named Beatrice who is artsy and wants to be a writer. With that, she has all the typical artistic angst: self-pitying, self-destructive, depressed, etcetera.
She stays in a bad relationship that readers don’t know why, the narrator is often telling the readers how intelligent and beautiful she is without giving any reason why, and the quotes the reviewer culls from the book sound like bad soap opera.
“She had not known love as a child. It had been a hankering for love that had bound her to Ned. Now, he had abandoned her, but she believed she still loved him. The despair she felt was love shorn naked, she thought — love skinned alive,” quotes Kakutani. He actually calls it “bad romance-novel prose”.
He then goes on to say, “Before” is a concept novel — self-loathing princess crashes and burns in 1970s New York — that never manages to turn the heroine embodying its concept into a sympathetic or recognizable human being.”
Adding to that concept would be one we’ve seen before: the depressed, artsy, self-destructive wannabe that everyone is supposed to feel sorry for, because she’s so good-looking and intelligent.
Wah. If that doesn’t say it, then the cover should. This novel is short, finishing only around 200 pages. If you’d like to read the negative review, click here.
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