Customer Reviews

Beginner's Greek: A Novel

5 star:		(29)
4 star:		(30)
3 star:		(38)
2 star:		(32)
1 star:		(25)

 

 

Remember that cross-country flight you took when an interesting, captivating person sat next to you and the two of you talked about life, your interests, philosophy and literature?

Remember that work event you attended (by choice) at which everyone was witty and warm, rich and powerful, beautiful, well read, and articulate and found you equally enchanting?

Neither do I, and yet these things happen in Beginner's Greek.

It seems like Collins is aiming for that zany comedy feeling from the 40s. You know - boy meets girl, boy and girl fall in love, but then a series of events occur that keep them apart. Unfortunately, Beginner's Greek is set in modern times with characters who talk like they are out of the 40s, and it just doesn't work. I won't even go into the disbelief over a romantic man who longs to meet the woman of his dreams, and, when he does, puts all his faith in a hastily scribbled phone number on a torn piece of paper stuffed into his front pocket as the only means of contacting this goddess.

I kept trying to get into the book, and I kept trying to find something redeeming about the characters, but I finally had to admit defeat. The characters are flat and "sweet" to the point of being vacuous. The book is far too focused on the introspective lives of the characters, and no one actually seems to do or work at anything. There isn't one character here that I found sympathetic or likable. They all float around until something happens to them or around them, and then they sit around and talk about how odd or horrible or wonderful that thing is. Some characters simply drop out of sight altogether.

Finally, I can't help but comment on the overuse of BIG words. For the love of all that is holy, please do not write a book with your thesaurus by your side. And please never, ever describe a hockey team as "pusillanimous" or describe someone's earlobes as "pendant." Polysyllabism does not necessarily indicate intelligence; it is true that sometimes less is more. The characters in Beginner's Greek speak like they are reciting lines in their junior-high English class.

For a better romantic, intelligent story with interesting characters, an intriguing plot, and excellent use of rich language, I recommend A.S. Byatt's Possession.

I've been reading so many bad books lately, I now start each book very skeptically. I'm ready to criticize any dialogue that doesn't ring true. I have begun to expect scenarios that seem contrived. Furthermore, I received an advance copy of this book. The last advance copy of a book I received was SO bad, that I expected this one to be the same.

Thankfully, I was wrong here. This book was actually pretty good. It didn't start out strong, though. I had to wade through several chapters until it found its rhythm.

One of the first things I noticed was that the protagonist of the story, Peter, didn't seem like any male I ever have known. The author characterized him in such a way that I assumed he was going to be rather nerdy throughout the book. Later, however, it was clear that Peter was just an upstanding and goodhearted guy who was also intelligent, witty, and well-adjusted. Somehow, I didn't get this impression when we first met Peter. He came off as neurotic, instead.

Another thing that really bothered me was everyone's excessive obsession with looks and contrived expressions and reading each expression and actively putting on a certain expression to elicit a certain response. This was very strange to read in the earlier part of the book. Yet, I can't really find any fault in it, because some of the whole forced expression thing seemed to ring true in the sense I could picture everything the author wrote. Also, towards the second part of the book, as the book really got better, this seemed to work more favoribly.

Overall, though, I really liked this book (towards the second half) and I liked how the characters were actually fleshed out and interesting. I found it easy to sympathize with the characters and began to actually cheer for them.

Beginner's Greek could have used some better editing. There were a few continuity errors which should have been caught in one of the review cycles.

All in all, this was a pretty fun book to read. The bad guys get their comeuppance and the good guys find their happily ever afters. And some of the characters who you think may be a bit unscrupulous, actually wind up doing the Right Thing. I definitely enjoyed this enough to recommend it.

This spirited novel gets off to a questionable start. I believe it is intended that way, until you fall into its rhythm. At about page 60 I was hooked. By that time, I really grokked the narrator's flow and the prose became so natural that it was like I was living the story. The low-star reviewers did not get it. This was not "zany" or "40's style" or vacuous. The narration is intentionally tongue-in-cheek and subversive. And yet...and yet. The Woody Allen movie, Vicky Cristina Barcelona, had a similar style of narrator. It winks at you and yet it rings true. It is agile and poised and yet disarming.

James Collins' story is like a painting or a beautiful photograph. Do you know how a painting or photograph, although depicting something real, can seem fantastical because of the play of light and shadow and mood and atmosphere? Do you know how a painting can be something unearthly, unreal, but because of the emotional rendering and quality can seem more genuine than a realistic interpretation? That is how this novel unfolds. It reveals itself through the crevices of the seemingly obvious story. It is like this big paradox. From the (wink wink) outer story the aperture widens, or even narrows simultaneously. You are holding a camera and you focus it on a field and in this field is an array of images. If you choose to look at it shallowly, then you will only see genus and species. But if you are sympathetic to your surroundings, there is a whole palette of beautiful colors and tones and textures to capture and captivate.


This is a page-turning love story. The characters are not meant to mimic "real" life. It is a romantic tale that hovers above reality but is an equipoise between absurd and exquisite. It is very human with spare but striking prose. His "big words," as some reviewers complain about, (they need to get back to their James Patterson, I guess) are not pretentious or overblown. The author has an elegant, clean, and precise but artistic flow of metaphors and imagery. I do not see one false note in this story. Yes, the characters are almost bigger than life in its broad strokes. But it is the small and eloquent strokes that give it its invigorating originality and artistic merit. There is a skeptical and farcical outer shell harboring a thumping big red heart.

This is a classic bildungsroman. It is also refreshing, clear as glass, never canned. There is moral ambiguity and well-wrought characterizations, a noirish tale of bright and beaming sunlight. The whole unfolding is done in the colors of paradox.

I actually felt slapped by the bad reviews because they were so far off the mark. They read like bully reviews. It reminded me of people criticizing Picasso's art by saying, "It is just a bunch of squares." It is OK to dislike and criticize a work of art--each to his own--but when something that ignorant is said about a work of art that the viewer does not even understand, then it reflects more on the reviewer.

The beauty of this novel is that it is sublime but direct, sly but open-hearted, insouciant but mindful, irreverent but reverent, layered but simple. It does have a similar tone to a British comedy of manners but it is so much warmer and more generous.

That's the only word I know how to describe this book.
First let me say I'm a helpless romantic, a sucker for sappy books and movies. I cried like a baby at the end of 'Sleepless in Seattle' and 'Cinema Paradiso' is one of my favorite movies.
I wanted to love this. Heck, I wanted to like this.
It started promising enough, but somewhere in the middle all the witty charms in the writing began to annoy in the long haul. I found myself thinking, "Well he's technically proficient', but if you're going to write something that at the end of the day is going to be essentially classified as 'chick lit' you better have some winning, amazing, colorful characters you're dying to finally get together. Alas, pallid.
Peter is frankly, a bore. And all of the characters feel less of contemporary society, and more some cast offs from a PG Wodehouse novel.
I couldn't say by the end there was anyone in the book I liked, except possibly Peter's wife's Stepmother, Julia, who at least was pro-active and vaulted the plot forward a bit.I feel like an editor could've had a field day with this book, and simply taught the word 'brevity' in regards to descriptive prose.The worst part for me was by the last one hundred pages I began to do something I rarely ever do: Skim.
A romance should be an effortless joy to read. Ultimately this just felt labored.

I found this book to be impossible to read and enjoy. My reasons are legion, however my primary stumbling block is the author's style. So in all fairness, here are a few lines. If you like them, perhaps you'll enjoy the book.

"So, as we have seen, however inert the setting might seem to be, tremendous forces were gathered in the cabin of this aircraft. Forces. Tremendous ones. Peter knew that with the smallest effort he could potentiate the situation, with epochal consequences for his life and happiness...."

Potentiate the situation? sheesh!

I understand the plight of first novelists and I empathize with reviewers who are lenient and willing to overlook crucial flaws. I've also come to the conclusion that by doing so, we as reviewers are doing no one any favors. That having been said, this novel has an anorexically thin plot and even more meager characters. Furthermore, author Collins tries much too arduously to impress his readers with his vocabulary, something I strongly applaud when it's successful and, as in the case of someone like Alexander Theroux or John Barth, the hallmark of virtuoso writing with daggerlike conciseness. Stylistically, the irritatingly inappropriate (as in just wrong!) metaphors and sloppy similes and other figurative language abound and annoy. The plot itself which so vitally requires an understanding of and appreciation for Thomas Mann's THE MAGIC MOUNTAIN has neither and the bits of discussion of this monumental classic of 20th century fiction fall flat and leave this reviewer wondering if the author has even read Mann at all. I'd like to say that with considerable editing and rewriting, this could become a readable and entertaining novel, but I can't. A bad idea, poorly rendered.

I thought this book flat and boring. It went on and on, about 200 pages too long. Last half of the book was particularly dreadful and required a lot of heavy skimming. It felt like a meaningless collection of vacant two dimensional characters randomly crossing each other over and over and over again, with made up stiff dialogues intermittent with `she was very pretty', `she was prettier than so and so', and `she was pretty enough'. I though this would be a somewhat of a delightful `meringue' read but it was just painful.

Peter Russell meets the girl of his dreams on a flight, gets her phone number, and then loses it within hours of arriving at his destination, never to find it again. Since he failed to get her last name during their lengthy flight, he is unable to track her down and the next time he sees her is some years later, when his best friend introduces her as his new girlfriend, whom he goes on to marry. Peter enters a loveless marriage with a girl he's been dating because he feels she expects him to. So far, in spite of some implausible plot set-ups (would you really get someone's phone number without knowing her last name? would you really lose something that was so important to you? would that person really end up marrying your best friend?), the author manages to keep the reader's interest. However, already the secondary characters are much more interesting than the main characters, a problem that only gets worse as the novel continues. Indeed, the author himself seems more interested in the minor characters than the protagonist.

The best sections of the novel are a series of what amount to character sketches, one of them quite long and quite good. It comes (just in time for the weary reader) in the middle of the book, and would have stood on its own as a novella with just a bit more development. It centers on Julia, the stepmother of Charlotte, the girl Peter marries. The author devotes many pages and considerable skill and insight to the character of Julia, and this section alone makes the book worth reading. In fact, it felt as if he may have taken what was meant to be a short story about Julia and tossed it into the middle of what became a longer (and inferior) novel. In his defense, as mentioned earlier, the author does manage to develop several other minor characters in a way that catches and keeps the reader interested just long enough to keep slogging through an increasingly annoying plot (way too many coincidences and convenient last-minute revelations) and a protagonist who grows increasingly clueless and almost insufferable.

There's a subplot involving Peter's work at an investment bank, apparently because the author, an investment banker himself, felt obligated to follow the first rule of writing, "write about what you know". While he does a reasonably good job of making this subplot bearable, he does so by using it to introduce another slew of minor characters, who (not surprisingly) are more interesting than the main characters.

The ending ties everything up neatly and predictably, and by then the reader is so accustomed to unlikely plot developments (one can hardly call them plot "twists", since that implies they were executed with more skill than is the case) that it doesn't really strain one's credulity.

The overall feeling I had on finishing this book was relief mixed with regret. The regret was not that the book was over (that was the relief), but that the author, who shows some promise in his ability to portray a variety of characters, chose to allow such a bloated plot to all but smother most of the minor characters he had so carefully created. There are signs of promise in this book, but the author needs to show more restraint, and perhaps needs a more discerning editor.

The flavor of this novel is somewhere between Noel Coward and Stella Dallas. Our protagonist, Peter, is a Walter Mitty-ish man who would probably be a great girl-friend but as a romantic lead, leaves a lot to be desired. The "true love of his life", Holly, is so perfect she must be the re-incarnation of Mother Teresa. And then we have the "friend" whose name happens to be Johnathan Speedwell. REVIEWERS OBSERVATION: the Speedwell was the ship that left England along with the Mayflower but was forced to return to England because it was a flawed, leaky vessel and not suitable to make the journey.(Could this be the author's metaphorical comment about the character he created and his ultimate fate???).

There are an assortment of of fathers, step-fathers, wives and ex-wives, bosses and co-workers, mothers and stepmothers and other bit part players who have been poured into the mix to add a bit of flavor to what would have been a very dry, mildly interesting attempt at a 21st century version of the drawing room comedy. Some of these periferal characters, like Julia Dyer, have more interesting stories and personalities than the novels central characters and they are what motivate the reader to continue reading.

As for my comparing this book to Stella Dallas.....well, what can I say. Like all soap operas this story has too many convenient coincidences, too many really good or really bad characters and arrives at a solution to everyones problems in a manner that is entirely too neat and tidy. All in all, the book will probably make a great T.V. mini series. It has the ability to provide you with an entertaining outlet for your boredom on a Saturday night, but when you awaken on Sunday morning you have trouble remembering the plot. Two and a half stars.

. . . and my it was hard to hang on for that long! I heard good things about this book on NPR and in the NY Times and eagerly reserved it at my local library. Thank goodness I didn't buy a copy. Terrible, terrible writing ("The unvariegated membrane of time that stretched before him would be dimpled only when the flight attendant handed him a beverage and a packet of pretzels.") and overly dramatic and laughable descriptions (is it a compliment if someone says your ears resemble a biscuit?). Another reviewer commented it was as if the author plucked words from a thesaurus and I completely agree.