Customer Reviews

Bordeaux

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Have you seen the film Memento? Bordeaux (published earlier in Britain as The Irresistible Inheritance of Wilberforce: A Novel in Four Vintages) doesn't revolve around someone afflicted with short-term memory loss, but it does employ a reverse storytelling technique and isn't jolly. Life sucked for Leonard in the movie; and despite his cheeriness about feeling life will turn out well, Wilberforce, the novel's off-kilter narrator, displays the depths of his own "loserness" upfront in act or "vintage" number one.

Paul Torday's second novel -- his first was, of course, the charmingly quirky Salmon Fishing in the Yemen -- kicks off in 2006 and works back, in four "vintages," to 2002. Basically, Wilberforce (in normal chronology) degenerates from a socially challenged workaholic software company owner who avoids alcohol to a man drinking himself to death on multiple bottles of select but questionable vintage a day. He accomplishes this in those few years by finding his way to Francis Black's not exactly prospering wine shop, Caerlyon Hall, one evening after work. Gradually he becomes a regular there and even acquires a few other friends, including a woman, Catherine, he gradually desires to marry, and a man who stands in his way. Under Francis' tutelage, Wilberforce becomes a wine connoisseur of sorts, and then Francis, an older man in poor health, prevails upon Wilberforce to take on responsibility for his considerable, debt-ridden wine cellar when the time comes. Why would Wilberforce take on such a life-altering commitment? Therein lies the crux of the matter....

Torday scored winningly with his satire, Salmon Fishing in the Yemen. Alfred, luckless sod he was in many ways, grew in awareness and love during his incredible adventure. Wilberforce, however, is no Alfred. He -- and I give nothing away that isn't made plain in the first section of the book -- is a doomed man. Bordeaux deals with themes of inevitability: Is our genetic inheritance insurmountable? Are we but the puppets of fate? Both Alfred and Wilberforce are diffident, socially handicapped men, but Torday doesn't stuff Alfred into a funnel that leads only to the refuse pile; Wilberforce he does.

Reading this novel could appear a thankless endeavor at times: why bother with a story being told so that each revelation unfolds before its underpinnings? But, as in the acclaimed Memento, Torday's exercise in backward story structure pays off. His character study feeds the curiosity about how and why Wilberforce reaches each stage of his undoing. Torday, in effect, puts the rind peels back on the orange, until on the last page Wilberforce is a man who can say in optimistic sincerity that he thinks life will turn out well for him.

Still, Salmon Fishing in the Yemen was the more enjoyable book of the two. Torday's third novel, The Girl on the Landing, is expected in early 2009. I await it with cautious eagerness, hoping for continued ingeniousness and less morbidity than displayed in Bordeaux.

To be honest, I'm utterly disappointed by this book. According to many reviews I read before I started to read this book, I had been expecting great novel about wine, about passion, about degustation and about love (well, in some way). In fact, you get extremely ordinary story about a bloke who felt for his newly found desire - wine. But there is almost no description of the process of degustation and about growing of vine. It's not a book for wine lovers.

What's more, the story is not narrated gradually, but from the end till the beginning. In same cases it could be useful (e.g. in Memento movie), but certainly not here. You start with reading of the end of a drunkard and finish with bloody boring description of finding of a new lifestyle. Don't hesitate not to buy and read it.

This book was very thoughtprovoking and entertaining at the same time. The description of a man dying of Wernicke Korsakoff alcoholic psychosis was fascinating. The structure of the novel, where you know what happens because it is told backwards, creates a tension and sadness instead of a spoiler. You at times feel very sad for Wilberforce and at other times you are repulsed by him. It's very much like people in real life. I am a very picky reader and I LOVED this book, couldn't put it down.

Although it starts out well, promising profound insights into the oenophile, Wilberforce, this book devolves into a half-hearted morality tale on alcoholism, but then veers into the utter self-absorption of the main character. Add in the allusions to plot points never explored, and I felt that there was another book, somewhere, that might answer all of the questions raised, but never addressed...

Medellin? The poor appraisal of the undercroft? The first names, Francis? The unknown parentage?

WTF.

Immensely disappointing.

I had thought the book was originally going to be an indepth novel involving wine and one man's love for it. However, it turned out to be just about a drunk who is in the last stages of alcohol poisioning and does so on a $4500 bottle of Chateau Petrus. humpf!

I read the whole book in a couple of days so it's easy reading. The book says it's in four vintages which means there are four different segments of Francis Wilberforce's life in reverse chronological order. In the beginning he is running from unknown spies in a foreign country but it turns out it's an hallucination from a story he had heard many years before. His entire life has become convoluted. He's the cause of a car accident that kills his pretty young wife, he loses all the money he made selling his software company in buying worthless wine that some gentry told him was worth millions and close to 100,000 bottle collection. It turns out it's barely worth $50,000 and it's only a few thousand bottles. Any of the valuable wine had stopped being collected in 1982 when the wine merchant's parents died and he took over the business. The character is Francis Black and he ran his life and fortune into the ground the same way he did Wilberforce's.

I actually thought Francis Black was going to turn out to be Francis Wilberforce's father. Wilberforce was an orphan and Mr. Black had talked about having an affair with a young women whom he never met again. hummmm? Both with the first name of Francis. But that plot of the story never developed but I thought it appropriate that Mr. Black actually knew nothing about wine but acted like he did, lost his family lands and fortune and then along come Wilberforce who also develops no real knowledge about wine, assumes Mr. Black's rantings about his cellar and wine collection are true. He actually even begins to look upon Mr. Black as a father.

It's not the most engaging novel I've ever read, but I did enjoy it and it kept me thinking for days wondering how in the world Wilberforce got himself wrapped up in this mess. It actually would make a great Hallmark movie.

Read with a nice bottle of Bordeaux.