Customer Reviews

City of the Mind

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This is the finest book I have read this year. It is an urbanphile's dream and is for those who have lived and absorbed the wonders of cities past and present. One floats through time and space and although this book is set in London it takes little imagination to site it in Paris, Philadelphia, or Prague. I found it superior to her Booker prize winning novels. What a joy.

Character development is not up to Lively standards. At the same time, as the title suggests, the city of London, as filtered through the mind of an intellectual architect, becomes a focal point. Lively uses a literary device to enhance London as a living, historical presence: brief flashbacks to scenes from the past, especially scenes centered around a warden during WWII.

Interestingly, in Lively's "Perfect Happiness", the protagonist thinks: "Places are receptacles, that's all: they give nothing away, they don't record, they don't tell". Hardly consistent with the viewpoint in this book, but Lively is simply channeling two different characters.

What does it way about a book if you can't remember the plot less than a week after you've read it? (And, no, I'm not quite yet an Alzheimer candidate.) It's good-enough late-night fare, and definitely better than Ayn Rand if you want to read a novel about an architect. It's not *bad*--it's just not memorable.