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Most Helpful Customer Reviews
11 of 12 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Entertaining, Clever and Unique,
By
This review is from: Ibid: A Life (Hardcover)
While not quite the phenomenal success as his debut novel, "Ella Minnow Pea," "Ibid" again dazzles us with Mr. Dunn's originality and wordplay. The book has more laugh-out-loud moments than any other I've read in a long time. While the book also tells an interesting and moving story, the structure of the book -- i.e., telling the story through the footnotes to a lost biography of the protagonist -- does keep the reader at a bit of a distance, so that the story is not quite as involving as it might otherwise have been. Nevertheless, "Ibid" is a treat that I would recommend highly to anyone who enjoys a good laugh and an unusual story about quirky characters and situations.
4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars
Help! Ibid,
This review is from: Ibid: A Novel (Paperback)
It's a pretty brave idea -- a story told entirely through the footnotes of a destroyed novel.
Even a brilliant experimental author like Italo Calvino might have blanched at writing something like this, and Mark Dunn gives it a solid try. The result is a mixed bag -- a wonderfully colourful main character with epic experiences, but written in a densely rambling style. The novel opens with an exchange of letters between Dunn and his editor. The editor tells Dunn that due to her three-year-old son, the only copy of his manuscript has been reduced to soggy pulp -- the only part left is the footnotes. The editor is willing to publish these, without the novel they belong to, and after a bit of dithering Dunn agrees. The footnotes sketch out the story of Jonathan Blashette, a man born with three legs. Unsurprisingly his life is an interesting one: he becomes a circus frreak, falls in love many times (a pockmarked prostitute, a transvestite, and a girl whose "life is snuffed out in a tsunami of molasses," among others), goes to war, becomes a deodorant king, and encounters countless important personages -- celebrities, inventors, politicians, and more. "Ibid" sounds like an impossible way to write a book, let alone a fictional memoir. Come on, who can tell a story through footnotes, which by definition are dependent on the main text? Which in this case, was destroyed in a bathtub by a three-year-old? But Dunn actually does a pretty decent job bringing Blashette's story to life, through a series of notes for the text we never see. These footnotes are detailed and kind of kooky (Greta Garbo announcing, "I vant to be alone... with this big plate of sliced beets. Bring me some tripe!"), and touch on major world events like the invention of the jigsaw puzzle. Unfortunately, "Ibid" keeps getting tangled in its own oddball narrative. It starts off well through the weird letters ("I know you never use the phone, fearing electrical shock") and Blashette's boyhood, but then Dunn seems to realize that this is going to be a very short book, and some of the footnotes become so extensive and rambling that the story gets lost. That's too bad, because Blashette's story is so fascinating that you wish the manuscript hadn't been wrecked. Blashette is a likably strange guy with a compassionate streak, who runs into all sorts of weird people over the course of his life -- including some who were real, as a racist (fictional) letter from Frank L. Baum displays. "Ibid: A Novel" is a strange, ambitious novel that trips over its own feet (all three of them). It has some definite flaws, but is still a pleasantly kooky read.
6 of 7 people found the following review helpful:
2.0 out of 5 stars
A man's reach should exceed his grasp, and this time it did,
By
This review is from: Ibid: A Novel (Paperback)
I adored Ella Minnow Pea. It was witty, well-paced, inventive, funny and endearing. It is rare that a comic novel packs such a serious message.
Ibid., the story of three-legged Jonathan Bleshette, carried solely through "endnotes" because the manuscript was lost in a bathtub, is another self-conscious attempt by Dunn to reinvent the novel. I would like to think that he succeeded, and indeed about 20 pages into the book I thought he'd succeeded admirably. Unfortunately, as the book goes on, it seems more and more like a one-note piano. Bleshette is, again quite consciously, like Zelig (or the uncredited Forrest Gump); he meets numerous famous people in his life, often in unusual ways. There is a constant theme of the women in his life meeting their end in Boston, until his great love, the prostitute Great Jane, breaks the "Boston curse". But so what. Despite his ability as a novelist to invent any source he wants, from transcripts of conversations to the notes Bleshette and the future Rudolph Valentino scribbled for stage names for the latter and a deodorant brand for the former, Dunn fails to make either Bleshette or the other characters come alive. The last two-thirds of the novel are rather boring, and little comes of the possibilities that the first bits promised. Great Jane, for instance, seems at first to have possibilities, and although she ends up as Lady Jane, and tries to save prostitutes from that life, we never get to know her much, or see her plying her trade. The various hangers-on at the deodorant factory have fewer possibilities (the running joke of "she's the one" "no, she's not" is okay but gets tiresome) and Jonathan's relatives seem to come and go without much purpose, the only exception being his father who comes to learn Yiddish after spending his whole life in Arkansas before Jonathan moved him to New York. But the real problem is the possibilities for Jonathan himself that are not explored in sufficient detail. You'd think a man with three legs would have a set of interesting encounters with tailors; nope. Jonathan goes to war; how were his uniforms made? Can he use three legs as a tripod and hold a machine gun better? No idea. Are there rules to sports that can be gotten around if you have three legs (e.g., catching a football in-bounds)? A possibility not exploited. The endnote thing is similarly unexploited. If you read endnotes (and I do) one thing you notice is a lot of vituperativeness toward prior biographers. Dunn creates the prior biography ("Three Legs, One Heart") but doesn't take it far enough. Give us a diatribe, Mark, something totally outlandish. Pick on the guy's commas or something, or a perpetual misspelling with endless "sic's". I'm glad we have authors like Dunn who experiment with the novel; this one just didn't work. At the end he notes his admiration for Woody Allen, and one wonders if he's a fan of the later, unfunny films. This book is a lot like them. A great premise with too few jokes and not enough character.
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