Customer Reviews

Little Fingers

5 star:		(3)
4 star:		(3)
3 star:		(8)
2 star:		(8)
1 star:		(2)

 

 

I was very interested in reading "Little Fingers" because the synopsis sounded intriguing. The rave reviews the book garnered in its native Romania also increased its appeal, as I'm always interested in experiencing new types of literature.

Sadly, the book was an exhausting read. Glimmers of a compelling story are there, but it was very hard to pull them out with the way in which the text was composed. I suspect the English translation may be to blame, although it's certainly possible this is the way Florian writes in his native tongue. For instance, several pages would go by without a paragraph break and sentences were often constructed in very odd ways.

This book would be appealing to those readers who relish a challenge or enjoy unconventional writing. If you're taste leans more towards conventional literature, you might want to explore other books.

I like a challenging read and I really get into international mystery stories--there are some great ones being published these days. Sorry to say that I didn't find "Little Fingers" falling into that category. Too unstructured to be enjoyable. And a sense that the translation didn't do the book complete justice.

On the plus side, there is some rich, evocative language here. But the extreme density of the writing style left me feeling like I was groping through a labyrinth in pitch darkness most of the time. It just wasn't a pleasurable read. I'll bet others will disagree and find this thoroughly satisfying because of the challenge.

This is a quirky Romanian novel written in a style I found funny but very perplexing. I didn't necessarily hate it but I can't say that I liked it and I don't think it rates 3 stars either.

The book does not read easily with long sentences, rambling and difficult to follow. It is a translation from the Romanian language and I wondered if perhaps something was lost in translation. The characters are colorful and their stories interesting even if the narratives are a bit confusing.

It's a very short novel and maybe I would appreciate it more after a second reading but unfortunately it didn't engage me enough to even consider rereading it.

Little Fingers is an interesting book that has two major problems - it does not fully cohere and it's almost untranslatable; I read only the English version - i wish I would have the Romanian original - but like with Days of the King (which is a model of clarity compared to this one) the translation is very convoluted, likely trying to imitate the original and again it just does not work resulting in very stilted and dense (in a negative way) prose. Using 5 sentences when one would work is not an indication of literary sophistication imho at least in English, while again I sort of can imagine the book working well in Romanian which is a more complex language than the English of the 21st century.

There are again moments of brilliance and the book is worth reading for them - there is a play on first versus third person - and the historical vignettes are excellent, but a lot of the contemporary stuff was so-so maybe because it did not cohere and the last part with the Argentinians was really pointless imho.

All in all I would read Little Fingers (C) in Romanian if i had the chance since I feel i would appreciate it more than in this presumably faithful but missing the point translation

It sounds like a great story. The problem is--and maybe it's this way with many translated books--the prose goes all over the place. Within a single paragraph, there are many digressions. Probably, if you read the whole book, it will make sense at the end. But the prose is so dense, and the phrasing odd, I did not find this enjoyable to read.

I usually give a book about 50 pages before I abandon it, but I couldn't get to page 25 here. I read "literary" books, and have a Master's Degree in Arts & Letters, but this one went over my head. If you enjoy reading Borges and Gabriel Gacia Marques, then you might enjoy this book. With those, I appreciate their talent, but they aren't a book I'd want to read before bed. I hope to some day return to this book and finish.

I hated this book for about the first 40-50 pages and was preparing to bash it as unreadable. Somewhere about page 45 I started enjoying myself.

The book would not have been so much fun if it hadn't irritated me. Those lovely, easy-to-read books with plots that draw you easily into them, with limited numbers of characters, complete clear sentences, etc., are usually what I consider to be B novels and they usually get 4 stars. Those are nice simple escapes, mostly mediocre and very appreciated, like one appreciates potato chips or microwave popcorn. They have their place and I happily read these books (and eat my chips or popcorn). This was not one of those books.

Rather, I seriously wondered whether I was going to finish this book. I probably wouldn't have except that I needed to do some more Vine reviews and the other volumes waiting to be read are non-fiction and didn't look like simple escapes either. So I worked through it.

I'm glad I started keep a list of characters from early in reading. This was helpful because common pronouns will become interesting proper people at some point in the story (and because my memory is short and impatient). Also, be prepared to have a dictionary handy. I didn't look up half the words I didn't understand, and I still used it a lot.

Irritating was that I couldn't read it quickly. I couldn't hang me attention on a plot, but felt like I was wafting around in the meanderings of the author's words that hinted at people and events without really telling me anything. Many sentences were seriously difficult to read. I always felt there was an underlying joke that I wasn't getting and that it was my fault for not paying close enough attention.

For all of that irritation I would have given the book 1 star if everyone else had given it 5. I couldn't average 1 and 5 and give it something in between. This is not a mediocre book. It doesn't deserve 2-4 stars. It deserves to be loved or hated, or loved and hated. It doesn't deserve a luke warm reaction.

And by the time I finished it, I loved it. I loved to the humor, the irony, the complex lives and exotic (to the 2-4 star life of the average American reader) characters that once fully developed told the story, and the ending which leaves the reader knowing that the story cannot really be over.

I loved Auntie Pauline and Eugenia Embury. I loved the monk Onufrie's personal creations of adoration (and now I want to go create a personal sanctuary, if only I could find something to adore). I loved his sense of responsibility toward his "flock." I loved the author's ability to make me chuckle in the midsts of horrors. I loved the playful language and metaphors. I loved being reminded that no human being, especially not an old one, is really boring. I loved how all that funky language and those strange lives and horrors of history came together merged at end leaving the story pregnant, because after all, nothing ever really ends, not even this review, but you are going to have to imagine the rest of it yourself . . .

The story drew me in. A mysterious mass grave is unearthed. OK, sounds compelling. The cover also has a quirky charm. So, I ordered it, and waited in anticipation. When it was in my hands, I noticed the author was Romanian and the Translator had also translated works by Mircea Cartarescu, Stelian Tanase and Constantin Noica. Well I know the geographical location of Romania, but as for those other authors--I've never heard of them and not sure I could pronounce their names. But I gave it a go, it did win Best Debut Novel from The Romanian Writers' Union, and it would be neat to conquer my first piece of Romanian Literature. It is only 200 pages...

I'm sure my lack of intelligence is to blame, but I didn't get it. I couldn't follow it. It did not hold my attention span. I finished it in 15 painful attempts. A book of this length should have breezed by in two or three. However, this book has never met my friend, discernable plot. I don't think this book has much at all to do with the product description, or if it does, I must have missed it in all the pages long paragraphs, narrator switches and dream sequences. There were dream sequences, right?

I'm sure if I was to give this book proper attention, and re-read it, several times, maybe keep notes on all the characters then I could get a clearer picture of what happened. As for now, I do not want to work that hard. This book was the most challenging piece I've picked up since I first attempted Woolf's, The Waves. Only in this book, I wouldn't be surprised if somewhere on the way to publishing the manuscript was dropped, and was scooped up out of order, and published in that sequence. Still if you are up for the satisfaction that only comes from forming a grip on a laborious work of literature, I commend you, and Little Fingers is a good choice. I'll plead ignorance.

This book was a bit difficult to read, I think partially because it was translated into English instead of written in English. Many sentences were wordy and rambling. On top of that, there were so many characters introduced with seemingly unrelated stories. From the book jacket, I got the impression the story was about a mass grave with someone stealing the pinky fingers off corpses and a group of Argentinean geologists that came to sort the whole thing out. That storyline takes place within the last 15 pages or so and is not the major part of the plot. The rest of the novel reminds me of Colm Toibin's "The Master," which seemed to have a lot of anecdotes that more or less lead to nowhere.

The most often mentioned character in this book is a monk named Onufrie and the main plot is about his battle to overcome adversity in the difficult life he has had. We get to read about his half-crazed mother while pregnant with him and then abandoning him, his constant cutting of the bluish-black tuft of hair growing on his forehead, and how he came to be involved with the mass grave. Onufrie is a very interesting character with so many unusual aspects to his tough life. I think I would have enjoyed this book more if about 20 extraneous characters were eliminated and there was more to read about Onufrie's challenges.

I read the first two chapters (about one quarter) of the book and then started over because I felt so confused as to who everybody was and how they related to each other. It was clearer the second time and I'd probably get more out of the book if I were to read the whole thing again. This might also make a good book club choice since there is so much going on and there would be many things to discuss. It certainly was not one of my favorite books, but I was glad to have read it.

LITTLE FINGERS supposedly has a fantastic concept. Something prevented me from falling into the narrative or even following any of the characters. I'm not sure if this is a sentence thing or a story structure issue or what, but I felt like a laser skipping across the surface of a CD, with only little scraps of music and lyrics getting played. Maybe the narrative voice just spoke at a level or at a level of detail my brain wasn't ready for. It's too bad, because I kept waiting for all of the quirky elements promised in the description to make themselves known and even at fifty pages in I still had no idea what was happening of import other than the discovery of a mass grave.

I must admit that this book did nothing for me, which is why it has taken me over two months to finish its svelte 200 pages. Like others here, I think something was literally lost in translation and if I were Romanian, maybe the wordplay, humor and metaphors would not be so lost on me. As it stands, it isn't a book much worth your time.

As mentioned by others here, it is an exhausting book filled with numerous characters who don't really do anything. There isn't exactly a plot to draw them all together. In many ways it could remind you of Carl Hiassen if stripped of the humor and plot. Oh well, read at your own risk.