Customer Reviews

WIDE OPEN.

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

 

 

Barker herself once described this as a novel of "cornball perversion," and no one who reads it will ever dispute that! It is filled with the weirdest group of gonzo characters ever assembled, among them Ronny, a homeless man whose real name is Jim; Jim, a hairless man whose real name is Ronny and who works spraying weed killer along the roads; Luke, a photographer of pornography who smells like fish; and Lily, a violent and rebellious teenager who suffers from a clotting disorder and worships The Head. And if these characters were not already bizarre enough, Barker also opens the Pandora's box of their not-in-the-textbook psyches to the reader--showing them to be even more off-the-wall than we had ever dreamed! Providing fertile ground for all the aberrations to flourish, the author sets the characters in a remote seaside resort/nudist colony during the off-season, with additional forays to a nearby boar farm, the Lost and Found Department of the London Underground, and a bat cave in Sumatra, where a character we know only from her letters is searching for a hairy hominid with no big toes. Obviously, not your grandmother's novel.

Wide Open is like nothing you've ever read before-absolutely original, sometimes wacky, sometimes poignant, sometimes violent, and always fascinating. The fluidity of Barker's prose keeps the reader zipping along, despite the fact that we can't always tell when she's putting us on, aren't always sure what's going on, and often suspect there are deep themes here if only we could catch our breaths long enough to figure them out. This is an absolutely exhilarating wild ride if the reader is willing to be "wide open."

The review excerpts on the back of this book are glowing and lead me to expect a satisfying and rich character study of some rather odd and eccentric people. Well, the characters are odd but the author's disjointed writing style and uneven storyline left me cold. It was absolutely ponderous wading though this book and I found it quite hard to care about the characters or their lives. I would occasionally be drawn in and believe that the book was finally going to get interesting but was inevitably disappointed.

Wide Open left me cold and disappointed.

Although this book has been written in an unusual style with a cast of unusual characters, I was completely intrigued by the strangeness and was drawn in to find out more. This book is so very different from anything I've ever read before or since. The storyline feels like a disjointed dream that reflects the subconcious of some unique and disturbing characters. Not a light read but truly artistic.

i managed to finish this book in the matter of a few hours ... bt not because the book was wildly thrilling -- honestly the book is about a group of very odd people who happened to meet at a point in time and managed to witness a "triumphant tragedy" ...

WIDE OPEN isn't madly suspenseful but it was very addictive. The characters were very queer but you could imagine that there are people like them lurking on the streets. The treatment of the book was mildly disturbing and very intriguing. The most satisfying thing about this book is the fact that it ends -- not like books that you can imagine might recur over and over again. WIDE OPEN is an account of an episode that only happens once and like Nietzsche's theory of eternal return states, this could be the reason why it is so significant and unforgettable a book.

Nicola Barker has immortalized her own unique storytelling style in Wide Open . A thoroughly enjoyable experience. Exhilarating and creepy. Ms. Barker's multidimensional polarization of normally obscure and suppressed (however significant) character traits makes this unique literary work a time stamp and a benchmark of monumental importance. Does this work epitomize modern societies unquenchable thirst for the off centred? I hope that the huge acclaim Wide Open will no doubt heap on Ms Barker will not distract her from her counter focus on the 'habitual and banal'.

It might have won the Impac, but it never made an impact.

Nicola Barker has immortalized her own unique storytelling style in Wide Open . A thoroughly enjoyable experience. Exhilarating and creepy. Ms. Barker's multidimensional polarization of normally obscure and suppressed (however significant) character traits makes this unique literary work a time stamp and a benchmark of monumental importance. Does this work epitomize modern societies unquenchable thirst for the off centred? I hope that the huge acclaim Wide Open will no doubt heap on Ms Barker will not distract her from her counter focus on the 'habitual and banal'.

Dear God, this is is an awful, awful novel. It's a dull-as-ditchwater account of a bunch of psychodramatic inbreds on the Isle Of Sheppey (sort of, Outer Banks without the tourists, or natural beauty, or anything). If you like books that depend on coincidence and the whim of the author to reach any sort of destination, you'll love it. If, on the other hand, you like books with a narrative drive, observation and analysis of characters and all that - you know - good storytelling stuff, you'll hate it. This is the embodiment of why so many young, literate English readers are turning away from young, literate UK fiction, towards its US counterpart. 'Wide Open' was written solely for the benefit of the author.

When you read the blurb on this book, the people in it are described as "creepy people doing nonsensical things". Well guess what? That's right.
But because it's written by a 'pet' of the English Literary Critics, it's considered to be soooooooooo much deeper. Guess what? It's NOT.

Not only are the people in this novel creepy, they're downright looney. What would possess anyone to think that this is a good book? Anything and everything that happens is there because the writer put them in and none of it flows. Maybe she had a lot of ideas for characters floating around in her head and she needed to get them out as part of some "neurotic cleansing". Well, they are all here. They just don't make any sense.

You have two men who are named Ronny and Jim who decide to exchange names. An ex-pornographer who smells like fish. And these are just the 'sane' characters. Another is the brother of one of the Ronnys who works in the "Underground" Lost & Found (nifty and subtle, huh!) who hasn't seen his brother in ten years. A woman, whose father just died, and had been or hadn't been in prison with the brother's father who was a pedophile but who went to prison for the rape and murder of a young girl. Got all this slop so far? It gets worse.

Drivel, trash, pretentious, at a loss for words. Ugh. Waste of time. Oh the poor trees who died for this! Please close up and nail it shut.

Zeb Kantrowitz

A group of people with strange but not abnormaloccupations. They try to find to each other, but mostly lockhorns. All of them seem weird. But the true weirdo in the group is the most lucid one. Is this a Gothic tale? Or a psycho-thriller? Has it some deeply hidden, dark meaning of a philosophical nature? Who knows? It can be rather confusing. The author handles the English language beautifully and can raise her prose to near poetry. The actors on the stage and their surroundings are sharply drawn. For that alone, the book is a pleasure to read. However, towards the end, the narration seems to flatten out and just bring confusion without greater purpose...