Thursday 3 October 2013

Book 1/65-The Emperor's Children, Claire Messud

I was expecting 'The Emperor's Children' to be a pretty emotional book, bearing in mind that it's set in New York in the Autumn of 2001. I figured we'd be introduced to some characters, get a feel for their lives and then see how they were all changed after the events of the 11th September or something along those sort of lines. It was actually nothing like that at all-for starters you have to read through 500 pages before 9/11 is mentioned at all, and even then it's almost a none-event, a background minutiae in the lives of the book's characters that almost has no impact on them at all.
So what is this book about then? Well...just people. Boring, ordinary, unremarkable people. It's a family and their somewhat spoiled grown up daughter, her grown up friends and their relationships and a cousin who doesn't fit in with their swanky lifestyle. If someone asked me to point out the key events from the story, I would struggle because it's basically 600 pages of nothing at all happening.
The second book I read for this challenge-The Secret History-was also about 600 pages long and, although I didn't really like the characters in it, there was definitely something happening in the story, something I could find and go "There, that's the most important thing that happens in this book". This is not the case with 'The Emperor's Children'. Again, the characters are fairly un-likeable, but they're also quite boring-nothing significant seems to happen to any of them (in my opinion). It's as if someone took a cheap gossip mag and made it into a 600 page book, and I just really couldn't bring myself to care about what was going on. Also I couldn't get on with the writing style at all-Messud has a habit of putting such long winded and rambling sentences in the middle of others with hyphens or brackets that by the time you've read them you've forgotten the start of the sentence and have to go back and read it again.

I dunno, maybe I just didn't 'get' 'The Emperor's Children', maybe it's just not the right sort of book for me-the host of good reviews printed on the cover certainly seem to suggest that not everyone found it as dull and uninteresting as I did, but I am certainly a very long way from agreeing that it's a "masterpiece".
If you like your stories to be about family feuds, about infidelity, about relationships, about enduring friendships and about running away from yourself to become someone new-then you should probably give this book a chance, or at least read it for yourself to see if you agree with me.
If, like me, however, you prefer a book with a bit more substance to it, a book with a definite beginning, middle and end, a book that centres around an event rather than some relationships, then you should probably skip it because you probably won't enjoy it either.

Memorable Quote " It's narcissism, to love a wall and resent it for not loving you back. It's perversity. Love is mutual, it flourishes in reciprocity. You can't have real love without a return of affection-otherwise it's just obsession, and projection. It's childish." -The Fourth of July (3), Pg 373

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