Masterpiece!
(At first, that's all I wanted to put down as my review of this book, but I can't resist raving about it.)
J. K. Rowling is a weaver. The world she created is intricate, complicated and yet so painfully familiar. Every single personage is complete and... "honest", raw, true, complicated, regular. (How does she KNOW all these people? How does she KNOW all these experiences? You have to know something in order to depict it so well. She describes feelings with easy offhandedness and you know exactly what she means. You've felt THAT before.) The structure of the book allows you to see how people invariably misunderstand and misread each other. While the story is so true. It haunts you and haunts you. It's a tragedy, and it's life, and it haunts you. And the last four words of the book sum us up as a society with eery, uncanny preciseness.
Two months ago I reflected on the fact that I hadn't read a masterpiece (not to be confused with books I loved) for a long, long, long time. It was so long ago that I've forgotten which book it was, even. And now there is this. This work of art. J. K. Rowling was born to be a writer. I'm glad she sneaked into English Literature Department and I'm glad she stuck to her dreams.
Her metaphors are whole. Her vocabulary is vast and never intrusive. She's current. She's congruent. She's logical. And she knows that her reader is smart. How does she KNOW? (smile). She has grown drastically as a writer and Casual Vacancy is awe-inspiring.
5 stars. Of course.
Afterthought: here are some quotes:
"[She was] almost entirely relieved."
"Savoring her own outrage."
"Gaia was there [town] too, absorbed in the mysterious rites of her gender."
"Shirley and Ruth found each other by the yogurts at half-past-twelve."
"... Little knots of pedestrians kept congregating [...] to check [...] the exactness of information."
"'Stone dead,' said Howard, as though there were degrees of deadness, and the kind that Barry Fairbrother had contracted was particularly sordid."
And there is a whole 505 pages of that.
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