5/10

In others, kinda meh, but better than a bad book. That really is not praise in my book. It’s just one star shy of becoming a bad book. Still, I give it five instead of four stars because the book is not boring, if you look at it from a story-telling angle.

But any critic or critically-thinking reader worth their salt already knows that fiction is not ‘made up stories’, nor we read it for the story-telling value only. I would go so far as to even claim that story-telling, the narrative element of the plot (like what happens and what happened next and so on) is not even as important as salt is to food. Plenty of action of any sort doesn’t guarantee good literature, as the case of Dumas’s (the father) works proves. A discerning reader, in other words, doesn’t read literature like a child reads Andersen’s tales.

Of course, a good story adds to the value, like we see in Lewis’s The Monk (also reviewed by me), but it depends on how the story is knit into the novel as a whole. Focusing too much on the action makes fiction almost useless, because now you’re wasting precious time and eyesight entertaining yourself the slow, hard way, whereas the same goal can be more efficiently achieved through visual media like movies and TV series.

I am not saying entertainment is not necessary, mind. My point is that the function of fiction as a work of art, and its value as such, does not exist in the entertainment value it provides. If I want entertainment, I can watch a movie. It’s an escapism, it helps me deflate.

But fiction is a serious undertaking. The underlying structure of a properly-composed fiction is artistic, but also didactic and personality-altering. It should make me think, wonder, grow, improve, reflect, absorb, re-think and so forth. And it should stem from the realities the author has experienced and reflected upon, so that I get to have a real, intellectual ’tawk’ with the author, in the guise of the fiction that he is presenting and I am reading. That’s the contract, in my opinion.

The Italian is pure entertainment mostly, but in order to take the edge off, Radcliffe wastes a lot of words describing sceneries and emotions in an incongruent way, so that one can feel the seams. When I was done with it, I felt like saying ‘good riddance’ and ‘phew’, not thinking about the story as something that had become a part of my mental apparatus, like the works of certain writers become (and so deeply that they begin to define and redefine us).

If you want a story, go for it. If you want art, and reflection, and deep thinking–if you want improvement, then this is not the book for it.