The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian by Sherman Alexie
230 pages
Published 2007
Read from October 14 to October 16
Rating: ★★★½ out of 5
Sometimes
I hate reading paperback editions of popular books. A paperback edition
has had time to nurture a thick crust of blind praise and critical
blurbs on the back cover and several pages deep in the front. Even if
you do your best to ignore them, the barnacles of praise emit and
saturate you with a zooplankton soup of expectations. Like with this
book. Sure, it won awards, and that's a promising sign, most of the
time. But the whole thing is sticky with famous writers and newspaper
critics spooging about how funny it is, how much they laughed from beginning to end, its hilarious language. And I hate knowing that Neil Gaiman and Amy Sedaris and Kirkus
universally found Alexie's narrative voice hysterical, because to me,
it just wasn't that funny. Certain characters were funny, certain events
were hilarious, but the style did nothing for me. In fact, the
narrative voice was the one and only thing I disliked about this book.
It read like an actual teenager's absolutely true diary, or worse yet some wacky random blogger's output.
Full of, like, sentence fragments.
And one-liners.
And jeez, so much emphasis.
ALL THE TIME, you know?
It gets annoying.
Off-putting, even. Too flippant, you know? It's like, jeez, an awkward voice for a truly affecting story.
I don't know what other voice one would use for this sort of high school confessional. I haven't read... well, I haven't read any
books of this genre before, at least none that come to mind. But the
prose here kept me at arm's length, as if I were a stereotypical teen
boy unable and unwilling to articulate an emotional attachment to my
male friends. Which is a shame, because this story is a series of
emotional punches to the face. My eyes swam in their sockets seemingly
for half the book, despite the narrative style. So maybe the writing
itself wasn't as much of a distraction as I thought, but whatever. I
think I would have liked this book just a little bit better if it
weren't so aggressively casual and OH MY GOD, right?
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