Take Camus' Stranger, and turn him into a hick farmer. Mix a dash of Humbert from Nabakov's Lolita. It is a good novella, but not great. It seems like an excellent back plot to a novel. If there was something else happening that drove Ethan, it might have been better. As it is, he appears as apathetic as Camus' character. He wants things, but never really attempts to get them. He doesn't stand up to his wife, indeed the first time he says he lied was to her about her pickle dish. A pickle dish she never used anyway, for fear of it being broken. I was reminded of my Memere's china from the porcelain shop that did Napoleon's. The language was pretty interesting. It holds the local flavor, without being oppressive. That in itself doesn't make a good novel. The novel seemed to me too much like most "literary" novels.
I also finished Perfume. The ending was perfect. It was unexpected but fit logically so well. It wasn't really a horror book though. He didn't even show us 24 of the murders. The last murder was better described than the first, but still not as sense-ual as the other events. What about the smell of the blood? Some of the sense of detatchment worked well towards the intent. Grenouille didn't consider the bodies as humans, just carriers of scent. I loved the 7 years in a cave. The stench of his body had become a fog, a fog of nothingness since he had no body odor. This worked for me. The last part was over the top, but remain completly believable in the world of the novel. I did not question the logic of anything.
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