Last night I finished Ahmet Altan's Son oyun (Endgame in Alexander Dawe's English translation). It had a solid noir ending, but it shouldn't have taken so long to get there. About a third of the way in, I realised the chapters fell in three categories:
The first consist of the novelist protagonist looking back and lamenting how fate made him a murderer. These are the worst. Altan introduces a God-as-novelist analogy which is precious from the start and then doesn't develop it. He just belabours it with a lot of pseudophilosophising about fate and sin. I started skimming these first.
Then there are the chapters consisting almost entirely of his sexy talk with the main love interest. These are pretty self-indulgent and boring but feel sort of necessary to give weight to the central romance. I quickly started skimming them, too. You could have reduced them by maybe half and still kept the same impact.
Finally, we have the actual plot, which is that of an escalating battle for control between competing factions in a small coastal town. It takes a while to get going and is nothing groundbreaking but, as I said, it has a good payoff. I'm not sure why several reviews laud the unreliable narration because I don't recall coming across anything that made me seriously doubt his account. I mean, he wildly oversells his sexual prowess (in a Mary-Sueish way to boot), but that's pretty typical for middle-aged straight male writers.
Then again, as mentioned above, I wasn't exactly giving the work a close reading. I'm kind of puzzled by the plaudits its received. The style and diction isn't bad, but the setting invites comparisons to Bachtyar Ali's I stared at the night of the city which makes Altan look like James Patterson.
The first consist of the novelist protagonist looking back and lamenting how fate made him a murderer. These are the worst. Altan introduces a God-as-novelist analogy which is precious from the start and then doesn't develop it. He just belabours it with a lot of pseudophilosophising about fate and sin. I started skimming these first.
Then there are the chapters consisting almost entirely of his sexy talk with the main love interest. These are pretty self-indulgent and boring but feel sort of necessary to give weight to the central romance. I quickly started skimming them, too. You could have reduced them by maybe half and still kept the same impact.
Finally, we have the actual plot, which is that of an escalating battle for control between competing factions in a small coastal town. It takes a while to get going and is nothing groundbreaking but, as I said, it has a good payoff. I'm not sure why several reviews laud the unreliable narration because I don't recall coming across anything that made me seriously doubt his account. I mean, he wildly oversells his sexual prowess (in a Mary-Sueish way to boot), but that's pretty typical for middle-aged straight male writers.
Then again, as mentioned above, I wasn't exactly giving the work a close reading. I'm kind of puzzled by the plaudits its received. The style and diction isn't bad, but the setting invites comparisons to Bachtyar Ali's I stared at the night of the city which makes Altan look like James Patterson.
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