Der Distelfink

I still haven't read the blurb - I need to do that - so I went into this audio book blindly. I'm happy I did because I was so pleasantly surprised that I never knew what was going to happen.

In a nutshell, I enjoyed this book a great deal. The characters were so real and complex, even a good number of the secondary characters, that I felt invested in the various story arcs. The only reason I'm not going five stars is because I felt some of the passages about art and furniture went on too long and I found my attention wandering away from the book while the narrator went on for what must have been pages of background information. Much of it was interesting and certainly showed how vast Theo's knowledge was but it couldn't hold my attention.

I finished the book yesterday evening and I'm actually missing Theo and Boris and Hobie.

The author's influences show, with explicit shoutouts to Dostoyevsky and to Proust in the last couple of chapters. It may just be me, but I also got a faint feeling I get when I read William Gibson, with the obsessive attention to the culture the characters are immersed in and a big climactic scene at the end that simply falls apart. Thematically the author covers similar ground to her other books by focusing on the ideas of good and evil, punishment and redemption, using a main character who is at heart an underdog even though he lives a high stakes lifestyle and winds up financially pretty well off. She lets the roguish character of Boris steal the show over and over, however, and even lets him protest how misunderstood he is. I wasn't put off by the length of the book having read some of those rambling 19th and 20th century works she draws some of her inspiration from, but if you're looking for a tightly written and plotted story, or if you require a book where the good and virtuous characters to bask in the triumph and the depraved ones to receive their fair punishments, this might not be the book for you.