[FCJ]∎ PDF In the Garden of the Fugitives A Novel Ceridwen Dovey Books

In the Garden of the Fugitives A Novel Ceridwen Dovey Books

Download As PDF : In the Garden of the Fugitives A Novel Ceridwen Dovey Books

In the Garden of the Fugitives A Novel Ceridwen Dovey Books

Found it slow


Tags : Amazon.com: In the Garden of the Fugitives: A Novel (9780374226640): Ceridwen Dovey: Books,Ceridwen Dovey,In the Garden of the Fugitives: A Novel,Farrar, Straus and Giroux,0374226644,Literary,Benefactors,Benefactors;Fiction.,Documentary films - Production and direction,Epistolary fiction,Guilt,Guilt;Fiction.,Women motion picture producers and directors;Fiction.,010101 FSG Cloth,AUSTRALIAN NOVEL AND SHORT STORY,Australia,Epistolary,FICTION Epistolary,FICTION Literary,Fiction,Fiction-Literary,FictionEpistolary,GENERAL,General Adult,Oceania,United States,literary fiction; South Africa; apartheid; Pompeii; archaeology; obsession; stalking; epistolary; letters; scholars; mystery; artifacts; ancient history; art; unreliable narrator; Naples; Italy; Harvard

In the Garden of the Fugitives A Novel Ceridwen Dovey Books Reviews

I slogged through to the end, despite characters I wanted to slap silly. Sick and tired of hearing about white guilt. The historical information about Pompei was interesting, but it’s not enough to recommend picking up this novel.
Totally agree with Bartleby the book is lifeless, the characters wooden, even the settings unrealized. The author is outside the total experience she has created, and so we readers are bored and alienated too. Amazed this author has published several books with a reputable company!
I soldiered on with this pompously conceived train wreck of a novel that goes on an on until I gave up caring where it was going. All the various historical backgrounds set against two stultifying personal histories was more than I could take. Who cares, get on with the story, until it became who cares about the story, what story, more like an endless carousel of personal histories going nowhere. Although I quit this novel half way through, I couldn't stand it anymore, I will check back, a dozen pages or so to see what happened but I'm convinced nothing will have happened, the earmark of an incredibly lifeless, overworked farce. I read a brief review of this that made it seem enticing but how wrongheaded that was.
Intriguing but less satisfying that I thought it would be. Part of this is because the story, such as it is, is told in an exchange of emails, which distances you from the real emotions of the characters and shows only what they chose to put forward. Royce and Vita have a tortured history and by the end you might want to tell both of them to get over themselves. That said, there's some very interesting information about Pompeii and post- apartheid South Africa. Thanks to Netgalley for the ARC. Try this one for a tale of two people trying to overcome their remorse.
In The Garden of the Fugitives tries to be grander than it actually is.
The novel is a correspondence between pervy Royce and Vita a light-skinned South African. The two "confess" to each other their past deeds. Royce was obsessed with his college love and Vita ashamed of her white privilege.
The letters contain a lot of technical issues including voice and lack of motive. The final chapter tries to rectify this but fails because the book was so boring--unless it was the passages about the history of Pompei. These passages shine with history and beautifully described landscapes. But this doesn't make up for the fact that you don't like the characters or that you don't truly understand what their relationship was and why.
Dovey spent too much time on the twist and not enough time developing the core of the story.

I received an ARC from the publisher; all opinions are my own.
Found it slow