The Terrible Twos

Rating:
Summary: What You're Missing
Review: I am at a loss to why Ishmael Reed's novels are so resisted by readers. OK maybe not a total loss. The frantic pace, unrelenting inventiveness and a satirical gift that exposes uncomfortable truths in all their multiplicity, is bound to leave some readers behind. (Despite the fact that the reading skills that you use walking down the average city street exceed what is required by most supposedly 'difficult' literature - Reed included).

For those readers of Pynchon, DeLillo, Foster Wallace and others, (never mind Laurence Sterne or Jonathan Swift that could also bear comparison) there should be no excuses.

To emphasise the positive, I personally found The Terrible Twos so funny and compelling, that I forgot what I was doing and read it to the end, giving myself sunstroke in the process (not easy to do in a Dublin garden I can tell you).

Rating:
Summary: Weird and confusing
Review: I know this book was supposed to be clever, but I found it to be very confusing. There were so many characters thrown at the reader in the first two or three chapters, that when those characters reappeared later in the book it was hard to remember who they were or what role they had played earlier. I also found the constant jumping from one scene to another hard to follow.

I am an avid reader and it is RARE that I ever quit reading a book before I reach the end, but I am about two thirds of the way through and am thinking about tossing this one. Maybe it redeems itself in the end, but I'm finding it a chore rather than a pleasure to persevere. Time is just too precious and there are so many good books out there.

Rating:
Summary: Complex, layered & Faulkner-esque
Review: I'm excited that Reed's book has been reprinted... when I read it for a course, we had to put a copy on reserve because it was out of print. This is a marvelously intricate novel which does eventually pull all the disparate strands together in a way that if you persevere, you will find rewarding.

You'll never look at Santa Claus the same way again. And those little statues people put up nowadays with a Nativity scene and Santa sitting in? They'll make you outright chortle.