Rating: 
Summary: Good read - bad details!!
Review: A jolly romp but, having been to Andorra myself, I could not recognise the country; I do not remember any beaches nor do I remember a harbour - let alone one capable of holding "a few ostentatious yachts".
Andorra is high in the Pyrenees and is land-locked.
I doubt if the author has ever been to Andorra.
Also Mrs Reinhardt comes from the English county
of Barsetshire; which does not exist.
If you're an American I suppose you'll enjoy it.
Rating: 
Summary: Superb but suspend disbelief & geography
Review: A magnificent book. Read it for the story then reread it for the quality & beauty of the prose. Don't try to look for reality. This is an Andorra on the sea inhabited by only English speakers. Since the whole book is metaphor so is the site. Enjoy.
Rating: 
Summary: Andorra: a dreamy mountain paradise
Review: Alexander Fox, seeking escape from personal tragedy, settles into the sunny, dreamy mountain paradise of Andorra. But in this haunting novel, something strangely mysterious, almost sinister, lurks in what otherwise appears to be heaven on earth. This book crosses from one genre to another, then back again, and it's difficult to pin down. Is it a mystery? Perhaps, but sometimes it feels like a comedy of manners. Is it a meditation on grief? Maybe, but then it seems to segue into a romance.
Keep reading; it's worth it.
Rating: 
Summary: A Dark Land of the Mind
Review: Andorra is a compelling and beautifully written mystery. It is about a murder about to happen and one that already has happened, but it is mostly about forgetting and running away from a past that cannot be faced. La Plata is not a real place, but an ideal land to run to in your mind to live peacefully when the world becomes violent. Still the imagination which Mr Cameron uses to describe this fantasy land is powerful and descriptively beautiful. Amidst the grim background of the story there are surprisingly fun and quirky observations. Who would think to write an operatic version of The Immoralist? In this author's strange and surreal imaginary land people can give way to eccentricities in searching for an understanding of themselves and there are quite a few surprises that follow.
Rating:
Summary: a little masterpiece.
Review: Andorra is the first book of Peter Cameron's that I have read. It was like Camus and Kafka meet Agatha Christie. In Camus' The Stranger the narrator is sensuous (Noone communicates heat or the feeling of sand on the skin like Camus) yet profoundly insensitive to emotions, "Mother died today, or was it yesterday...". The narrator of Andorra, Alex Fox, is similarly sensuous and emotionally off. The descriptions of this Andorra through the senses are eloquent word paintings. Such images are lasting, but Alex seems to be misreading his characters all along, a little like the narrator, butler in The Remains of the Day.Once the police take Alex's passport with very little explanation, one feels like the bureaucratic labrynth of The Trial is about to descend. And it does. At the end, I wanted to reread the book to pick up all those clues I'd missed while I was enjoying the experience.
Rating:
Summary: Perfect Conceit
Review: Cameron's Andorra presents a problem for the reviewer: to describe the perfection of its literary conceit is to ruin its effect. Apparently the technique is too oblique for the more literal reader. There are many elegant touches but the best comes at the very end when the fictive logic of its construction is revealed.
Rating:
Summary: A triumph of style over substance
Review: Cameron's prose is wonderful if hardly original. Sadly, the novel places all its bets on a narrative technique that fails utterly. The revelation at the end of the book is supposed to recast the entire first-person narrative but this is so heavily foreshadowed that I felt as if the author must believe his readers to be imbeciles. A shame, but I will give Cameron's next novel a try.
Rating: 
Summary: Camerondorra?
Review: Does Mr. Cameron have so little imagination that he has to use the name of my homeland, this little Country in the Pyrenées,to place the action of his novel? It should show a warning to the customers that could be tempted of buying the book: This book HAS NOTHING TO SEE WITH ANDORRA; neither geographically, etnographically or sociologically!
Rating:
Summary: Brilliant and well-crafted
Review: Every once in a while, a book comes along that makes you rethink the concept of a 'novel'. Andorra weaves and bobs in the half-dream state between reality and fantasy, never giving up so much that the reader can see what's really coming. Overall, it's a darkly comic novel that redefines the structure of a novel. And for those that think the story is slight, it's only because the reader is only supposed to know as much as the characters are willing to say. Just like life.
Rating:
Summary: Disappointing
Review: I bought this book after reading all the great reviews of it in the papers. The first few chapters I found charming. The author's ability to capture details, to describe scenery is undoubtedly remarkable. However, the plot was ridiculous, or the way the story developed was a bit forced and the magic just disappeared.
|
