Rating: 
Summary: Annoying
Review: Vincent Ettrich, the suave ladies man, goes on a date one night only to learn that he has died and come back, but can't remember anything about it. His task in a nutshell: remember everything and pass the knowledge of the afterlife to his unborn son. Each chapter of White Apples contains a surprise. Carroll won't let a dozen pages slip past without throwing out a shocker. In the beginning, I was intrigued; as the book wore on, it became grating. I wanted to like this book, but it was just too annoying. The characters were interesting, but unlikable. The bad guys were undefined and incomprehensible, and the same could be said for some of the good guys. New "rules" were constantly popping into existence to justify or limit sudden miracles or newfound powers. The characters did a lot of explaining to each other, because nothing made sense. Through it all, the reader suffers. By the end, I gained the strong impression that Carroll was making it all up as he went along, without ever having a clear idea of where he was going. That's great as a creative exercise, but not as something to sell to others in the guise of a novel. Avoid.
Rating: 
Summary: Carroll's latest metamorphis seems incomplete
Review: White Apples is the beginning of a new trilogy from Carroll, and with new beginnings he's decided to modify his modus operandi from previous novels. To start with, gone is the first-person, unreliable male narrator; in its place is a third-person omniscient voice that is both strangly familiar and disconcerting. I hesitate to call it Carroll's true voice, because he's shown in previous novels that he can take on differing personas convincingly, and the voice is still filtered here through the impressions of the characters. However, instead of only getting into the thoughts of the primary character lost in Carroll's latest version of Wonderland, this time you get to understand the motivations of three: the male lead, Vincent Ettrich, "a genial philanderer" (as the dust jacket copy labels him); Isabelle, his true love; and Coco Hallis, his guardian angel.That's the other thing that's different about this new novel. Most of Carroll's novels have something strange and weird about them--the common way I introduce his work to people is to say that it would be labeled magic realism if his last name had been of the Spanish origin. Before White Apples, however, the typical Carroll started off in a world much like our own and only started to look weird halfway through the book when the dog sleeping on the bed starts talking or two characters realize that they share the same dreamworld. In this new novel, Carroll drops us down the rabbit hole in the first chapter when we learn that Vincent is actually dead. Or has died, and now is back, but not in the sense that he was legally dead and the paramedics restarted his heart, but in the Monty Python sense of he had kicked the bucket and was pushing up daisies, and now he's walking his old haunts. No one knows the difference, except for his friend Bruno Mann, but that's because Bruno's dead himself. It only gets weirder from that. Carroll's strength is never in the weirdnesses, although every one of his books contains a major element of the fantastic. Instead, Carroll's best writing centers around those integral and important details that make up characters and relationships. I consider the first third of Bones of the Moon to be the best love story I've ever read and think it would have not been out of place had it appeared in The New Yorker. There's no fantasy anywhere in it, either, except the wonder that such a love could ever grow between two people. In White Apples, the reader never gets to see those important details between Vincent and Isabelle, and must instead learn about their character and relationship from the things they tell each other and awkward flackback sequences. In the world of creative writing workshops, we would consider this "telling, and not showing," except that Carroll's an accomplished storyteller and doesn't linger on the telling for that long. If this is your first taste of Carroll, you might not even notice it, but for those fans, it provides enough of a twist to the tale that it is every bit as off-putting as the Twilight Zone cliffhangers at the end of each chapter here. I don't want to give the impression that I didn't like this book. I read it with the same fervor that I reserve for only a few authors (Carroll, Pat Cadigan, Iain Banks, and, recently, J.K. Rowling). But something nagged at me constantly, and I think it was the assumption that the relationship between Vincent and Isabelle was love, beautiful and strong. My suspension of disbelief didn't have any trouble with Vincent back from the dead, but I could never get over the precious way that Vincent and Isabelle reflected on their past. It was like listening to a couple baby-talk with each other thinking that you would hear their words as endearing and not sophomoric. This is supposedly the first book of a Joyce Cary-like trilogy, where this was from the viewpoint of the man, the next will be from the viewpoint of a woman, and the third from a child. Having heard Carroll read the first chapter of the new book during his recent U.S. tour, I'm already excited by it, and it should be interesting to see how well he gets into the female viewpoint--the sections in White Apples give us a just a taste of that. That first chapter is weirder than anything in this book, and perhaps that is what Carroll is heading to: a book that shows us that normal is really the fantasy, the fantastic.
Rating: 
Summary: From Pepsi to Anjo
Review: With a deftness that can only be described as sheer brilliance, the author has written a novel that in its interweaving and metamorphic structure intentionally mimes its own thematics, the world of the word reflecting the writer's own ongoing cosmogony. The ingenuity of this device, combined with the author's ability to pull it off, frankly leaves one awed.
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