Tiffany McDaniel

Très étrange et angoissant, ce livre se lit d'une traite, parce qu'on aimerait comprendre ce qu'est l'enfant ( l'ado) qui arrive dans une famille unie, qui l'accepte, le protège, mais qui commence à vivre des drames épouvantables, tout comme certains habitants du village. Qui est cet enfant ? d'où vient-il ? il est noir, avec des yeux verts, il impressionne par se maturité et ses connaissances, Est-il vraiment le Diable, invité sur une idée bizarre du père magistrat ? est-il tout simplement diabolique pour provoquer sans avoir l'air d'en être responsable, les pires situations que peuvent vivre les habitants su bourg où la colère finira par exploser ? Livre addictif et étrange, mais toutefois pas tout à fait à la hauteur du précédent de l'auteure : Betty.… (mer)

Oh boy do I have some thoughts.

I tried to read this book months ago. I didn't like it so I put it down. But I went back to it with fresh eyes and an open mind, and now after reading the whole book carefully, I can safely say… I still don't like it.

Immediately the tone of this book irked me. The author makes every description florid and off-the-wall original. Hands aren't just hands they're "...wetlands and his fingers the bulrushes that grew at the edges of them.", the main character claims to have heard someone describe his home town as, "...the scar of the paradise we lost.", his brother's eyes look like Russia "...the largest country in the world of his face.". This over the top description goes double for characters. Every character is an overwrought, unbearably twee parody of uniqueness. Stella is a housewife with intense agoraphobia who decorates the rooms of her house to be different countries and says she's "going to" England or Brazil when she goes to the kitchen or a bedroom. The protagonist's father is an Atticus Finch type named Autopsy Bliss who sees the law as God's divine filter and takes to writing invitations to the devil in the local paper. Elohim is an aggressively vegetarian dwarf who eats dinner at a dining table set on his front porch everyday. And this is EVERY character we spend any time with.

It just exhausts the reader. Moreover, by making everyone so quirky and unique, it ruins the effect. When discussing his father's name, Autopsy, the protagonist admits it's an "acutely strange name" but that his mother who gave it to him was an "acutely strange woman". Strangeness, acute or otherwise, is completely sapped of meaning in a novel where EVERYONE is bizarre and quirky to the nth degree.

On top of that the characters almost never act like human beings. Autopsy’s mother was a devout Christian until she slipped one day in her kitchen and God wasn’t there to catch her, then she immediately became a church vandalizing atheist. Elohim finds out his wife has been cheating on him so he makes a phone call and asks the operator to “connect him to God”. Fielding, as an adult, writes his sins on scraps of aluminum foil so that they look beautiful from a distance. And on and on. These actions are all very poetic and meaning laden, but in the world of the book they’re also things people apparently literally did, something that strains the imagination and rolls the eyes.

This disconnect might not be so bad if the author didn't also firmly ground the book in reality. As the first chapter reminds us, it's 1984, the Macintosh computer is out, AIDS is making headlines, and "Cruel Summer" is on the radio. The disconnect between this setting and the people that inhabit it is jarring at best, tasteless at worst. It can be difficult to care about characters that seem like cartoons most of the time, and is downright puzzling when the tone of the book shifts to include things like suicide, serial murder, and cannibalism. It seems like the author should have chosen to write either a poetic book with a style similar to magical realism, or a gritty and dark novel about man inhumanity to man, but by trying to do them together she fails at both.

Overall the whole book felt like nothing so much as a very well made cake, delicious but completely drowned out by about ten pounds of meticulously crafted icing filigree. The substance of the main event was lost due incessant tampering, adding, and unnecessary flourishes that went nowhere.
… (mer)

«Querido señor Diablo, su alteza Lucifer y todas las cruces con las que carga: Le invito cordialmente a Breathed, Ohio. Tierra de colinas y balas de heno, de pecadores y de indulgentes. Con gran fe, Autopsy Bliss.» Este es el anuncio que el fiscal Bliss puso en el periódico local a principios del verano de 1984. Unos días más tarde, el diablo en persona se presentaba en el porche de su casa. Vestía un mono de trabajo azul hecho jirones y pedía helado insistentemente. Se llamaba Sal, era negro y tenía trece años. Ese mismo día el señor Elohim, afamado techador y vegetariano extremista, fundiría todo el helado del supermercado con su soplete. Ese día se desataría la ola de calor y desgracias más insólita que jamás abrasó Breathed. «Es cosa del diablo que ahora vive con los Bliss», pensaban muchos. Pero puede que Sal solo fuera un niño escapado del horror de su familia. ¿Acaso el diablo puede enamorarse de la niña de la casa de al lado? ¿O tener un mejor amigo? De una belleza devastadora, El verano que lo derritió todo es una profunda reflexión sobre la comunidad, el paletismo y los lugares oscuros donde realmente reside el mal. Una nueva y magistral novela gótica rural de la autora de la multipremiada Betty.… (mer)