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A review by nordic_reads
The Boy with the Cuckoo-Clock Heart by Mathias Malzieu
3.0
Wow...it's a weird book. o__0
My 3 star-rating is to reflect how conflicted I feel about this one. On the one hand there are things I really enjoyed, on the other it contained two of my most hated things in fiction.
What I liked was the writing style. I've only read the English translation, but the text was kind of floaty and fairytale-like. There's a lot of metaphor and simile used, which might not be everyone's cup of tea, but I grew used to and even started to like a lot. It makes the whole book feel a bit dream-like, making me a little uncertain as to how much was "actually happening" and how much was "prettified" by Jack's state of mind.
The pacing of the plot was fine enough as well. I never felt like the story stalled or dragged just to fill up the word count. It is a short book, and the time is spent well in my opinion.
What I didn't like was that much of the drama in the latter half of the book seemed to be perpetuated by...stupid people being stupid and doing stupid things for the sake of the plot.
I get that much of the point was that emotions can lead us to do the wrong thing at the worst time just because those emotions are running high. But instead of growing and learning, in the second half it feels like the characters just...stop developing conveniently because the plot requires them to in order to keep the drama alive.
Perhaps this is partly due to my own life experience: personally I feel that people who, continually and over a long period of time, refuse to trust you, or are constantly waiting for you to cheat them, or are ready to believe the worst of you at the drop of a hat, are just not worth the battle to keep them as your friend (or more). Thus it feels like a letdown when, despite all he's done for some relationships in his life, he's condemned by allegations or the appearances of situations rather than being asked (by someone who has known him for years) whether they're true or not, or what his side of the story is. Yet, instead of identifying such relationships as toxic he never does. And in the very end he basically finds out that the first and most fundamental relationship of his life was kind of toxic too.
The worst of it is, that Jack actually seems to grown and learn a lesson just before the epilogue...in a way. But then the epilogue seems to spit on him by "our hero, if we can call him a hero." It feels like the author himself is disparaging his own work, and the reader along with it, if the reader was foolish enough to form something like empathy toward Jack.
This is yet another book in the category of "the ending spoils everything that came before." The ending is both disappointing and baffling, somehow feeling satisfying and entirely pointless. I might have felt more positively if the epilogue hadn't been included--it's really quite terrible in my opinion. It's like the author wrote a wonderful story but then just couldn't resist the urge to beat the readers over the head with an iron baseball bat labelled "exposition dump" at the last second. All the dream-like haziness is just eradicated and nothing is left up to the imagination.
Overall, I wanted to like this book, and I did for much of it. But after finishing it I rolled my eyes and kind of wished I'd never stumbled across it to begin with. Honestly it's like a drug trip: dream-like, brief, and ultimately just not worth it.
My 3 star-rating is to reflect how conflicted I feel about this one. On the one hand there are things I really enjoyed, on the other it contained two of my most hated things in fiction.
What I liked was the writing style. I've only read the English translation, but the text was kind of floaty and fairytale-like. There's a lot of metaphor and simile used, which might not be everyone's cup of tea, but I grew used to and even started to like a lot. It makes the whole book feel a bit dream-like, making me a little uncertain as to how much was "actually happening" and how much was "prettified" by Jack's state of mind.
The pacing of the plot was fine enough as well. I never felt like the story stalled or dragged just to fill up the word count. It is a short book, and the time is spent well in my opinion.
What I didn't like was that much of the drama in the latter half of the book seemed to be perpetuated by...stupid people being stupid and doing stupid things for the sake of the plot.
I get that much of the point was that emotions can lead us to do the wrong thing at the worst time just because those emotions are running high. But instead of growing and learning, in the second half it feels like the characters just...stop developing conveniently because the plot requires them to in order to keep the drama alive.
Perhaps this is partly due to my own life experience: personally I feel that people who, continually and over a long period of time, refuse to trust you, or are constantly waiting for you to cheat them, or are ready to believe the worst of you at the drop of a hat, are just not worth the battle to keep them as your friend (or more). Thus it feels like a letdown when, despite all he's done for some relationships in his life, he's condemned by allegations or the appearances of situations rather than being asked (by someone who has known him for years) whether they're true or not, or what his side of the story is. Yet, instead of identifying such relationships as toxic he never does. And in the very end he basically finds out that the first and most fundamental relationship of his life was kind of toxic too.
The worst of it is, that Jack actually seems to grown and learn a lesson just before the epilogue...in a way. But then the epilogue seems to spit on him by "our hero, if we can call him a hero." It feels like the author himself is disparaging his own work, and the reader along with it, if the reader was foolish enough to form something like empathy toward Jack.
This is yet another book in the category of "the ending spoils everything that came before." The ending is both disappointing and baffling, somehow feeling satisfying and entirely pointless. I might have felt more positively if the epilogue hadn't been included--it's really quite terrible in my opinion. It's like the author wrote a wonderful story but then just couldn't resist the urge to beat the readers over the head with an iron baseball bat labelled "exposition dump" at the last second. All the dream-like haziness is just eradicated and nothing is left up to the imagination.
Overall, I wanted to like this book, and I did for much of it. But after finishing it I rolled my eyes and kind of wished I'd never stumbled across it to begin with. Honestly it's like a drug trip: dream-like, brief, and ultimately just not worth it.