I’ve started reading Tim Vine’s book out of a whim, just picked it up at random while looking through a bookstore. The premise sounded interesting, it technically follows the story of dysfunctional characters and how their modern (80’s-90’s) surroundings just destroys them.
Or at least, that’s what I thought it might be.
I’m on page 80 out of 200, and it’s been just paragraphs of backstory for 4 or 5 different characters, some critiques of lifestyles and a lot of winging from a middle-age British guy that wants to complain about everything he sees on the street.
At first, I thought that maybe the author tried to give some recognizable characteristics to the era and locations, but it keeps showing up more and more, and a lot of them are weirdly personal. There are comments about young people’s fashion, fat people (+lazy, didn’t ya know, fat people=lazy), new music while implying that old music was better (i.e I think it’s the old= the songs the author listened when he was younger).
Tim Vine has passages and descriptions that give the book some personality, but the random complains about whatever he felt that paragraph is getting out of hand. If anyone has read the book, are the character introductions at least over?
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by DamonGantz