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Necessary Errors (2013)

by Caleb Crain(Favorite Author)

3.33 of 5 Votes: 3

ISBN

014312241X (ISBN13: 9780143122418)

languge

English

genre

Fiction

publisher

Penguin Books

review 1: Jacob, an American and a recent graduate from Harvard, spends a year in Prague teaching English. The year is 1990, the Velvet Revolution has just brought an end to Communism, but it'll still be a while before Capitalism truly arrives. This setting was so interesting - especially since it falls withing my lifetime, but I was too young to really register the culture of the 90s. And for 250-300 pages, Caleb Crain managed to hold my interest with detailed descriptions of the city and everyday life for Jacob and his friends. His style is very immersive and not rushed at all - but after a while, the reader realizes that everyday life is all that he is going to get from this novel. Yes, there are a lot of discussions about writing, life as an expat, relationships, about Capitalis... morem and the role it will play in the future. But none of the characters really change or experience anything one would describe as a traditional plot line. There are affairs, people move on from the group of friends, or enter it. Jacob stays strangely bland and featureless for a protagonist, and after a while, he just seems frustratingly indecisive. It feels wrong to criticize this, because it's obvious that this was the desired effect: Feeling frustration at someone who is priviliged and has vague ambitions about wanting to be a writer, but who is aimlessly drifting through life. Is the year abroad a necessary error for Jacob, did he eventually learn important lessons? I wanted to give this a better rating, but the truth is that I struggled for the last third of the book. I raced to finish it in the end, because there are still lenghty descriptions of places and people, but you know they won't be of any consequence, so there's little motivation to keep going. This needed to be shorter and more focused in my opinion.
review 2: Set in the 1990's in post-revolutionary Prague, Jacob, an inexperienced gay American, wants to witness what he can of the revolution. He has a job teaching English to Czechs and an apartment in a Czech family's home. Together with a group of ex-pat friends from England, Ireland, Scotland, and Germany they get together many nights for drinking and conversation. Not much of real importance happens, but the group's interactions and relationships with the city of Prague make this story very compelling. The characters are real and distinctive and the writing is elegant. less

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