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Woke Up Lonely (2013)

by Fiona Maazel(Favorite Author)

2.74 of 5 Votes: 4

ISBN

1555976387 (ISBN13: 9781555976385)

languge

English

genre

Fiction

publisher

Graywolf Press

review 1: So many mixed feelings on this book. Maazel can write an absolutely breathtaking sentence. She can write a beautiful paragraph. She can even write a pretty amazing page. But somehow these amazing pages don't come together into a coherent novel. While I don't think this book deserves the terrible Goodreads reviews it's gotten--it's pretty darn good--I do acknowledge that it has a lot of flaws. Overall, I still enjoyed it.
review 2: In "Woke Up Lonely," Fiona Maazel examines the plight of 21st century loneliness by presenting the stories of six individuals, one of whom is the leader of a cult that has as its purpose the creation of a community that transcends loneliness. Think "Bowling Alone" with a plot. Of sorts. Maazel challengers herself with the novel'... mores subject matter but the reader feels too cut off from the story, as if the tale is unfolding on the other side of an as yet unreached corner or as if the book is, at times, narrated in a language which assumes an institutional language which the reader is not privy to. Perhaps like David Foster Wallace's "The Pale King" which was underscored with boredom, Maazel deliberately crafted "Woke Up Lonely" in order to convey the sense of loneliness to the reader but this conceit, as with Wallace's novel, has a tendency to alienate the reader, to march the reader through 400 +/- pages in order to follow a story about characters who arouse, at best, middling interest in the reader. Make no mistakes, Maazel is an excellent writer. And this novel seems to have succeeded in capturing the zeitgeist of chronic loneliness but the told tale is likely to be unread if the reader feels too adrift. And the loneliness cult presents itself, at times, as a quirky dating service rather than as a cult that draws the existentially lonely into its enchantment. less

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