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The Ballad Of A Small Player (2014)

by Lawrence Osborne(Favorite Author)

3.13 of 5 Votes: 2

ISBN

0804137978 (ISBN13: 9780804137973)

languge

English

genre

Fiction

publisher

Hogarth

review 1: I received this book through the goodreads firstreads program. I'll admit, it's not really the type of book I generally read. I'm not a fan of foreign settings/cultures, as I find it harder to identify with them. For this reason I had difficulty following in a few instances, and it made me a bit bored. It certainly did not play out the way I had initially expected, although by the time I got to the end it did. It was a little bit confusing at the end.
review 2: A story of gambling addiction ostensibly but there are more layers than that. I didn't fully understand where the author was going with this story of a British lawyer who embezzled from his elderly clients. When he was discovered, he took flight to Macau where he had lived for a few years when ... morethe novel begins. An inveterate gambler, Lord Doyle as he calls himself seems on the verge of losing everything when he is rescued by a Chinese prostitute. I will not spoil the story's magical conclusion but I was not satisfied with it either. The author seems to be engaged in a dissertation into the nature of addiction, probing both Eastern and Western attitudes towards gambling and "luck". I found many of the descriptions of Macau and Hong Kong to be compelling. However, the protagonist's journey through Macau was repetitive and incredibly nihilistic. Perhaps this is what the writer intended but I felt bludgeoned by Doyle's despair which was only somewhat muted by the love he felt for the prostitute. The book could have been a clone of "Leaving LasVegas" but with a more supernatural twist. less

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