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Bonita Avenue: A Novel (2000)

by Peter Buwalda(Favorite Author)

3.68 of 5 Votes: 1

ISBN

0553417851 (ISBN13: 9780553417852)

languge

English

genre

Fiction

review 1: Thanks to Goodreads First Reads for a copy of Bonita Avenue in exchange of my honest review.Buwalda's Bonita Avenue is promising at the start. But once 300 pages in, with almost another 300 left to read, one wonders what the point of it all is. It is one of those books that feels like everything is pretty much revealed by the middle. If there is some interesting twist or surprise later, I found myself thinking, I don't care. It is not to say that Buwalda does not build some interesting characters and manage to tell a lot about them in so many different ways. The story is told from the point of vies of several characters with the added twist that one of the narrators is certainly not reliable, as even he is unsure of what is real and what is not. It seems that the male char... moreacters are extremes: The genius mathematician who is just so successful, so good for everyone around him, we can forgive him his little mishaps. And on the other extreme is his son-in-law, who is mentally unstable and, well, a pornographer, and often seen by others and himself as kind of a loser (if only they knew about his oodles of money made from his porn site!) These two men seem opposites, except perhaps for the fact that they are both very smart. The women are more mysterious, and perhaps have more depth to them, or seem like they might. The successful and very beautiful daughter who also is the porn star is certainly intriguing, except, again by 300 pages, nothing much happened to make me feel like I cared about her. There is a storm brewing, one can tell, but it takes a long time to brew, and by the time it happens, I am not there to really see it happen. All in all, a good read that could have been much much better if it were less rambling, shorter and more to the point.
review 2: I am going to blame it on a loss through translation, a very large loss. I struggled through this book, hoping with every turn of the page that it would get there, but it never did. It just felt flat. It had the makings for a great novel, but failed in the execution. Because of all of the praise over the original I feel comfortable guessing that something major was lost in translation, which is a shame, I could see the potential but at the same time I was tempted to pick up a red pen and edit throughout. If I could read Dutch I would probably read it again in it's original format, but the English translation came up wanting in my opinion. less

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