Rate this book

The Heyday Of Insensitive Bastards (2000)

by Robert Boswell(Favorite Author)

3.75 of 5 Votes: 4

languge

English

genre

review 1: The stories are quite varied but all are about quirky, flawed and somewhat disturbing characters. Boswell has a knack for developing interesting characters and drawing us into some unusual situations. I prefer a story to be more conclusively tied together at the end, but Boswell leaves us pondering the implications and just exactly how to interpret what the story's title implies. Though intrigued by the offbeat characters, it took me awhile to appreciate his style. I have been stealthily seduced by the stories, so my rating edged up to 4 stars, perhaps I may need to delve deeper into Boswell's world.
review 2: I thought this was a good collection, and I'm almost a lot more enthusiastic about it than the number of stars would suggest. The writing is not onl... morey consistently excellent, but its varied. The stories feature strong characters that reveal their emotional lives in ways that makes it hard not to be sympathetic with them-- even though that might mean this collection has a lot of sad sacks in it, I don't think I ever felt dulled by the experience-- rather, the pain these character endured, their sadness and loneliness always felt real and fresh to me.So why not give it a higher mark? I think because I found that these elements, the writing and the characters, were sort of arbitrary, or at least not obviously related to the story, either in the way it brought out the characters or the way the plots disposed of the characters, or resolved their troubles, or otherwise did something with them. The stories, despite the level of attention to the sentence, felt a little haphazard or arbitrary, and not just yet fitted to the characters they contained.... the end result is a ton of potential that for me at least didn't really pay off.The story that sticks with me is an exception to this, "City Bus," which really was awesome, even though I couldn't tell you why it works better for me than the others did. less

Download links for: The Heyday of Insensitive Bastards

Advertising