Most recent book: The Magus, by John Fowles (656 pags).
This book is very weird and very hard to describe. The narrator of the book is a British guy, Nicholas Urfe, who takes a job teaching English at a private boys school on a remote Greek island. On the island, he meets a very wealthy, strange man name Conchis. Urfe, having heard some vague reference to Conchis from his predecessor at the school, is curious and wanders on to his property; Conchis invites him to tea, and then invites him to come back the next weekend. Urfe sees some things that lead him to suspect that there is someone else staying at Conchis’ place besides just Conchis and his maid, and then on his first night at the house, Conchis tells Urfe that he’s psychic.
I’ll just go ahead and say that no one in this book is actually psychic—it’s not that kind of story. Urfe keeps coming back to visit Conchis, an every time he comes, stranger and stranger things happen. And every time you think you know what’s going on, something new happens that twists everything around. So at first it looks like it might be a supernatural story about psychics and time travel and whatnot—but that only lasts 50 or so pages, until Urfe discovers something that makes you realize that something else is going on. And then it happens again. And again. And again. Essentially, Conchis is playing some very elaborate game with (or trick on?) Urfe, and the whole book is an attempt to find out what exactly it is.
At first I was really in to this book—it has a very good, spooky atmosphere, filled with allusions to ancient myth and Shakespeare. But it suffers from what I’m going to call Lost syndrome. At the beginning of the story, when it’s just getting started, the possibilities are endless, and the story could go anywhere. But eventually, it has to end, it has to pick one of the limitless possibilities for an ending, and that ending will never be as good as the unknown, unformed ending you were imagining. The mystery is just more fun than the solution.
So yeah, the ending was a little bit of a let-down. And, much like Lost, it didn’t even answer all my questions! I looked it up online to see what other people thought of the ending (it’s that kind of book), and a lot of other people were confused as well. I think that not giving you a definite ending is a big part of Fowles’ literary philosophy (see: The French Lieutenant’s Woman), but I just want to know, damn it! I’ll admit that part of the problem may be that I was so impatient to finish the book and find out what happens that I didn’t read the last hundred pages as closely as I probably should have—maybe if I read the book again, I would come away with a totally different opinion of the ending. It’s definitely possible.
So I’m going to say that, even though I didn’t think the ending lived up to the beginning, this book is worth a read. It’s memorable, that’s for sure.
@internrachel @julia1