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5+ obres 106 Membres 2 Ressenyes

Obres de Keith Hollihan

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Gamification and C-Monkeys are a pair of related novellas sold together as a “flip book” with a different cover on each side. The effect is clearly meant as a call-back to days when publishers sold slim, pulpy novels in bound pairs, and although both stories include familiar beats, Hollihan leavens each with modern ecological concerns and stylistic touches.

I decided to start reading these novellas thanks to a highly scientific method that involved skimming the first page of every review copy I have in my possession until I found one that hooked me enough to keep reading.

Gamification, a thriller about corporate espionage, offered just the right combination of spare prose and business jargon. I was soon caught up in the plight of the main character, a former corporate executive and current ex-con recently released from prison and struggling to make ends meet. When he begins working under-the-table for his old company cleaning up after the CEO’s ill-advised affair with a woman at a rival company, things start to get hairy.

Hollihan definitely knows his jargon. I’m pretty sure that if you turn this book sideways, a few inter-office memos and a quarterly report might fall out. He also has a pretty solid grasp of thriller conventions and pacing; the book starts out slow but steady until things inevitably begin escalating and Hollihan pulls the rug out from under his main character.

It was exciting reading, and I definitely enjoyed the experience, but the end of the novella left several story threads unresolved or unexplained, and I was admittedly a bit confused about who did what to whom and why. It felt a bit like Hollihan ignored motivations and explanations in the name of surprise and excitement. It worked in the moment, but ultimately left me unsatisfied.

I assumed that C-Monkeys might shed some light on the parts of Gamification that remained unexplained, but I was sadly disappointed. At one point in Gamification, the main character is given a pulpy dime-store novel about a mad scientist on a mysterious island full of giant salamanders. C-Monkeys is essentially the expanded version of that novel’s summary.

Unfortunately, in expanding the story, Hollihan doesn’t bring much more to the table. The main character in C-Monkeys is a cipher with no backstory and no clear motivations. We are eventually told a bit more about who he is and why he might want to sneak on the island, but it comes late in the story and feels like an arbitrary info-dump instead of a shocking revelation. Honestly, nothing about C-Monkeys felt particularly surprising or remarkable.

I wanted to like Gamification and C-Monkeys more than I did. Both novellas were eminently readable, and Hollihan gets a surprising amount of entertainment mileage out of corporate espionage and the particulars of drilling for oil, but Gamification’s many twists add up to a whole lot of nonsense and C-Monkeys just feels unnecessary. I might be up for reading more of Hollihan’s work, but I can’t recommend this pair of novellas.
… (més)
 
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unsquare | Feb 16, 2021 |
Moral ambiguity is at the crux of Keith Hollihan's novel Flagged Victor, which is narrated by a young man whose best friend Chris is not only seduced by the romance of the criminal act, but convinced he won't be caught. The narrator (we never learn his name) and Chris grow up together in Dartmouth, Nova Scotia in the 1980s. Their tight and in some ways exclusive bond results from having pulled each other intact through the knothole of childhood. Chris—athletic, charismatic, confident and persuasive—is the risk taker who lives lightly (Hollihan borrows the concept from Milan Kundera), unburdened by the consequences of his actions. The narrator, the younger of the two, is a plodder who feels sufficient weight of consequence for the both of them. The narrator wants to be a writer and regards all experience as grist for the mill, and for that reason, while he and Chris are in university, allows himself to be convinced that armed robbery is a good idea. Chris and the narrator pull off a number of heists, blowing the proceeds on booze, girls and expensive hotel rooms. But everything goes wrong with the last job: Chris ends up in prison and the narrator spends years of his life lugging around a burden of guilt as he tries to write Chris's story. Flagged Victor is an engaging coming-of-age novel, witty, entertaining and often hilarious. The problem is that it is also trying to be a serious novel about art, betrayal, and moral choice. Hollihan devotes large chunks of his narrative to philosophical discussions regarding the artist's responsibility to himself and to society and (with frequent references to Nietzsche, Kundera, Joseph Conrad, and even St. Augustine) wondering (morally speaking) if artistic intention lifts the artist above the common rabble and excuses his actions. These discussions are in themselves thought-provoking, but the final impression is of a novel that is being asked to do too much and ends up divided against itself. Readers expecting an action story will likely end up skipping the philosophical bits, and those looking for a meditation on art and life will find the action sequences (not to mention the lengthy and often repetitive sections devoted to adolescent horniness) trivial and shallow. Flagged Victor works best if we regard it as a serious entertainment—but unfortunately it is one that does not know what audience it was written for.… (més)
 
Marcat
icolford | Jan 5, 2014 |

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Obres
5
També de
1
Membres
106
Popularitat
#181,887
Valoració
3.2
Ressenyes
2
ISBN
16
Llengües
1

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