Zadignose's Reviews > The Fermata

I'll probably finish this eventually, since I think I'm about 2/3 of the way into it. It's okay. The premise is intriguing--guy has power to freeze time, uses it to get pervy, a lot, and it pretty much defines what's important in his life. I think it has enough worthwhile material to make a decent short story, or maybe a slimmer novella. Maybe not much more. The humor often didn't work for me, though I liked the initial absurdity of the protagonist's first attempt at writing erotica. The obsessive-compulsiveness of it, and its commitment to following its premise, taking it seriously enough to look at its implications... I thought at first it was going to be the strength of the book, and I reckon it's admirable of the author to pursue a project in this way... and yet it became tiresome for me. But I probably ought to eventually follow it to its conclusion. Maybe not right now, though.

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I went back to finish it, and regrettably, it gets worse. It was, overall, extremely tedious. At times it was repulsive, which... yeah, is likely intentional, but no thanks. The facetious use of ridiculous erotica-style terms for body parts and sex acts, such as fist-hammering one's "gender-pole" was a worn-out schtick very early on, but it just kept going--not to my amusement. If it's not going to make you laugh, it's going to make you groan a lot, like being trapped at a stand-up comedy show that ran off the rails from the first joke but went on for hours anyway. So, it alternates between that kind of unpleasantness and the other unpleasantness of being trapped in another man's bizarre fetish fantasy. (It doesn't matter if it's a semi-parodic fantasy, I was still trapped in it.)

And then, briefly at the end, it got a touch better--not a whole lot, but somewhat--when the tedium broke and the book's dilemma worked out a way to resolve itself--as another kind of fantasy, it is true--but it was a relief for the fantasy to take on another kind character. But what was probably best about the ending was that it finally felt relatively brisk and not too laborious... and the end was finally approaching. I was halfway tempted to forgive and forget what came before, but I couldn't.

I don't know for sure if I've been a little too harsh, or not harsh enough. This certainly left some impressions. But I think the book was ill-conceived, nothing I can think of could quite fix it, and I'd probably have rather read... well, one-thousand-and-one other possible books.

(And, the third way I thought of to end this review is...)

One thing I usually value is when a book is completely different from other books I've read. This is that, but I guess it's the wrong kind of different.