Books I've Been Reading Part 4: Liar

[bloodyrosemccoy]

I’m not really sure what I thought of Justine Larbalestier’s Liar.

I don’t mean in the obvious sense, where Larbalestier’s main character, Micah, takes the unreliable narrator trope to such extremes that you put the book down thinking “What the balls did I just read?!”—no, I liked that. I liked that there were many possible ways it really could have gone down.*

I’m just not sure any of the interpretations really worked for me as an awesome story. There’s one that almost does,** but that ending leaves too many blanks to fill in.

It was a good book. I just don’t think it was my kind of book.

Also, it's exceedingly difficult to talk generally about a book where everything, including what kind of book it IS, is a sort of Schroedinger's spoiler—depending on whether you believe it or not. I thought that was cool, but it doesn't make it easy to write about.


*Although my favorite comment from the spoiler discussion on Justine’s blog, which contained lots of people giving their theories on “what really happened,” was the one postmodernist who pointed out that none of it “really happened,” it was FICTION. Thanks, dude.

**The psychodrama one taken to extremes, where you don’t believe anything she’s told you and spend your whole time looking for slips and hints to the inside of her mind. I keep referring to it as the “Detective Goren Ending,” because it seems like something he’d wind up doing.

Comments

[fadethecat.livejournal.com]

I really, really liked the book. But part of why I did was because at the end I thought about the possible interpretations, and went, "I'm going to believe this version, whether or not the author intended it as the 'real' one, because I like it the best." And it worked well for me that way. It's a very strange and difficult book to talk about, though, indeed.

[chibicharibdys.livejournal.com]

I really liked it, but I think I'm sticking with the interpretation that the family disease is real, although not as ... tidy as she'd like?

... I dunno, I keep on turning out grimmer and grimmer versions of events.

[fadethecat.livejournal.com]

That's the interpretation that I am running with. Because I reached the possible alternate interpretation for what happend with her teacher (and teacher's kid) at the end, and stopped, and went, "...no. It went just like she said it did the first time. THAT'S THE TRUTH." And then refused to consider other possibilities.

[chibicharibdys.livejournal.com]

Yeah, I think no matter what, there's a trial that happens at the end that she's at, and what it's for isn't accounted for.

[padparadscha.livejournal.com]

I tend to go with the darker interpretation--for some reason, it's closer to satisfying for me. Strange, as I'm usually the one who buys things like her version of the family illness.

[chibicharibdys.livejournal.com]

Yeah, but I've been reading Glen Cook and I'm all grimmed out for the month. It's more like I'd like to believe the family illness, but it doesn't quite fit together.

Argh, it's like one of those trick puzzles. I keep turning it over and over in my mind and I can't make the pieces fit! Maybe not exactly my kind of book, either. I might like worrying at things, but I like the part where I've figured it out, too.

[gethenian.livejournal.com]

I have never heard of this, though I would suggest that in a vaguely similar vein you might like Stephen Fry's The Liar better.

Unreliable Narrator tropes are such fun. I just came across a DELIGHTFUL example of it in The Somnambulist. My favourite example from that book involved a lengthy scene in which a previously unsympathetic villain character is poisoned, realizes what has happened, suffers the slow torment of his inevitable death as he returns home to bid his farewells to his small crippled child whose mother died tragically some years before, and it's all very touching, and then the Narrator breaks from the story to chat with the reader (this happens fairly often) and says, more or less, "LOL no seriously that was total bullshit. Did you cry? I bet you did. Ain't I a stinker? Now back to our regularly scheduled series of murders, time-travelling Gods, and disfigured prostitutes..."

[gwalla.livejournal.com]

Fry's book is indeed a lot of fun.