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A review by aarongertler
Multiple Choice by Alejandro Zambra
3.0
I was hoping for a book that made a lot of fun literary allusions while playing funny meta-jokes on the premise of multiple-choice tests. I got... maybe 30% of what I wanted? The jokes were straightforward, without anything funny enough to evoke any kind of laugh, and often kind of cheesy:
a. cut
b. paste
c. cut
d. paste
e. undo
Ha.
Anyway, Zambra then does a section of stories split up by the multiple-choice options into chunks that you can read in a variety of orders. It's a nice idea, but not done especially well; the stories are mostly melancholy and low-stakes no matter which bits you choose (if this book were a film, it would be mumblecore).
The last section, with fake "reading comprehension" questions, is by far the best; I didn't care much about the questions, but the stories were good enough that I'd gladly read more of those by Zambra. He's at his best when he doesn't try to play around with form. That fact, plus a few split-up stories that actually contained a memorable passage or image, squeaked the book into three-star territory.
(Aside: The used edition I purchased included some penciled-in notes in the handwriting of a high-school student who seemed to have assumed they were actually picking up a book of multiple-choice tests. Notes included "pattern", "syllables", "not necessarily", and "why" [several times, no punctuation, on some of the weirder questions]. The marks smudge when rubbed, so not the author's doing -- if it was, it would be the funniest joke in the book by far.)
a. cut
b. paste
c. cut
d. paste
e. undo
Ha.
Anyway, Zambra then does a section of stories split up by the multiple-choice options into chunks that you can read in a variety of orders. It's a nice idea, but not done especially well; the stories are mostly melancholy and low-stakes no matter which bits you choose (if this book were a film, it would be mumblecore).
The last section, with fake "reading comprehension" questions, is by far the best; I didn't care much about the questions, but the stories were good enough that I'd gladly read more of those by Zambra. He's at his best when he doesn't try to play around with form. That fact, plus a few split-up stories that actually contained a memorable passage or image, squeaked the book into three-star territory.
(Aside: The used edition I purchased included some penciled-in notes in the handwriting of a high-school student who seemed to have assumed they were actually picking up a book of multiple-choice tests. Notes included "pattern", "syllables", "not necessarily", and "why" [several times, no punctuation, on some of the weirder questions]. The marks smudge when rubbed, so not the author's doing -- if it was, it would be the funniest joke in the book by far.)