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A review by gorecki
A Thousand Acres by Jane Smiley
3.0
When I picked this book up and read the first few pages, I was overcome with a peaceful and calming feeling, the type a really well written, slow, and introverted book gives you. I was going through a very demanding period at work and reaching for this book after a day filled with hectic phone calls, scrambling and ticking things off urgent to-do lists was just what I needed at the end of the day. The descriptions of land, life on a farm, draining a swamp to reveal the rich and nurturing soil under it brought me much delight and helped me slow down and unwind.
And that is how the book reads very much until its end - a calm and slow account of a family’s falling apart under the many and varied types of pressure a huge farm puts on them. There is drama, but it somehow feels undramatic, there is abuse, bit it somehow reads too detached, and there is much left to be desired, but you somehow don’t feel all too invested to have too many and too high expectations. I learned that this is a re-imagined version of King Lear in a modern setting a few pages after I’d started reading, and this did explain some of the decisions taken later on in the novel and quite often even the things that I felt didn’t work out so well. While things did make sense and the story built up well, there were situations which seemed forced or actions which were left unexplained and a little bit confusing.
Sometimes reality is stranger than fiction, but then sometimes fiction is too strange to be fit into a portrayal of a supposedly real scenario. Especially fiction from a few centuries ago.
And that is how the book reads very much until its end - a calm and slow account of a family’s falling apart under the many and varied types of pressure a huge farm puts on them. There is drama, but it somehow feels undramatic, there is abuse, bit it somehow reads too detached, and there is much left to be desired, but you somehow don’t feel all too invested to have too many and too high expectations. I learned that this is a re-imagined version of King Lear in a modern setting a few pages after I’d started reading, and this did explain some of the decisions taken later on in the novel and quite often even the things that I felt didn’t work out so well. While things did make sense and the story built up well, there were situations which seemed forced or actions which were left unexplained and a little bit confusing.
Sometimes reality is stranger than fiction, but then sometimes fiction is too strange to be fit into a portrayal of a supposedly real scenario. Especially fiction from a few centuries ago.