Title: The Polyglots
Author: William Gerhardie
Type: Fiction
Page Count/Review Word Count: 340
Rating: 3*/5
William Gerhardie – The Polyglots
This book was given to me by a friend with good taste and so I was expecting to enjoy it much more than I did. But the truth is that I found it kind of dull and I didn’t actually think much of it. It reminded me of other classics in which it feels as though nothing much really happens. It’s more about the language itself than the actually story line, which was negligible at best, and that was a shame as far as I’m concerned.
Still, it was okay I guess – not exactly gripping, but the writing itself was okay. It was occasionally over-complicated, but it wasn’t exactly torture. There were lines here and there that I really liked and I even shared a quote on my Facebook page, but there were also big chunks of text that slowed me down while I was reading it and didn’t seem to add much value to it all.
The result is a book that’s definitely professional but simply not all that enjoyable, not least because the characters and their setting is so unfamiliar to me. It also didn’t help that I didn’t read the blurb but rather just jumped straight in, which left me feeling somehow behind from the outset. It’s the kind of book that, if you only read it casually, will be difficult for you to wrap your head around. You need to pay a lot of attention to who the characters are and what motivates them.
Overall, then, I wouldn’t call it memorable. It’s not the kind of book that I’d recommend to anyone, purely because there are so many other great books out there and this one is just kind of eh. That said, I’m still glad that I read it because it’s always good to discover new authors, even if you don’t necessarily enjoy them. Gerhardie had potential, but it wasn’t to be. Maybe read something else.
William Gerhardie
