I wanted to like it, I really wanted to like it but I just didn't find any of the characters likeable. I think each chapter is very well written, and I think as a series of short stories it could be a decent collection but as a novel I found the lack of continuity between chapters jarring. The subject of each chapter shifts between characters, and because I really didn't like any of them, I found it difficult to keep track of what was happening to whom. I also felt let down by the lack of resolution at the end... The quality of the writing is technically very good but I found it impossible to be engaged in the stories.
9781844081295 I have rarely had such a visceral reaction to a book as I did with Alligator. Closing the book after finishing, I felt a seething anger towards life, which was mixed with a sublime terror not unlike what that moment right before being attacked by a slithering, obscured reptile must feel like. There are instances of empathetic humanity in the novel, but the undercurrent is of a pervading thoughtlessness that spins progressively out of control. The characters cause each other immense pain and never truly get a chance to make amends, even if they want to. Instead, we leave the novel with the breath knocked out of us - both by the cinematic exactitude of Moore's ravaging prose and the all-encompassing maw of that alligator right under the surface of things, ready to strike. 9781844081295 I loved Alligator so much. It's not perfect -there are certainly a few things that some would find offensive- but I don't understand why the average rating isn't higher. Lisa Moore is my favourite contemporary fiction author. Like Moore, I was born and raised in Newfoundland, so the Newfoundland setting drew me in and definitely adds to the appeal for me, but my appreciation for her books goes so much further than that. Her unique style embodies everything that I adore and her characters feel so alive, as if I know them in real life. I don't know how she does it but oh my gosh. My little Newfie heart is madly in love with, and in awe of, her writing.
Full review to come (maybe).
View of St. John's Harbour and The Narrows ♡
9781844081295 This author has a true gift for place description and feelings laid out so evocatively, but her style of chapter intercutting is too annoying. I really would love to read a novel she writes fluidly, rather than jumping around back and forth, person to person, year to year. It is frustrating and I am not sure why I cannot accept her strategy except that I see it as a weakness in a writer, rather than a strength.
These characters were more interesting than February but I am curious whether I would have found the opposite had I read Alligator first, followed by February.
Either way her characters are completely real and engrossing and I would have liked both books so much more had they been traditionally paced.
Maybe I am being unfair and should simply accept her style and appreciate it- not sure. 9781844081295 The nice thing about unravelling a Sudoku is: in the end it either fits or it doesn't; if a mistake has been made, whether by a careless realignment or a lapse in logic, it's clear that I've got it wrong. When trying to put together the shards of Lisa Moore's Alligator the solution does not appear upside down after the acknowledgements. I may have it wrong. Embarrassingly so. But the writing so deliciously excites the imagination paragraph after paragraph that I feel like I can't be alone in wanting there to be some trail of breadcrumbs to a real story. Moore makes me green with envy with her razor sharp delineation of characters, her dance along the tightrope of emphasis or effect—precision or excess. Where does she come up with these backgrounds, these descriptions, these deafening understatements that end almost every scene? It can't be accidental, then, that only one of the many character vignettes is actually written in the first person: that of Colleen, the teenage rebel. It is Colleen that gives shape to her mother, her aunt, to a young hot dog vendor, his assailant, Frank's friends, an alligator farm proprietor, and others. And while, for a reason I cannot fathom, Colleen is not given the final (or even one of the final eight) voices in the book, she is, in the end, finally nudged back onto a hopeful path. She is neither eaten nor alienated nor dedicated to a life of crime and that, perhaps, is as much as anyone can wish for a teenager in the post-modern world. 9781844081295
This layered novel is made up multiple perspective chapters and takes place mostly in St. Johns, Newfoundland. Moore is wonderful writer of character and setting, and each chapter is delicately and crisply composed. But. As a whole, I'm not sure I entirely understand what she was trying to do here. Things are pretty unrelentingly bleak for all the characters, and I guess maybe Moore is just trying to remind us that all systems tend towards decay.
This won't dissaude me from reading any other Moore books (I loved February), and there are some excellent examples of inner monologue in here. Even though I enjoyed the individual chapters as they came to me, that enjoyment was undermined by feeling a little cold and meh when I finally finished the book. 9781844081295 Picked this book from the library shelf because of it's alluring cover. Lisa Moore is a very skilled writer. Her ability to describe the details of ordinary things is amazing. Many authors can do this, and somehow Moore describes things you have seen yourself, can identify with immediately, so it feels almost as if you are reading about your own memories. For example, at the beginning of the second chapter: ...the warm night breeze jostles the handful of forget-me-nots sitting in a Mason jar of yellowish water on the windowsill. A few petals move on the surface of the water like tiny boats on a still lake. The glass jar and the submerged flower stems are coated with silvery beads of air...(and at the end of the chapter)...several air bubbles on the stems of the flowers in the Mason jar floated to the surface and broke soundlessly. The breeze nudged the flowers into one another and the stems tippytoed across the bottom of the jar.
Each chapter is written from the perspective on the main characters (Beverley, Colleen, Frank and Madeleine). Again this is a technique used by many authors these days (don't know the technical term for it, but it is one I tend to like). In this novel, each chapter can almost stand on it's own as a short story, and when you've finished reading the entire book, you feel as if you've read 4 novels - each character's story is compelling on it's own... and yet of course they are all interconnected.
9781844081295 Since I cried and snuffled my way through February, I was really looking forward to reading Alligator, and perhaps I was expecting too much, especially since this book was Lisa Moore's first novel. I didn't find the multiple first person narratives and time jumping particularly confusing (which seems to be the chief complaint from other readers), in fact the time shifting in February and Open was a definite stylistic point in their favour, but here the complicated structure came off as masking more sizzle than steak.
Even in this early work, Moore writes some lovely bits I enjoyed rereading, such as:
The anticipation of the hurling mass of the next wave, which is cold and mounting triumphantly and about crotch high, is huge, and if this wave hits her she's getting all the way in. Like the world exhaling. A hammering home of the truth. A refusal to be a wave any longer. The wave accepts the absurdity of being a wave, but also recognises the beach for what it is: a reckoning. Who said it would go on forever?
Nobody said.
They said quite the opposite.
There is no cold on earth as unequivocal as this wave that is higher than her head and about to smash itself against her skull. It is as cold as cold can be. Because how can matter be so blasted with sunlight, so sparkle-riven, and curve with such blood lust and be so soul numbing? A wave is the bone around the marrow of light.
A wave is the bone around the marrow of light. That took some figuring out, but I enjoyed rolling it on my tongue. I think what's nagging at me is the bleakness of everyone's situation in this book, that everyone will eventually be hit by the bone around the marrow of light, be attacked by the alligator that is lurking for each of us. And in the imagery, this notion felt a little heavy-handed. Did anyone not lose at least one parent at some point?
Illustrative of this:
She had come to think of life not as a progression of days full of minor dramas, some tragedies, small joys, and carefully won accomplishments, as she figures most people think of life -- but rather a stillness that would occasionally be interrupted by blasts of chaos.
And more so:
The water was deep and I screamed and I could feel weeds clinging to my jeans and he hauled the boat in and I tried to get onto the little island of mud he was on but the land kept giving way under me and he jumped onto the boat and I saw an alligator slide off the shore.
I had not seen it before and then I saw it. I thought I saw it. A shape that sank almost below the surface, just the ridge of its back visible, gliding quickly toward me. It moved with the same slow-fastness that things in dreams move with, it dipped under the surface but the wake, a soft V in the water, plaiting itself behind some invisible thing coming my way.
And then he had me in the boat. He reached over the side and hauled me up, which, how he lifted me I don't know. I lost a shoe and he was screaming how stupid I was how crazy and stupid and he stopped and he got me a blanket and he was crying with his face all screwed up with rage, tears rolling down his cheeks, and then he just stood over me patting the blanket and he stared for thirty seconds or so and I said his name and he didn't hear me and then he started shouting at me again. How stupid I was.
I said but there weren't any alligators around. There weren't any around, I screamed back at him and I was crying too, and when I said that there weren't any alligators around, there was a whack against the side of the boat.
Ah, so the teenage girl has been behaving recklessly because, due to her youth and protective upbringing, she didn't yet realise that the alligators are always lurking? It's a small complaint, no doubt compounded by my big expectations, and I will gladly read anything Lisa Moore comes up with next.
9781844081295 Der Plot erinnert an Rätsel im Stil: Wenn Petra im roten Haus wohnt und Tim einen Hund hat, wie heisst dann der Vater von Emma? Lisa Moores Roman spielt in St. Johns/Neufundland und deckt nach und nach die Beziehungen zwischen zahlreichen Figuren auf. Frank ist Waise und lebt von den Einkünften seines Hotdog-Imbisswagens. Er wohnt im gleichen Haus mit Valentin, einem furchterregenden Russen, der auf Neufundland gestrandet ist, weil der kanadische Staat das Schiff bechlagnahmte, auf dem Valentin Dienst tat. Colleen ist eine pubertierende Umweltaktivistin, die mit allen Mitteln den Lebensraum des Neufundländer Fichtenmarders vor der Abholzung bewahren will. Colleens Patentante arbeitet als Filmemacherin und hat einmal einen Spot über einen Krokodilbändiger gedreht. Nachdem Colleen Ärger mit der Polizei bekommen hat und zu Sozialstunden als Schadensausgleich verurteilt wurde, haut sie nach Louisiana ab, um den Krokodilbändiger aus Madeleines Film zu besuchen. Valentin hat sich ins Leben seiner Vermieterin Carol eingenistet und will sie um Haus und Vermögen bringen. Er sucht Veränderungen, behauptet er. Das Auftreten sehr vieler Personen in einem Roman erinnert an Winesburg, Ohio und begeistert als einziges Alleinstellungsmerkmal eines Buches noch nicht. Lisa Moore ist zweifellos eine begabte Erzählerin. Bei mir ist der Funke zu ihren in Im Rachen des Alligators äußerst knapp skizzierten Figuren einfach nicht übergesprungen, weil mir bei jeder der Figuren das Motiv für deren Handeln fehlte. 9781844081295 A novel of a first novel! Love the style, the writing...more later! In the meantime, highly recommended. 9781844081295
characters Alligator
Lisa Moore's Alligator gives dramatic birth to a new kind of fiction: North Atlantic Gothic. The story moves with the swiftness of a gator in attack mode through the lives of a group of brilliantly rendered characters in contemporary St. John's, Newfoundland — a city whose spiritual location is somewhere in the heart of Flannery O'Connor country. Its denizens jostle each other in uneasy arabesques of desire, greed, lust, and ambition, juxtaposed with a yearning for purity, depth, and redemption. Meet Madeleine, the driven aging filmmaker whose mission is to complete a Bergmanesque magnum opus before she dies; Frank, a young man of innocence and determination whose life is a strange anthology of unpredictable dangers; Valentin, the sociopathic Russian refugee whose predatory tendencies threaten everyone he encounters; and Colleen, at seventeen a hard-edged female Holden Caulfield, drawn inexorably to the places where alligators thrive. In these pages humanity is a bizarre combination of the reptilian and the saintly. Listen to its heartbeat, and be moved — and delighted. Alligator