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the paris apartment -- 100% review
Saturday, April 15th, 2023 18:05
alright. i finished the book late last night and... i'm not really certain how to format my thoughts. so much happens. the plot unfolds. of course there's a fucking sex dungeon. let's just go through what all happens and get to the review part of the review.
( SPOILERS INSIDE )
honestly, i'm not sure how i feel about this novel. i feel like it was written more for the sex and intrigue than it was written to be, like, a satisfying mystery novel. there are moments where the rigid adherence to first person narration does less for the tone and pacing than third person narration would accomplish. the secret, last-minute swap around makes it.... too clean, too trite of a resolution. suddenly the one who's dead this whole time was a man that no one could stand to be around anyway? then what was the point of making it seem like it was ben the whole time? ben, whom everyone looked at with rose-tinted lenses. half the time jacques isn't even MENTIONED, let alone admired. the snippets we do get of him are disjointed, ugly vignettes of what power and money do for a man who's determined to rule with an iron fist. there's no love lost on that man's death; there was no love gained on his integration in the story. were it not for how the story is written to incorporate him at the very end, it would make no difference if he were absent throughout. no, rather, he IS absent throughout and the characters make significant effort to assure the reader that yes, this is normal. jacques is frequently absent, and the loneliness the other characters feel when he is absent is part of their everyday lives. so now he's dead. so what?
i wish the story had been more contained inside the house. there were so many different reasons that each resident should wish for ben's demise that any number of them trying, in their turns, to destroy him would have made for a more compelling ending. i truly don't feel like ben and jess should have been rewarded for how invasively they entered this family's life and how disruptively they transgressed in those spaces. and i honestly would have been fine without the entire investigation into the club. like yeah, the club was a sinister, dire place and i guess it deserved to be shut down for what it was doing to the girls that worked there. but it was intended, positionally, to contribute to jacques' overall character. and he was simply so untouched by the narrative-- hell, the destruction of his club didn't even affect him because he was already dead!-- that he entered and exited without really leaving a mark.
i don't know. i wish the servants' staircase and the dumbwaiter had been more incorporated into the plot. i wish it had been some kind of complicated "it was mimi's weapon wielded in sophie's hand after nick riled antoine up so much antoine baited sophie into acting" trajectory, where everyone was as involved as there was love lost between them and ben. it would have been... neat. tidy. not whatever the hell the rest of this book was.
anyway. i think my rating of the book overall is a 5 out of 11 now. there are so many other things that could have happened with the plot devices that had been established. and what we got instead was a sex dungeon.
( SPOILERS INSIDE )
honestly, i'm not sure how i feel about this novel. i feel like it was written more for the sex and intrigue than it was written to be, like, a satisfying mystery novel. there are moments where the rigid adherence to first person narration does less for the tone and pacing than third person narration would accomplish. the secret, last-minute swap around makes it.... too clean, too trite of a resolution. suddenly the one who's dead this whole time was a man that no one could stand to be around anyway? then what was the point of making it seem like it was ben the whole time? ben, whom everyone looked at with rose-tinted lenses. half the time jacques isn't even MENTIONED, let alone admired. the snippets we do get of him are disjointed, ugly vignettes of what power and money do for a man who's determined to rule with an iron fist. there's no love lost on that man's death; there was no love gained on his integration in the story. were it not for how the story is written to incorporate him at the very end, it would make no difference if he were absent throughout. no, rather, he IS absent throughout and the characters make significant effort to assure the reader that yes, this is normal. jacques is frequently absent, and the loneliness the other characters feel when he is absent is part of their everyday lives. so now he's dead. so what?
i wish the story had been more contained inside the house. there were so many different reasons that each resident should wish for ben's demise that any number of them trying, in their turns, to destroy him would have made for a more compelling ending. i truly don't feel like ben and jess should have been rewarded for how invasively they entered this family's life and how disruptively they transgressed in those spaces. and i honestly would have been fine without the entire investigation into the club. like yeah, the club was a sinister, dire place and i guess it deserved to be shut down for what it was doing to the girls that worked there. but it was intended, positionally, to contribute to jacques' overall character. and he was simply so untouched by the narrative-- hell, the destruction of his club didn't even affect him because he was already dead!-- that he entered and exited without really leaving a mark.
i don't know. i wish the servants' staircase and the dumbwaiter had been more incorporated into the plot. i wish it had been some kind of complicated "it was mimi's weapon wielded in sophie's hand after nick riled antoine up so much antoine baited sophie into acting" trajectory, where everyone was as involved as there was love lost between them and ben. it would have been... neat. tidy. not whatever the hell the rest of this book was.
anyway. i think my rating of the book overall is a 5 out of 11 now. there are so many other things that could have happened with the plot devices that had been established. and what we got instead was a sex dungeon.
