Tuesday, May 14, 2013

Rules of Civility

Just polished off Rules of Civility by Amor Towles. I started reading it on a Monday afternoon (was it at the hairdressers?) and am now done with it on the wee hours of Wednesday morning. Towles' prose is beautifully understated - the whole show not tell thing done to perfection. His style reminds me almost of Kazuo Ishiguro in a way. I really liked how although majority of the story is done from a first person perspective, we are never actually told what the narrator is thinking, but instead simply how she reacts and responds.

When I first started reading it I thought it was simply a story about a girl who had to stand in the sidelines while her best friend wheeled in the man she loved, but the story is so much more than that, and brings up little nuggets of things to think about. It is is more about a year in the life of a girl in her prime, and the varied things that happen. I think this will definitely be one of the highlight reads of the year.

"And at the same time, I know that right choices by definition are the means by which life crystallises loss."

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