The Death of All Things Seen

by Michael Collins

From Booker-shortlisted Irish author, two families living the dream in small town America are forced to confront their guilty secrets in the aftermath of a shocking death.

This is just after the financial crash – people are beginning to discover the depth of the mess and all of a sudden the American dream is beginning to look tawdry. Michael Collins’s bravura novel begins with a spectacular death on a highway as a woman choses to drive off a bridge into a lake rather than face the reality of a recent cancer diagnosis.

It soon emerges that the cancer diagnosis is not the only secret the woman has been hiding. When her husband dies soon after, the real nature of an apparently happy marriage is inexorably exposed, adultery, lies, corruption, the list goes on, and the couple’s son Norman has to somehow make sense of it all.

Norman finds the life he has carefully constructed for himself decompose, and in the process mirrors the need for realignment that the greater world also has to face. He makes the unexpected discovery of the real treasures of life; in Norman’s case, love, and a brother he never imagined existed.

Genres: Fiction

400 pages, Hardcover

Published July 14, 2016

About the author

Librarian Note: There is more than one author in the GoodReads database with this name. See this thread for more information.
(1)Irish Novelist

Michael Collins was born in 1964. He was educated in Belfast, Dublin and Chicago. His short stories have been awarded the Hennessy/Sunday Tribune Award in Ireland and the Pushcart Prize in America.

Reviews

[Ian Mapp · Rating 1 out of 5]

Gosh - 2.45 Stars average score on GR - this might be the lowest I have seen and mine is hardly going to help things.

Abandoned at Page 130.

I've love Michael Collins other work - and had a spate of reading him frequently around 2012. He became something of a forgotten author for me - and seeing my old reviews, I decided to seek him out again.

This simply failed to grab my attention in any way. I lost my way with the characters totally and there seemed to be little plot or activity.

I very rarely abandon books with no pleasure being gained and the pages just turning without comprehension, I gave up.

[Kathryn Blyth · Rating 1 out of 5]

The book just didn't grab my attention. The characters didn't resonate.

[Shawn · Rating 4 out of 5]

Mr. Collins is a serious & wise writer of beautifully composed prose. I always am interested when he has a new book out as they are too few and far between, as he is unfashionable in a world in which the most infantile of juvenilia is praised as great fiction.

Not a thriller or mystery, nor a comedic romp. Just a story.

The lives of a group of disparate characters interconnect in the modern world. Everyone has secrets that they feel make them fragile. Yet perhaps you are stronger than your secrets.

PLEASE NOTE: Though mostly a good read I do WARN that there is one chapter featuring a disturbing and graphic paedophilic rape.

[Emily · Rating 2 out of 5]

I feel that I was not in the intended audience while reading this book.

The characters did not compell me to read further, and I found the happenings and themes within the book to be quite depressing.

Writing was good, though. If a little floaty and confusing. As I said, I don't think I was the kind of person this book was intended for.

[Caroline · Rating 4 out of 5]

Great storytelling! You feel more than just reading the life of the two main characters here, you have an insight of what life means rather. There are so many great quotations in this book.

[Mar Mar · Rating 1 out of 5]

Such a boring book! The sentences are, for no reason, long and confusing, to the point that sometimes I had to reread them to remember what he initially wanted to say.

[David Gagen · Rating 3 out of 5]

After quite a pedestrian start, the novel gathers momentum in the 2nd half. However, at no stage do I actually care for most of these characters. They are always at a distance as chapters jump between various characters and places. We never stay long enough to get an emotional connection with them. Nevertheless, this is an ambitious work covering many themes and the author is a very accomplished writer. There are many pages where I marvelled at the language. The problem is there is too much going on, the book cant decide what it wants to be. There are too many incidental characters hovering around. I would have preferred if the novel centred on the only really interesting character here, Nate, dealing with his past, exiled in Canada after the Vietnam war, returning to the US to deal with family matters, after the loss of his beloved Ursula, a First Nation's perspective an interesting part of the story. This needed to be at the heart of the story, in my opinion, rather than what ended up as the story of Norman Price and his existential journey, with assorted hangers on. An extra half star for the wonderful language and insightful observations along the way.

[Hal the Faerie · Rating 1 out of 5]

If I could give it 0 stars, I definitely would. I think maybe (and this is a very very generous maybe) I might have enjoyed this book if I was older. It’s focused on the financial crisis, and how it impacts people etc, and the characters and their stories/affairs😳 all intertwine, which I guess is interesting. But the plot itself, was dry. I didn’t enjoy it, and I’m wondering if this even deserves space in my physical book journal. I finished the book but couldn’t tell you what happened, I was certainly distracted reading this, and that’s all because of how dull it was. I’m just glad it’s over.

[Indi Smith · Rating 1 out of 5]

The story is all over the place. The author tries to go into depth as each character talks about their past but it’s just tortuous to read. I couldn’t connect with a single character. There was no logic to each of their deep depression and behavior towards life and each other. I kept going in the hope the story would get better. It never did. If you like hearing random accounts of people who are miserable about everything in life, with no coherent storyline this may be the book for you.

[rachel whitelaw · Rating 1 out of 5]

Just could not get into this at all. Read about 50 pages and that was it. Couldn’t relate to the characters at all, not likeable at all. Really wanted to read this book but too much like hard work- couldn’t follow the plot at all!!

[Brenda · Rating 1 out of 5]

The book is hard to get to grips with. It jumps all over the place and the characters lack depth. I waded through until page 177 and gave up.

[Elite Group · Rating 3 out of 5]

THE DEATH OF ALL THINGS SEEN MICHAEL COLLINS
3 STARS
A book of complex relationships

Some books pick you up and immerse you in the plot, ready to be carried along at breakneck speed. This is not one of those books.

Some books have large conversational passages between the various characters. Again, this is not one of those books.

What this book is, is a well-crafted and deeply thoughtful insight into the lives and minds of the two main characters; Norman Price and Nate Feldman.

These two men lead separate live. One in Chicago and the other on Canada, where he fled to avoid the Viet-Nam draft in the 1960s. One is a highly successful entrepreneur and one is a playwright. They have nothing in common, but something is linking them to their past. Slowly, the book brings them together.

The author veers off in many tangents, exploring the people connected to these men. All the time he is building the scene towards the final climax.

I didn’t find this an easy book to read and, because of these tangents, it needs concentration. This is neither a thriller nor a mystery book but rather a tale of lives and relationships being laid bare.

Try as I might, by the end of the book I just couldn’t see where the title of the book came from. Maybe it was just me, but I do like to link the title with the plotline.

To sum up, the characters were believable; the storyline credible; the difficulty in reading the book was not insurmountable.

Mr Bumblebee


Breakaway Reviewers received a copy of the book to review.

[Siu Jane · Rating 2 out of 5]

Started off well. There were a few "un-necessary" characters that didn't add anything to the story.