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The Walking Tour
MP3 CD Format It is the turn of this century. Two couples--businessman Bobby Rose and his artist wife Carole Ridingham, his partner Coleman Snow, and Snow's wife, Ruth Farr--have gone on a walking tour in Wales, during which a fatal accident occurs. The question of what happened preoccupies not only an ensuing negligence trial but also the narrator, Bobby and Carole's daughter. Susan lives alone in her parents' house near the coast of Maine, addressing us from a future in which property no longer shapes destiny, a position providing unusual perspective on the way we live now. Assisted by court transcripts, a notebook computer containing Ruth Farr's journal, as well as by the menacing young vagrant who's taken to camping on her doorstep, Susan ultimately lays open the moral predicament at the heart of the we are culpable beings, even though we live in a world of imperfect knowledge. By turns dazzling and dark, as dangerous and entrancing as the Welsh landscape it describes, The Walking Tour is part mystery story, part shrewd visionary meditation on the uneasy marriage of art and commerce.
264 pages, Hardcover
First published January 1, 1999
4 people are currently reading
303 people want to read
About the author
Kathryn Davis
47 books182 followersKathryn Davis is an award-winning American novelist.
Davis has taught at Skidmore College, and is now senior fiction writer in the Writing Program in Arts & Sciences at Washington University in St. Louis.
She is a recipient of the Kafka Prize, the Morton Dauwen Zabel Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters in 1999, a 2000 Guggenheim Fellowship, and a Lannan Literary Award for Fiction in 2006.
Davis lives in Montpelier, Vermont, with her husband, the novelist and essayist Eric Zencey.
Davis has taught at Skidmore College, and is now senior fiction writer in the Writing Program in Arts & Sciences at Washington University in St. Louis.
She is a recipient of the Kafka Prize, the Morton Dauwen Zabel Award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters in 1999, a 2000 Guggenheim Fellowship, and a Lannan Literary Award for Fiction in 2006.
Davis lives in Montpelier, Vermont, with her husband, the novelist and essayist Eric Zencey.
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 44 reviews
May 31, 2020
wow.
so i finished this book today and rather than start the new book i brought for the subway ride home, i just started this thing all over again.
it's really good.
that's why it astounds me that there are so many one- and two-star reviews on here. this is good stuff, guys! i was talking to tom fuller about it today, telling him how many people called this book "confusing" or "boring" or saying that they just didn't get it. and tom fuller, bless him, said "what the fuck's there not to get??"
which may be a little disingenuous.
because kathryn davis does not write like nicholas sparks, and people accustomed to reading incredibly basic and paint-by-the-numbers fiction may not be able to follow a book that doesn't read itself to you, holding your hand all the way.
pay attention.
this here's literary.
it is not difficult, but i do suggest that you pay attention when you read, which is advice you may feel free to apply to any book you read. it is respectful to the author, after all. this is not a casual beach read, but it shouldn't intimidate anyone.
she is a gorgeous writer.
oh, that's good...
her mental condition is schizophrenia, and her character is a brilliant, larger-than-life artist whose daughter (probably unreliably, considering genetics) narrates this story which splits into many facets and tells the story of a walking tour gone wrong; relying upon court testimony, a diary, and memory, which necessarily will be full of gaps and deliberate omissions.
this is the third book i have read from her, and i love the way she blends realism with fantasy and keeps the reader guessing. she is masterful, and this book is so much better than the ratings on here would suggest.
will you read it?
come to my blog!
so i finished this book today and rather than start the new book i brought for the subway ride home, i just started this thing all over again.
it's really good.
that's why it astounds me that there are so many one- and two-star reviews on here. this is good stuff, guys! i was talking to tom fuller about it today, telling him how many people called this book "confusing" or "boring" or saying that they just didn't get it. and tom fuller, bless him, said "what the fuck's there not to get??"
which may be a little disingenuous.
because kathryn davis does not write like nicholas sparks, and people accustomed to reading incredibly basic and paint-by-the-numbers fiction may not be able to follow a book that doesn't read itself to you, holding your hand all the way.
pay attention.
this here's literary.
it is not difficult, but i do suggest that you pay attention when you read, which is advice you may feel free to apply to any book you read. it is respectful to the author, after all. this is not a casual beach read, but it shouldn't intimidate anyone.
she is a gorgeous writer.
They were so young: he'd just finished his junior year at Princeton; if all went well she was going to begin Cooper Union in the fall. Afterward he told her he was majoring in economics and planning to do graduate work at the Wharton School. He didn't tell her he'd almost flunked out of Princeton, because he knew he was destined for success and the information would be misleading. She told him she'd gotten the only perfect score in the history of Cooper Union on the entrance test where you guessed how many blocks of a variety of sizes went into making a variety of structures of which you could see, say, only part of a side. She didn't tell him about her mental condition, figuring he'd either deduce it for himself (from the information about the blocks) or else didn't care about such things. In this way they set the tone for all subsequent pillow talk: suppression disguised as candor.
oh, that's good...
her mental condition is schizophrenia, and her character is a brilliant, larger-than-life artist whose daughter (probably unreliably, considering genetics) narrates this story which splits into many facets and tells the story of a walking tour gone wrong; relying upon court testimony, a diary, and memory, which necessarily will be full of gaps and deliberate omissions.
this is the third book i have read from her, and i love the way she blends realism with fantasy and keeps the reader guessing. she is masterful, and this book is so much better than the ratings on here would suggest.
will you read it?
come to my blog!
June 16, 2013
Wretched, pretentious, nattering prose. The story is narrated by the adult daughter of a couple who, years earlier, took a walking tour in Wales with another married couple, friends and business partners, but there was rivalry and unhappiness involved. On the walking tour a "fatal accident" occurs. We're not told right away who died or how. The reader tries to piece together what happened from the court transcripts of the wrongful death suit, the mother's dingbatty letters to her daughter, the mother's friend's computer diary; at the same time, the daughter narrates the odd tale of her current life and her weird associates. I kept reading, even though I cared nought for a single soul in the tale, out of the most miniscule curiosity. My persistence was not rewarded. I will stay away from this author's works in the future.
May 7, 2008
I finally finished. Technically, it has taken me 4 years to read it. I purchased this book for a college literature class, and it was the only book we did not get to. Based on how much I liked my professor's other choices, I thought i would really like this book too. Over the last few years I intermitterntly started reading it, but it was difficult to get into, and I would get bored and pick up something else. I finally forced myself to finish it. I did not like it.
Maybe I was missing the dialogue of my professor, or the exchange of ideas in class, but I just could not get interested in this story. The character development was overwrought and pointless, and there were so many unnecessary components in the novel. I felt like most parts of the book were left incomplete. I didn't find anything to tie it all together at the end.
I certainly marked passages where I liked the wording of the author, as I usually do when i read, but I certianly wouldn't pick this book up again, or recommend it to a friend.
Maybe I was missing the dialogue of my professor, or the exchange of ideas in class, but I just could not get interested in this story. The character development was overwrought and pointless, and there were so many unnecessary components in the novel. I felt like most parts of the book were left incomplete. I didn't find anything to tie it all together at the end.
I certainly marked passages where I liked the wording of the author, as I usually do when i read, but I certianly wouldn't pick this book up again, or recommend it to a friend.
September 19, 2012
“As in real life, it isn’t always easy to keep the couples straight…” This line comes from Kathryn Davis’ The Walking Tour, but it could just as easily have been written about the book. The novel is a highly-complex, tightly-woven narrative blending ancient Celtic mythology and post-apocalyptic science fiction with a more conventional contemporary tale of love, jealously and betrayal among a group of tourists. Davis’ work is highly ambitious, blurring the lines of time and reality, and often forcing the reader to go back and re-read the last few pages to understand what is going on. The interweaving narratives are similar to those in Michael Cunningham’s The Hours, which was published around the same time. The Walking Tour is not quite as elegantly constructed, but it gives the reader the same sense of satisfaction derived from working through a challenging and imaginative text.
The main narrative thrust of The Walking Tour describes two American couples that travel to Wales to go on a walking tour. Bobby Rose and Coleman Snow are business partners who have created a sort of super-Wikipedia program that allows users to modify any computer file. Their company is called SnowWrite & RoseRead and it is ''a business built on the idea that no one owns anything, especially not an idea, while simultaneously gobbling other companies up.” Bobby is the businessman of the partnership, a handsome and self-assured philanderer, while Coleman is more of a computer geek. The two men, although friends, are mistrustful of and insecure towards one another. Similarly, their wives share an equally dysfunctional friendship; they were childhood playmates that subsequently grew apart only to find themselves thrust back together when their husbands hatched a wildly-ambitious business plan after being snowed in at a tavern. Bobby’s wife, Carole Ridingham, is a famous painter who is also a “borderline schizophrenic.” Coleman’s wife, Ruth Farr, is a writer who suffers bouts of mythological hallucination and is jealous of both Carole’s success and Coleman’s infatuation with her. The quartet is joined by a group of international tourists who are rather difficult to keep straight, including an Asian businessman deliciously named George Bernard Hsia, with designs on SnowWrite & RoseRead. Throughout the tour, the characters threaten each other with sexual and financial betrayal before it culminates in a fatal accident.
The book’s narrator is Susan, the daughter of Bobby and Carole, who dwells in the future where the program invented by Bobby and Coleman seems to have wrought global chaos. Susan is attempting to reconstruct the events leading up to the mysterious accident based on court transcripts, postcards from Carole, and Ruth’s diary, which she kept on her laptop. These documents not only help Susan understand the accident, but also give her a glimpse into the world of rivalry, infidelity and intrigue in which her parents lived. Susan is aided by Monkey, a drug-addled cyberpunk who is more than he seems. He belongs to a group of illiterate anarchists, the Strags, who have used the program created by Bobby and Coleman to collapse the early Twenty-first Century economic system that spawned it. With Monkey’s help, Susan is able to recreate the events leading up to the death in Wales, but the reader gets the sense that truth is relative, and Susan’s version is just as suspect as everyone else’s.
So the novel exists simultaneously in the present, with the American travelers making their way through Wales, and in the future, with Susan and Monkey trying to put it all together from the vantage point of history. But the novel also exists in the mythic past. It is permeated with references to the Mabinogion, a collection of Welsh Celtic legends, which gives the novel a rather timeless feel. Davis tells a story not only of e-commerce, computer viruses, and modern infidelity, but also a tale of ageless fairies and intergenerational magic spells.
When one pulls away all of the Celtic imagery and temporal blending, the story is essentially a murder mystery. Just like in a classic whodunit, there is a group of eccentric individuals away from home, many of whom have a motivation to kill. Susan gathers the evidence piece by piece throughout the novel, each time bringing the reader a little closer to understanding what happened, but also leaving the real truth tantalizingly out of reach. In the end, Davis more or less answers the question of what happened that day on the Gower Peninsula. What is less clear, however, is how did these events lead to the dystopic future in which Susan and Monkey dwell? This is a somewhat more interesting question, and leaving it unanswered creates a chasm between the adventures of the idle rich documented in the present and the uncivilized world described in the future. We know the two are connected, but are left only with the vague notion that the accident may have somehow let SnowWrite & RoseRed’s technology slip into the wrong hands with disastrous effect.
Stylistically Davis succeeds at blending a number of different perspectives and voices into Susan’s narration through her efforts as an amateur historian. Susan speaks in present tense when discussing the future and past tense when explaining past events, which makes the narrative jumps easy to follow. She also includes the words of her subjects whenever possible. For example, some chapters consist solely of postcards written in shorthand by Caroline to her daughter describing their adventures with lines simultaneously poetic and vacuous, such as “boringness of hiking like underpainting, climbing steep rocky slippery hills thru darksome chattery woods yr soul’s ears can barely stand so active & suggestive of how yr doomed to fail & then all of a sudden beautiful valleys lay selves adoringly at yr feet.” Some of the most entertaining moments in the book are trial transcript excerpts in which the free-spirited characters spar with the stodgier attorneys. The following exchange was particularly humorous:
ROBERT ROSE: …Coleman always said that as far as the business was concerned, he was the conscience and I was the balls.
COUNSEL FOR THE DEFENSE: Would you describe the company’s financial holdings as having been divided with similar equity between yourself and Mr. Snow?
…
ROBERT ROSE: Okay. But wouldn’t that depend on the relative weight you attribute to conscience and balls?
COUNSEL FOR THE DEFENSE: Say they’re equal.
ROBERT ROSE: Then, yes.
Similarly, the devious Mr. Hsia, who speaks perfect English throughout the novel, adopts a non-threatening, stereotypical persona on the witness stand, testifying, “Confucious say, in business and in Buddhism, absolute purity required. Mr. Snow and I see eye to eye from start. Very well named, Mr. Snow. Velly.” Susan also presents Strag culture through the prophetic gibberish spouted by Monkey, like “Nothing could change you, because ‘you’ was all one thing.” Of some irritation is the use of the phrase “could care less” by multiple characters, which suggests the error belongs to the otherwise erudite author, rather than to her characters.
In all, the novel is startlingly original and ambitious. Davis’ use of time as an important element of the novel echoes The Sound and the Fury, and is nearly as skillfully done. She challenges our notions of both chronology and reality without sacrificing good storytelling. She draws vivid characters who are alternately pitiable, loathsome and sympathetic. The novel’s complexity begs a second reading, although just as Susan’s investigation raised as many questions as it answered, closer study of The Walking Tour unleashes even more of its mysteries.
The main narrative thrust of The Walking Tour describes two American couples that travel to Wales to go on a walking tour. Bobby Rose and Coleman Snow are business partners who have created a sort of super-Wikipedia program that allows users to modify any computer file. Their company is called SnowWrite & RoseRead and it is ''a business built on the idea that no one owns anything, especially not an idea, while simultaneously gobbling other companies up.” Bobby is the businessman of the partnership, a handsome and self-assured philanderer, while Coleman is more of a computer geek. The two men, although friends, are mistrustful of and insecure towards one another. Similarly, their wives share an equally dysfunctional friendship; they were childhood playmates that subsequently grew apart only to find themselves thrust back together when their husbands hatched a wildly-ambitious business plan after being snowed in at a tavern. Bobby’s wife, Carole Ridingham, is a famous painter who is also a “borderline schizophrenic.” Coleman’s wife, Ruth Farr, is a writer who suffers bouts of mythological hallucination and is jealous of both Carole’s success and Coleman’s infatuation with her. The quartet is joined by a group of international tourists who are rather difficult to keep straight, including an Asian businessman deliciously named George Bernard Hsia, with designs on SnowWrite & RoseRead. Throughout the tour, the characters threaten each other with sexual and financial betrayal before it culminates in a fatal accident.
The book’s narrator is Susan, the daughter of Bobby and Carole, who dwells in the future where the program invented by Bobby and Coleman seems to have wrought global chaos. Susan is attempting to reconstruct the events leading up to the mysterious accident based on court transcripts, postcards from Carole, and Ruth’s diary, which she kept on her laptop. These documents not only help Susan understand the accident, but also give her a glimpse into the world of rivalry, infidelity and intrigue in which her parents lived. Susan is aided by Monkey, a drug-addled cyberpunk who is more than he seems. He belongs to a group of illiterate anarchists, the Strags, who have used the program created by Bobby and Coleman to collapse the early Twenty-first Century economic system that spawned it. With Monkey’s help, Susan is able to recreate the events leading up to the death in Wales, but the reader gets the sense that truth is relative, and Susan’s version is just as suspect as everyone else’s.
So the novel exists simultaneously in the present, with the American travelers making their way through Wales, and in the future, with Susan and Monkey trying to put it all together from the vantage point of history. But the novel also exists in the mythic past. It is permeated with references to the Mabinogion, a collection of Welsh Celtic legends, which gives the novel a rather timeless feel. Davis tells a story not only of e-commerce, computer viruses, and modern infidelity, but also a tale of ageless fairies and intergenerational magic spells.
When one pulls away all of the Celtic imagery and temporal blending, the story is essentially a murder mystery. Just like in a classic whodunit, there is a group of eccentric individuals away from home, many of whom have a motivation to kill. Susan gathers the evidence piece by piece throughout the novel, each time bringing the reader a little closer to understanding what happened, but also leaving the real truth tantalizingly out of reach. In the end, Davis more or less answers the question of what happened that day on the Gower Peninsula. What is less clear, however, is how did these events lead to the dystopic future in which Susan and Monkey dwell? This is a somewhat more interesting question, and leaving it unanswered creates a chasm between the adventures of the idle rich documented in the present and the uncivilized world described in the future. We know the two are connected, but are left only with the vague notion that the accident may have somehow let SnowWrite & RoseRed’s technology slip into the wrong hands with disastrous effect.
Stylistically Davis succeeds at blending a number of different perspectives and voices into Susan’s narration through her efforts as an amateur historian. Susan speaks in present tense when discussing the future and past tense when explaining past events, which makes the narrative jumps easy to follow. She also includes the words of her subjects whenever possible. For example, some chapters consist solely of postcards written in shorthand by Caroline to her daughter describing their adventures with lines simultaneously poetic and vacuous, such as “boringness of hiking like underpainting, climbing steep rocky slippery hills thru darksome chattery woods yr soul’s ears can barely stand so active & suggestive of how yr doomed to fail & then all of a sudden beautiful valleys lay selves adoringly at yr feet.” Some of the most entertaining moments in the book are trial transcript excerpts in which the free-spirited characters spar with the stodgier attorneys. The following exchange was particularly humorous:
ROBERT ROSE: …Coleman always said that as far as the business was concerned, he was the conscience and I was the balls.
COUNSEL FOR THE DEFENSE: Would you describe the company’s financial holdings as having been divided with similar equity between yourself and Mr. Snow?
…
ROBERT ROSE: Okay. But wouldn’t that depend on the relative weight you attribute to conscience and balls?
COUNSEL FOR THE DEFENSE: Say they’re equal.
ROBERT ROSE: Then, yes.
Similarly, the devious Mr. Hsia, who speaks perfect English throughout the novel, adopts a non-threatening, stereotypical persona on the witness stand, testifying, “Confucious say, in business and in Buddhism, absolute purity required. Mr. Snow and I see eye to eye from start. Very well named, Mr. Snow. Velly.” Susan also presents Strag culture through the prophetic gibberish spouted by Monkey, like “Nothing could change you, because ‘you’ was all one thing.” Of some irritation is the use of the phrase “could care less” by multiple characters, which suggests the error belongs to the otherwise erudite author, rather than to her characters.
In all, the novel is startlingly original and ambitious. Davis’ use of time as an important element of the novel echoes The Sound and the Fury, and is nearly as skillfully done. She challenges our notions of both chronology and reality without sacrificing good storytelling. She draws vivid characters who are alternately pitiable, loathsome and sympathetic. The novel’s complexity begs a second reading, although just as Susan’s investigation raised as many questions as it answered, closer study of The Walking Tour unleashes even more of its mysteries.
This entire review has been hidden because of spoilers.
April 11, 2021
"Of course you only romanticize ruin when you don't have to live with it."
As with all of Davis' books, there are stories within stories within stories, a looking glass hole that is never either fully explained or resolved. It's hard to keep track of time and place, but this is writeen as a memoir, and memory plays tricks like that.
The motivations and interior lives of all the characters are mysterious. Their actions make no logical sense. The pieces of the puzzle will never fit; there will always be crucial parts missing. This can also be said of both remembering and life as it is actually lived. We fill in what's missing as best we can in order to function, but it's always a construct, "because that's the way we live these days, in an endless state of cause without effect, which is to say endlessly waiting, waiting, waiting.
Particularly apt for these pandemic times, Davis' writing is, as always, worth reading just for how she paints her worlds with words.
As with all of Davis' books, there are stories within stories within stories, a looking glass hole that is never either fully explained or resolved. It's hard to keep track of time and place, but this is writeen as a memoir, and memory plays tricks like that.
The motivations and interior lives of all the characters are mysterious. Their actions make no logical sense. The pieces of the puzzle will never fit; there will always be crucial parts missing. This can also be said of both remembering and life as it is actually lived. We fill in what's missing as best we can in order to function, but it's always a construct, "because that's the way we live these days, in an endless state of cause without effect, which is to say endlessly waiting, waiting, waiting.
Particularly apt for these pandemic times, Davis' writing is, as always, worth reading just for how she paints her worlds with words.
June 5, 2020
Kathryn Davis has a much less optimistic sense of tragedy than Ann Patchett, but she’s just as relentless in pursuing it to its logical, and even illogical, conclusions. It turns out this is the second time I’ve read this book – in the past couple of decades since it was published – and I’m just as mystified by it now as I was when I read it almost twenty years ago. And that’s probably intentional. The extended metaphor here is that of the walking tour, one which, step by inexorable step, leads to the death that we know must take place, will take place, that forms the conclusion, if not of the novel, at least of the walking tour through rainy, magical Wales. The tour is taken by a famous painter – Davis’s descriptions of her paintings is one of the delights of the book – her philandering husband, her jealous best friend, and her rather nice husband as well as a cast of characters that takes on more sinister, and funnier, over and undertones the closer the crime/tragedy comes to taking place. Left behind is the artist’s beloved young daughter. At least, she believes herself to be beloved, for a time.
But Davis would never be satisfied by the linear, pedestrian, inert plotting that such a summary implies. This walking tour takes place through a mythical land still in habited in some way by ancient Welsh kings and the stories about them. This provides opportunities for mystification that are quite pleasurable. It does hint at solutions to the mystery of the murder/suicide/strange disappearance, but never really invests in anything but the mystery. To resolve it would be too mundane for Davis. In fact, she manages to shed doubt on its ever having taken place. Strangest of all, this walking tour extends itself into a future that is both post-apocalyptic and terribly sad.
January 5, 2008
Maybe five stars? I loved The Thin Place as well. She seems to only tell stories in completely extraordinary ways. I can't wait to get to the rest of her books. This is about 2 couples on a walking tour, a bunch of shit that may or may not have happened, and an unreliable narrator years later piecing it all together, who may be losing her mind in this weird scary fucked up future. There's also some Welsh myth stuff. One thing bothered me - there was this Asian character who seemed to be written all fucked up and racist, but I guess that was supposed to just reflect the retarded impressions of everyone else in the book?
June 30, 2009
I'm not quite finished with this book (maybe 30 pages left) and I'm trying to decide whether or not I care enough to finish it. The author gives you an inkling of what happens, but doesn't actually give you the full information until almost 200 pages in. At that point I was just reading to satisfy my own need to know I was right and experiencing a growing sense of aggravation with the storyteller. Also, there are two parallel stories, one of which has the mystery. In the other, I feel like there is too much just dropped in and unexplained to have any satisfaction or enjoyment with the story.
December 6, 2013
Interesting story, though told in a way I didn't expect, and in a way that kind of ruined it for me. It wasn't until the end that I even had a better idea of what was going on. The "fantastical" parts really didn't work in this story. They confused everything, annoyed me and didn't add anything to the story as far as I'm concerned. I really wanted to like this, I liked the idea of it but in the end it was a big disappointment.
April 10, 2009
I begin with the modest aim of writing a nice review of Davis's very nice book, but I find my intentions and memories of the book--and particularly my belief that I've understood Davis's aims--riddled with uncertainties. Which is, I think, how Davis would have it--so I'll leave it at that. A pleasure, and a puzzle.
January 4, 2012
While Davis is a smart and interesting writer, I never learned to love this book. Who knows, one day down the road I may give it another try.
February 12, 2020
Abandoned after 130 pages. Mostly nonsensical to me..especially the monkey character. Pretentious and boring...
June 1, 2024
Bees, Wales, and mental illness!
The reading experience of this book was absolutely delightful. The indirect first-person narration coupled with the feeling of putting together a puzzle reminded me of House of Leaves and The Glassbead Game, two books I am quite fond of.
The number of negative reviews on Goodreads surprises me, especially the number calling the prose pretentious. Like, I've been accused of pretention too so maybe I'm not the best person to weigh in, but like, read literally any Modernist and you'll find prose higher on the pretention meter. I found the prose extremely smooth, but more importantly, believable for the set of characters that the prose gives voice to.
They are characters that are not exactly likeable, but certainly real. I began to love them. Her use of Welsh myth is good and original. The pastiche of prose-types--poems, letters, etc. and also genres--murder mystery, gothic, magical realism, etc. kept my ADHD happy.
My three gripes keeping this from 5-stars were 1) the one PoC character drew on stereotypes in a way that made me roll my eyes (damn, opportunistic Chinese businessman who quotes Confuscius...Kathryn you can do better), 2) the product of the business Bobby and Coleman had devised wasn't particularly believable, 3) the ending was underwhelming in porportion to the rest of the novel. Davis could have cut the last chapter and lost nothing.
The reading experience of this book was absolutely delightful. The indirect first-person narration coupled with the feeling of putting together a puzzle reminded me of House of Leaves and The Glassbead Game, two books I am quite fond of.
The number of negative reviews on Goodreads surprises me, especially the number calling the prose pretentious. Like, I've been accused of pretention too so maybe I'm not the best person to weigh in, but like, read literally any Modernist and you'll find prose higher on the pretention meter. I found the prose extremely smooth, but more importantly, believable for the set of characters that the prose gives voice to.
They are characters that are not exactly likeable, but certainly real. I began to love them. Her use of Welsh myth is good and original. The pastiche of prose-types--poems, letters, etc. and also genres--murder mystery, gothic, magical realism, etc. kept my ADHD happy.
My three gripes keeping this from 5-stars were 1) the one PoC character drew on stereotypes in a way that made me roll my eyes (damn, opportunistic Chinese businessman who quotes Confuscius...Kathryn you can do better), 2) the product of the business Bobby and Coleman had devised wasn't particularly believable, 3) the ending was underwhelming in porportion to the rest of the novel. Davis could have cut the last chapter and lost nothing.
March 5, 2019
I'm not really sure how to rate this book. On the one hand, it's interesting enough that it probably deserves more than 3 stars, on the other hand, it is very hard _work_ to put together everything that's going on and keep track.
I settled on a slightly lower rating, because I don't think I'm intrigued enough to go back and read it again. I remember when I finished "Infinite Jest," I said WTF, and immediately turned back to the first page. With "The Walking Tour" I just thought, "OK," and that I'd had enough.
It did mostly hold my attention, though with bouts of frustration. Both from the opacity of the story and the writing style which started out seeming overly arch, and veered into the obscure. But the fragments of myth, allusions, and plot did keep me reading.
I settled on a slightly lower rating, because I don't think I'm intrigued enough to go back and read it again. I remember when I finished "Infinite Jest," I said WTF, and immediately turned back to the first page. With "The Walking Tour" I just thought, "OK," and that I'd had enough.
It did mostly hold my attention, though with bouts of frustration. Both from the opacity of the story and the writing style which started out seeming overly arch, and veered into the obscure. But the fragments of myth, allusions, and plot did keep me reading.
June 9, 2018
I LOVED Kathryn Davis' book "The Thin Place," but I've had no luck with her other novels. Like "Hell" and "Versailles," this account of two married couples -- "frenemies," whose shared business interests and similar lifestyles seem to dictate that they socialize and call themselves friends, in spite of the fact that they all hate each other --on a walking tour of mystical/historical sites in Wales seems unfocused, a hodge-podge of bits (diary entries, postcards, random poems and memories) that probably seemed very clever to someone, but to me seemed trying to force tension from a wafer-thin plot, and depth to dull, annoying characters.
August 18, 2018
Davis has a very unique "voice" and it took me a 100 pages to read without interrupting to question what the prior sentence really meant. The story is interlaced with numerous literary and linguistic references that don't always contribute to moving the story along.
That said, the characters were incredibly well-drawn, idiosyncratic and compelling.
It sometimes felt like a fantasy, then really earthy.
Davis may be an acquired taste but I felt it was really worthwhile to struggle through the earlier pages to deeply enjoy the ultimate story.
That said, the characters were incredibly well-drawn, idiosyncratic and compelling.
It sometimes felt like a fantasy, then really earthy.
Davis may be an acquired taste but I felt it was really worthwhile to struggle through the earlier pages to deeply enjoy the ultimate story.
July 23, 2019
I got to page 75 and gave up. Then I read a few reviews....many two-star reviews. The four-star reviews praising this book convinced me even further, from their description of how the book unfolds, that I would not have liked this book. Glad I didn't waste my time.
December 20, 2025
Too deep for me.
July 27, 2015
I am a huge Davis fan. But I'm stuck, in my mind, comparing her books to one another (admittedly unfair as that is) and I find this one coming up a little short. Before I'm blasted in the comments section: this has nothing to do with my "idiocy" or "beach-reading mentality." I just don't find this as engaging as, say, DUPLEX or THE THIN PLACE. I attribute this mostly to the lack of character development, and there is no one in the book with whom I can identify or for whom I can root. That is hugely detrimental, given the kaleidoscopic telling of the mysteries here, relying heavily on multiple voices -- none of which I care about. In the other works, there was always someone to root for.
Structurally, I'm fascinated: two story lines going on, 30 years apart, comprised of first person narration, epistolary confessionals, poems, fairy tales, folklore and broken memories...the past sets up RoseRead & SnowWrite, technology affording the ability to insert one's self into the works of any author. As these things usually go, the technology brings about cataclysm: two murders, for sure, and just as much global pandemonium.
And in that pandemonium, Susan and Monkey set about inserting themselves back into the narrative of her parents, as if these remnants serve as a new Bible of sorts. All that remains in global catastrophe are the petty quibbles of bourgeois white people, reordered and replayed to what end? If "everyone suffering from anxiety, which makes them anticipate the future with fear and trembling; or from depression, which makes them refuse to believe it exists," what does that leave for the characters in the future part of the story?
And ultimately, is that REALLY the story? Or has Susan succumbed to her mother's mental illness, too? Or is mental illness so much background noise, the ads and social media hooha that clog up the senses? I'm more inclined to believe that her obsessive desire to pour over every detail, concocting the story in infinite ways, inserting herself into it, might mean Susan is not 100% all there. But then again, who ever is?
Structurally, I'm fascinated: two story lines going on, 30 years apart, comprised of first person narration, epistolary confessionals, poems, fairy tales, folklore and broken memories...the past sets up RoseRead & SnowWrite, technology affording the ability to insert one's self into the works of any author. As these things usually go, the technology brings about cataclysm: two murders, for sure, and just as much global pandemonium.
And in that pandemonium, Susan and Monkey set about inserting themselves back into the narrative of her parents, as if these remnants serve as a new Bible of sorts. All that remains in global catastrophe are the petty quibbles of bourgeois white people, reordered and replayed to what end? If "everyone suffering from anxiety, which makes them anticipate the future with fear and trembling; or from depression, which makes them refuse to believe it exists," what does that leave for the characters in the future part of the story?
And ultimately, is that REALLY the story? Or has Susan succumbed to her mother's mental illness, too? Or is mental illness so much background noise, the ads and social media hooha that clog up the senses? I'm more inclined to believe that her obsessive desire to pour over every detail, concocting the story in infinite ways, inserting herself into it, might mean Susan is not 100% all there. But then again, who ever is?
July 21, 2009
i loved this book even when i started to question it because i believed there was an "aha" coming, but it never came. now i am at the end and can't figure out if i'm not as keen as i thought and missed something, or if my preconceived expectations led me astray. davis is always alluding to references that go right over my head, though, so maybe the clue i needed was in the tale of Manawydan. anybody know this welsh hero guy? i'd love to get the scoop.
January 15, 2010
When I finished the book I was maybe less clear on what it was about than when I was halfway through--and yet, I continued to be completely intrigued by the characters and settings and how much was real and how much wasn't. Clearly not everyone's cup of tea (most people in my book group were put off by the unclear ending, and, I think, felt it was overly experimental, more of a writing exercise).
July 27, 2016
I promised myself I was going to get through this even though I hated it from the very beginning, but I just could not do it. 60 pages in, I couldn't take another second. I read an average of around 100 books per year, so to say something is among the worst books I've ever read is quite a statement, but this definitely falls firmly into that category. The writing is all over the place, the grammar is terrible, and there was not a single redeeming quality.
June 18, 2008
The writing style was at time intriguing and at times off putting. I couldn't wait to finish the book this afternoon, i had been enjoying the story and was looking forward to it coming together. But I was left with a "huh" feeling that other reviews have mentioned and feeling like i missed something major. Enjoyed it enough to try another book by the same author...
May 17, 2011
When reading Kathryn Davis's novels--this is the second I've encountered--I always feel a bit dazed. The writing is gorgeous and I sometimes sense a little bit of Virginia Woolf, but as much as I wanted to love this book, I see that's taken me two weeks to finish a relatively short novel...and that should tell me something.
Read
February 5, 2017If I was going only on personal taste and you could do half stars I'd give it a 3.5. Beautifully written, puzzling, messy, intriguing, insightful, disorienting, unfinished, uncommitted, frustrating -- a little convoluted for my taste. The woman can write. Not a book for everyone, not always an easy read, but beautifully written. Personally I wish it had stayed with the walking tour.
February 15, 2014
I had to force myself to get through it. I figured the critics couldn't be that wrong, so I persevered. I finished it and I still didn't like it or enjoy it. Neither did I like the characters. It was boring and I couldn't make myself care about the characters very much. They didn't seem at all real to me.
December 2, 2007
Sort of pretentious writing style, but interesting enough the keep reading...right up to the disappointing ending. Leaves you with a "huh?" feeling. Or maybe I just wasn't interested enough by the end to get it?
April 17, 2008
I enjoyed The Thin Place more, but this had a much more experimental storytelling aspect; the whole thing kind of comes across as a painting viewed with smudgy glasses. You never get an entirely clear picture, which is totally frustrating sometimes, but I think that was more or less the point.
July 8, 2011
This book is surprising. It combines two seemingly disparate genres in an interesting way. It's one of those books where you have to let go of needing final clarity on exactly what happened. Everything is open to interpretation.
August 10, 2016
picked this up cause it was to be about a walking tour in Wales. this had to be the worst book I have ever read, except for the sparse references to the Welsh walk. read the entire book and it was awful, even the ending left you hanging, don't know why they wasted paper and ink in printing it
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