Mike Finn’s Reviews > A Dram of Poison > Status Update
Mike Finn
is 37% done
Like Gibson himself, the prose keeps emotions at arms length, denying them a voice, while letting the imagination see clearly how circumstances have changed, dreams have been lost and bleak futures ushered in.
I hadn't liked Gibson much when he was in rescue mode. Now I feel sorry for him as he starts to see himself becoming an old cripple leading a life he didn't choose and harbouring resentments he can't voice.
— Oct 03, 2024 01:03AM
I hadn't liked Gibson much when he was in rescue mode. Now I feel sorry for him as he starts to see himself becoming an old cripple leading a life he didn't choose and harbouring resentments he can't voice.
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Mike’s Previous Updates
Mike Finn
is finished
The last half left me dazed. Suddenly, I went from a doom-laden, oppressive, hard to keep reading book to a novelisation of a Bernard Shaw play of ideas, filled to the brim with optimism, wit, friendship and a determination to overcome adversity.
I liked the second half much better but it was such a surprise, it took me a while to adjust to what was happening.
— Oct 05, 2024 09:46AM
I liked the second half much better but it was such a surprise, it took me a while to adjust to what was happening.
Mike Finn
is 25% done
I love the delicacy with which this captures shifting moods and emotions and startling moments of reassessement.
The content feels very odd to me. Our hero treats his 'wife' like a dog he's rescued from the pound and nursed back to health. There's no malice in it but there's no understanding either. I have to remind myself that he was born in 1900, has lived alone for decades and has almost no experience of women.
— Sep 27, 2024 01:32PM
The content feels very odd to me. Our hero treats his 'wife' like a dog he's rescued from the pound and nursed back to health. There's no malice in it but there's no understanding either. I have to remind myself that he was born in 1900, has lived alone for decades and has almost no experience of women.
Mike Finn
is 9% done
The storytelling has an odd distance to it. It feels like the kind of account that I'd have expected 50 years earlier from Wharton or James.
— Sep 13, 2024 01:51PM
Mike Finn
is 4% done
This starts like 'The Great American Novel' rather than a crime novella - the life of a man evoked with skill a a modicum of lyricism in just a few pages so that we know who he is at 55 and who he would probably have continued to be had he not met a young woman at her father's funeral.
I think that promises a lot.
— Sep 09, 2024 02:09AM
I think that promises a lot.
