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Ensiform's Reviews > The Ginger Man
The Ginger Man
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A great big stream of consciousness slice of life book about the boozing, lazy, nasty, cruel, selfish Sebastian Dangerfield, an American in Dublin who is supposed to be studying law at Trinity but instead drinks all day, chases women and exchanges abuse with his wife.
To be sure, Sebastian is an unpleasant character, but that doesn’t bother me. I was simply bored by the events of the novel. I didn’t find it, as all the blurbs promised, an exuberant, witty, wildly comic escapade. Donleavy’s writing style is good and his language is rich (and the book contains amazingly graphic sex scenes for its time), but I wasn’t interested in what he was writing about. And, as with The Horse's Mouth, the same nothings seemed to happen again and again: Sebastian avoids creditors. Sebastian beds women. Sebastian gets drunk and waxes outrageous and lyrical. Okay, but must there be so much of it?
To be sure, Sebastian is an unpleasant character, but that doesn’t bother me. I was simply bored by the events of the novel. I didn’t find it, as all the blurbs promised, an exuberant, witty, wildly comic escapade. Donleavy’s writing style is good and his language is rich (and the book contains amazingly graphic sex scenes for its time), but I wasn’t interested in what he was writing about. And, as with The Horse's Mouth, the same nothings seemed to happen again and again: Sebastian avoids creditors. Sebastian beds women. Sebastian gets drunk and waxes outrageous and lyrical. Okay, but must there be so much of it?
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Reading Progress
Started Reading
May 20, 1999
–
Finished Reading
December 14, 2011
– Shelved
December 14, 2011
– Shelved as:
fiction
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Peter
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rated it 3 stars
Mar 26, 2013 08:48AM
"The same nothings seemed to happen again and again": I agree completely. This is a 150-page story inflated into a 350-page book. And I hope it will be a very long time before I read another stream-of-consciousness internal dialogue.
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Thanks for commenting, Pete. Re-reading this review, it looks like I ought to downgrade the rating to two stars.
I have this on my list to read b/c it made the Modern Library Top 100 Novels of the 20th Century.
When you read it, let me know what you think. Lots of people I respect think highly of the book.
The Ginger Man like the Horses Mouth isn't so much about story as writing. The writing in parts of this book, as with all of his books rates as high as any of his contemporaries who were really carving out a new kind of literature at the time. If you like genre books, plot driven books, than a writer like Donleavy is never going to do it for you.
I understand it's not meant to be plot driven, of course. I'm not tied to plot. I don't mind a dreamy slice of life, like some of James Joyce's work. I just didn't think Dunleavy's prose, while well-crafted, was good enough to engage me on its own.
Thank you for your review. I finished the novel moments ago and found the first half interesting, engaging, and uniquely written. The second half was painfully tedious, redundant, and apparently poorly edited.
