Homo Faber

[logicbutton]

Arrrrrrrrrrrrrrgh. I'm trying to write my evil, evil German paper, which is not even halfway done and I've been on it for a good ten hours (really) and some serious problems with the book have begun to present themselves to me. By the way, this is the book about the 50-year-old guy who has sex with the 20(!)-year-old girl who turns out to be his daughter. Anyway. So the first, like, quarter of the book is about his plane trip that has to make an emergency landing in the desert. While he's out there, he discovers that another guy on the plane is the brother of his best friend who he hasn't seen in twenty years, and is actually going to look for said brother. So Walter, the guy, decides to go with him, and they find the brother/friend dead in this place with a bunch of Indians (hey, that's what the book said). So Walter leaves and decides for no reason to go back to Europe by boat, and this is where he meets his daughter, and the rest of the story is about him and her and her mother. That's right, the first sixty pages have NOTHING TO DO WITH THE REST OF THE BOOK. Their only function is exposition, which wasn't even presented in the context of Walter's experiences in the desert and such. It was presented almost entirely in flashbacks. And not the oh-my-god-I'm-gonna-die-life-flashing-before-eyes flashbacks. No, no, he was just kinda sittin' around thinkin' 'bout things and started ruminating about his past. In fact, the only exposition that took place in that part of the story was his discovery that his friend had married and divorced Hanna, the mother of his daughter. Subtracting about ten pages of flashbacks, then, the author of the book spent about fifty pages telling us that Walter's deceased friend had married and divorced Hanna many years ago. Which is really, really, lame. It isn't even that important in the rest of the book.

And then, y'know, I could accept the idea that maybe the point of that part of the book was to show us why Walter would be afraid to fly back to Europe and instead needed to take the ship where he would meet his daughter. Except he WASN'T afraid to fly. He says himself that he doesn't know why he decided to go by ship rather than by plane; it just seemed like the thing to do. And he STILL doesn't believe in fate! GAAAAAH!

Hmm. In a way, I feel a bit better now, and in other ways, I feel much, much worse.