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Title: The Rules of Dreaming
Author: Bruce Hartman
Number of pages: 298
Genre: mystery
Book Number/Goal: 18/52
My Rating: 3/5
Review:
A beautiful opera singer, obsessed with the opera she’s rehearsing, Offenbach’s “Tales of Hoffmann”, commits suicide. A few years later, mysterious deaths continue, and everything seems to follow the patterns outlined in the opera, with real people inadvertently playing the roles of their fictional analogs. Is it madness, coincidence or someone’s devious plan? The singer's schizophrenic children, institutionalized in a psych hospital, might hold some clues, but it's difficult to communicate with them. Their doctor, by some fluke of chance also called Hoffmann, gets more and more confused about what's going on...
The book is very intellectual. It extensively discusses the Tales of Hoffmann, and presents some exciting ideas, such as: "To Hoffmann the spirit world wasn't just a metaphor - it was the real thing, more real than anything else we ordinarily experience - and he believed that the creative artist had to do everything possible to go there. Through music, dreams, alcohol, drugs - and if all else filed, madness." One of the patients is writing a thesis "Authors as characters, Characters as Authors" about "authors becoming characters in what somebody else writes, and then meeting up with the characters they created themselves in their own works." Confusion between fiction and reality is a big theme in this book. Yet another musing: "But somewhere there's an intelligence at work - probably not God or the Devil, just some indifferent cosmic scribe writing and rewriting the book of the world in a thousand different plots and a thousand different styles. And I'm one of the very, very minor characters."
However, the story feels too much like an artificial device for illustrating the ideas, a bit like a puppet theater (another character's hobby). Somehow, it's neither atmospheric nor touching, and the characters are rather boring, even the ones who are in various stages of insanity. There's a cool twist in the end, though.
This book is definitely not a wasted time (it even made me google up Tales of Hoffmann), but it takes a fair amount of efforts to get through.
Author: Bruce Hartman
Number of pages: 298
Genre: mystery
Book Number/Goal: 18/52
My Rating: 3/5
Review:
A beautiful opera singer, obsessed with the opera she’s rehearsing, Offenbach’s “Tales of Hoffmann”, commits suicide. A few years later, mysterious deaths continue, and everything seems to follow the patterns outlined in the opera, with real people inadvertently playing the roles of their fictional analogs. Is it madness, coincidence or someone’s devious plan? The singer's schizophrenic children, institutionalized in a psych hospital, might hold some clues, but it's difficult to communicate with them. Their doctor, by some fluke of chance also called Hoffmann, gets more and more confused about what's going on...
The book is very intellectual. It extensively discusses the Tales of Hoffmann, and presents some exciting ideas, such as: "To Hoffmann the spirit world wasn't just a metaphor - it was the real thing, more real than anything else we ordinarily experience - and he believed that the creative artist had to do everything possible to go there. Through music, dreams, alcohol, drugs - and if all else filed, madness." One of the patients is writing a thesis "Authors as characters, Characters as Authors" about "authors becoming characters in what somebody else writes, and then meeting up with the characters they created themselves in their own works." Confusion between fiction and reality is a big theme in this book. Yet another musing: "But somewhere there's an intelligence at work - probably not God or the Devil, just some indifferent cosmic scribe writing and rewriting the book of the world in a thousand different plots and a thousand different styles. And I'm one of the very, very minor characters."
However, the story feels too much like an artificial device for illustrating the ideas, a bit like a puppet theater (another character's hobby). Somehow, it's neither atmospheric nor touching, and the characters are rather boring, even the ones who are in various stages of insanity. There's a cool twist in the end, though.
This book is definitely not a wasted time (it even made me google up Tales of Hoffmann), but it takes a fair amount of efforts to get through.
