This book begins in Czechoslovakia a few years before The Hoff tore down the Berlin Wall, this really appealed to me as I especially enjoy books about the cold war or bunkers, Im also a fan of Museums. The descriptive parts are well written, the locations come to life, but the plot becomes a little disjointed.
The protagonist Laure is breaking through the iron curtain, stark grey Eastern Europe swathed in claustrophobic paranoia, this part really captured the time and place well.
Alas, we then fast forward to present day. Laure is married to some chap and curates a museum in Paris, this portion I didn’t get on well with. There is a scream and the characters run down the stairs with a first aid kit, it’s not clear whats occurring at this stage, are they paramedics? It doesn’t make sense that folk kick off regularly enough in the museum for this to be considered normal by Laure and her man. Anyway, the narrative is a little roughshod, but we get the idea, Laure is a Parisian and has a flawed hidden past that we anticipate finding out about.
Towards the end of this extract Elizabeth tries to use quantum physics as an analogy for Laure exploring every possibility, I don’t think she has quite grasped the concept to make this work. It’s really more of a probability function which is a better way of thinking of wave particle duality than deal in absolutes. Although fair play in introducing Quantum Physics so early in the novel, hopefully we will see if Schrodinger’s cat is still alive later.
A good start to this novel, I would consider reading this on a steam train, but there’s not enough communism, too much modern Paris and the plot does not seem to be going anywhere interesting enough for me within these first pages.
The protagonist Laure is breaking through the iron curtain, stark grey Eastern Europe swathed in claustrophobic paranoia, this part really captured the time and place well.
Alas, we then fast forward to present day. Laure is married to some chap and curates a museum in Paris, this portion I didn’t get on well with. There is a scream and the characters run down the stairs with a first aid kit, it’s not clear whats occurring at this stage, are they paramedics? It doesn’t make sense that folk kick off regularly enough in the museum for this to be considered normal by Laure and her man. Anyway, the narrative is a little roughshod, but we get the idea, Laure is a Parisian and has a flawed hidden past that we anticipate finding out about.
Towards the end of this extract Elizabeth tries to use quantum physics as an analogy for Laure exploring every possibility, I don’t think she has quite grasped the concept to make this work. It’s really more of a probability function which is a better way of thinking of wave particle duality than deal in absolutes. Although fair play in introducing Quantum Physics so early in the novel, hopefully we will see if Schrodinger’s cat is still alive later.
A good start to this novel, I would consider reading this on a steam train, but there’s not enough communism, too much modern Paris and the plot does not seem to be going anywhere interesting enough for me within these first pages.