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Title: The Vices
Author: Lawrence Douglas
Narrator: Andy Caploe
Format: Unabridged
Length: 10 hrs and 13 mins
Language: English
Release date: 06-13-14
Publisher: Audible Studios
Ratings: 4 of 5 out of 2 votes
Genres: Fiction, Historical
Publisher's Summary:
Oliver Vice, 41, prominent philosopher, scholar, and art collector, is missing and presumed dead, over the side of Queen Mary 2.
Troubled by his friends possible suicide, the unnamed narrator of Lawrence Douglas new novel launches an all-consuming investigation into Vices life history. Douglas, moving backward through time, tells a mordantly humorous story of fascination turned obsession, as his narrator peels back the layers of the Vice familys rich and bizarre history. At the heart of the family are Francizka, Olivers handsome, overbearing, vaguely anti-Semitic Hungarian mother, and his fraternal twin brother, Bartholomew, a gigantic and troubled young man with a morbid interest in Europes great tyrants. As the narrator finds himself drawn into a battle over the familys money and art, he comes to sense that someone - or perhaps the entire family - is hiding an unsavory past. Pursuing the truth from New York to London, from Budapest to Portugal, he remains oblivious to the irony of the search: that in his need to understand Vices life, he is really grappling with ambivalence about his own.
Members Reviews:
It would be a vice not to read VICES
This novel is literally mesmerizing; it is good on so many levels that to put it down is to feel loss. It's a story about a brilliantly funny dysfunctional family; a tale of the intricate culture of academic life; a mystery about what happened to its main subject, a passenger on the QE2; a story about forbidden and hidden memories of the Second World War; a self-analysis by the narrator; a story of the varieties of love; and, I could go on. So, talk about getting a bang for your bucks...... To top it off, it is written with skill and verve. It's good to know that the American novel remains in such good hands as those of Lawrence Douglas.
funny and profound
I laughed, nodded as if to an inside joke, and thoroughly enjoyed Douglas' engaging and fresh style. But the book is more than the sum of its mysteries - the anguish of the characters, and their friendships, rings true and didn't leave me, long after the last page has been turned.
Not so good
I hoped for more. The narrative is quite gripping, at first, and the main characters have some interest to them. But after a time, it just seems to go on. But it isn't really an awful book; I've read worse.
But the worst part, and the reason it gets only one star, is the horrible, shoddy job done editing this book. It is riddled with mistakes and questionable usage, stuff that a moderately talented editor should have caught. One example: pickles are called "gurkens" twice. What? No such word. Simple spell-checking would have nabbed this. And the book is FULL of similar errors.
So don't waste your time on a this modest novel, unless you want to spend half your reading time editing.
A well-crafted story, a gripping read
This book is a terrific read -- hard to put down from the very beginning, and gripping through a wonderful denouement. It's a well-crafted and satisfying mystery, but its real accomplishment is in its elucidation of human relationships: in particular, the author's insight into the thought processes set in motion by uncertainty and creeping suspicion. The narrator is an amateur deceiver who becomes enthralled with a more accomplished one, and the limits of self-invention are tested in the story of their friendship. The story is tragic, but the writing is full of humor.
