I always wanted to belong to a book club, and now my dream became a reality. One afternoon last week, I got a telephone call from the local library telling me that I now belong to such a club. The first book to read and discuss is Talk Talk by T.C. Boyle. I never heard the name of the author, but excited ran to the library to finalise the deal and get the book. Four days later, I finished the book, and my feeling now is that of disappointment. In a way, I have expected that the choice of books may not be interesting for me and the first book confirmed my expectations. One may wonder why I wanted to belong to such a club knowing that my taste in books may not be an average reader’s taste. Well, this is still about books and about discussing them with like-minded people. I still have hopes that the meeting with the fellow reviewers will be a good, interesting experience. I will meet new people, and I like that. So I am looking forward to this evening in a couple of week’s time.
Now, about the book. It read well up to a point when I realized that this is all there is, just an easy read. I will forget the book very quickly; it will not leave any residue in me. At least I think so. The book is about stealing the identity of innocent people and breaking into their credit cards accounts. This may be a warning for me as I have been rather trusting not to say careless with my cards. Not that I lose them, but I use them too freely perhaps. This will change now, and I will use PayPal more often instead. This is a practical plus of reading the book, but such effect was, most likely, not intended.
The story is told in two separate streams that at the end of the book merge. The victim of the identity theft is a deaf girl. She spends the whole weekend in jail after being stopped by police while speeding a bit. During the documents, check police discover that her records show many crimes and she is treated like a criminal, imprisoned till Monday as it is Friday afternoon. Being deaf makes it a particularly difficult and bizarre experience. The reader gets for a while into the Kafkaesque world to move later into a chasing the thief story. And this is what the book is all about. The story is about chasing the identity thief through the whole USA. From California to New York. Dana, the victim, together with her supportive boyfriend Bridger is looking for Dana, the crook. They have little information by which to start the chase, but there are many lucky coincidences on the way to help them unnerve the thief and upset his life in the process. So this is the story. Moderately interesting and moderately credible. If the book was written with some sense of humour, I would not be put off that much, but the writing style is very average and, some poetic descriptions of landscapes are rather misplaced. Little plugs of poetry seem to only slow down the action and not add anything to the book. Reading it was a waste of time for me.
One pleasurable aspect of the book was reading the parts describing food preparation by the bad Dana. He is a real foodie and knows his drinks as well. Reading about his cooking I felt like getting up and going to my new kitchen to prepare something interesting to eat. I even did it at one stage, but not having gourmet ingredients at home it was only a bake of spinach covered with sauerkraut, feta cheese and beaten eggs. When I write about it , it sounds revolting but, in fact it was quite nice.
During my days I spend time, sometimes even too much, on watching silly TV serials or bad movies that are now freely available on YouTube. I wonder why I do not have any problems with this type of waste of time, but reading Talk Talk makes me feel that I will not like to repeat the experience too often. Even if it is the price for belonging to the book club. Maybe it is because books have some magic value for me and I have particular expectations of learning from them either new facts, new better ways of living my life or being a better person? I guess that my reverence for literature seems to exclude reading “so what” type of books.
Would I recommend the book? Sorry – No.
