CBR18 BINGO: Wheels
I have been wanting to try Andrew Sean Greer, and this really piqued my interest when it came out. Plus it has such a charming cover. Alas, it did not meet my hopes or expectations.
The narrator is semi-nameless. He is called Giovedì by his employer, but that’s not his real name. He was hired just out of college to travel to Italy and archive the contents of Villa Coco, owned by the Baronessa Lisabetta (AKA Coco). While there, he hopes to avoid romantic entanglements, which had interfered with his life a bit in college. The book blurb identifies the book as charming and witty. And it is. Unfortunately, there wasn’t much more to the book than that.
The Baronessa’s primary personality trait is “quirky.” Other side characters are similarly quirky or go along with the Baronessa in such a way that they earned that descriptor by association. Giovedì goes along with it but is essentially the confused American foil, though this shifts a bit over time. My problem was that I needed more. The book was amusing at first but after a while seemed to become little more than a collection of eccentric actions and recitations of similarly quirky stories about the Baronessa’s (or her friends’) life.
I nearly DNF’d the book around 31% after a particularly egregious example of one such story, but I stuck with it and it got better. We spent more time with Giovedì and without the Baronessa, which gave me room to appreciate the prose and the beautiful descriptions of Italy (and the food). But then around 75% or so, something happened to a side character, which Giovedì and the Baronessa had strong emotional reactions to. And I felt like the author expected me as a reader to also have feelings about it, but I could not have cared less. So I DNF’d at 78%. I did quickly skim some of the rest, and it seemed like it could be interesting, but by then I just couldn’t be bothered.
I do think this book will work for some people. If you don’t mind depth being sacrificed for lightness, charm, and quirkiness, you might like this. And that’s not meant to be derogatory. Sometimes that’s exactly what a reader might be in the mood for. And based on what I skimmed, I suspect the characters eventually found more depth, but by then it was too late for me.
