Friday, November 11, 2011

Steven Millhauser, Martin Dressler ****

I read (and reviewed) Martin Dressler once before. I stand by my comments from that earlier review, but I had to add one more star because (a) the tone and atmosphere of the book stayed with me in the years since I first read it and (b) I enjoyed it more the second time around, probably because I knew in advance that it was going to take a turn into magical realism.

Martin Dressler actually resonates well with the book I read immediately before it, Tom McCarthy's C. Like C, Martin Dressler features a character whose main defining feature is the way he thinks. Serge Carrefax saw the world in a two-dimensional "plan" view; Martin Dressler sees everything as "a great, elaborate structure, a system of order, a well-planned machine." Neither book attempts much more characterization than that.

The tone and atmosphere of the book are its greatest draws, and they derive largely from the accumulation of 19th century period detail, an "internal eclecticism."  The greatest drawback is a static quality to the prose and to the story, which I mentioned in my earlier review. Martin didn't really develop as a character, resulting in a certain repetitiveness; for example, the development of the New Dressler Hotel wasn't much different from the development of the original Dressler Hotel and probably could have been omitted.

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