Absolute blindness is rare. There's usually some suggestion of movement, some sense of light and shade. Not in my case. What I 'saw' was depthless and impenetrable...There were no gradations in the blankness, no fluctuations of any kind. It was what depression would like, I thought, if you had to externalize it.This was a spontaneous purchase for me - I knew nothing about the book or its author, but decided to give him a try because I was intrigued. I'm very glad that I did, as it turned out to be one of the stranger and certainly more interesting novels that I recently read.The Insult opens with the main protagonist and narrator, Martin Blom, waking up in a hospital and being informed that he was shot in the head, and has suffered a cerebral insult which resulted in complete blindness. Blom's neurosurgeon, Bruno Visser, informs him that the loss of vision is permanent and irreversible - there is no chance of a recovery, and no operation or treatment which could give him at least a portion of his sight back. Visser tells Blom that if the bulled passed milimeters lower he would have been killed instantly - and that he will experience shock, depression, self-pity and even have suicidal thoughts before his long rehabilitation will be complete, and before he will eventually be able to exist among other people again. A titanium plate has been inserted into his skull to cover the hole left by the shot. There were no witnesses.Martin begins the long and slow walk on the rough road leading towards his new life as a blind man - laboriously learning to life without depending on sight, as he did every minute before he was deprived of it. Until one day, when Martin is practicing with his new white cane in the hospital gardens, something incredible and inexplicable happens...This is a tough novel to review, as I believe that the best way to readit is to approach it without any knowledge about it - blindly, if you'll excuse the expression. Still, a review needs to be written, so I will do my best to not spoil it and encourage you to give it a shot (I am so bad).Thomson is a very good writer - and refreshingly so. In the age of overwritten monstrosities or books which are overtly bare in their prose he achieves an elegant balance between both: he is descriptive, but not overtly so, and has a genuine talent for creating original and apt metaphor and similes, and images which are effective and memorable - which really is quite a feat in a novel about a and narrated by a blinded man. His writing is elegant and subdued, and there is a sense of carefulness and restraint in his sentences - although they are short and written in language styled to be ordinary, they give an air of being trimmed down or unnecessary fat and throwaway words, their structure chosen with delicate attention. It's refreshing to read a writer whose prose flows smoothly, but who pays attention to his craft and is a pleasure to read on the sentence level.Thomson delights in playing hide and seek with the reader; the time when the novel takes place is very vague, and thanks to careful avoidance of any cultural or technological details The Insult could take place both in the 70's and in the 90's. The country where it is set is unnamed; it can't be England as it is said to have a president, and the characters' names sound foreign - Blom, Visser, Slatnick, Salenko, Kolan. There is a city where much of the novel takes place which features a hotel Kosminsky, and the city itself has numbered districts - much like Paris. But there is a certain grimness hanging around the place, typical to the ravaged natios of the former Eastern Bloc. If this is true, then the mountains which the novel also describes could well be the Carpathians.The biggest flaw of The Insult is a complete shift of focus around halfway through - where Martin's narrative switches from his perspective to that of another character. The novel is still narrated in the first person, but the story is entirely different, although tied to Martin's - it's as if Thomson dreamed up two different books, and thought of a way to merge them into one. The novel shifts from being a surreal and hypnotic story about different ways of observing the world to a surreal and unnerving detective story, with a saga of a troubled family thrown in. This makes The Insult lose the almost unbreakable grip that it had on this reader - although it's still compelling and well-written, Thomson has pretty much abandoned the fascinating and exciting possibilities which he teased us with in the first act, and his plot starts wandering. Although it's sparkled with great scenes, it never manages to match the impression left by the beginning of the novel.Still, despite its flaws, I believe that the novel is definitely worth reading - it is exciting, it is well-written, and it's dark in a quirky way. Rupert Thomson has been called an English Paul Auster, and the comparison is not entirely without any merits - Thomson's book shares the same interest in the detective story as the novels of The New York Trilogy, and both writers enjoy filling their worlds with strange events and protagonists and touch on the existential question of identity. Thomson creates a brilliant first act and his writing is a pleasure to read throughout the whole book, and I'm very glad that I have read it and that I also picked up his debut, Dreams Of Leaving, which I hope to read very soon.
The premise is intriguing :Martin Blom is shot in the head in an act of random violence and consequently goes blind. His doctor insists that he is in denial and suffering from Anton’s Syndrome whereas Blom sees (?!?) perfectly well at night. He doesn’t feel suicidal, not even depressed, in fact he is brimming with optimism and can’t wait to start life afresh from the moment of his attack.He breaks off his relationship with his fiancée, cuts off all communication with his parents and friends and moves to a different city. So far, so good. The first thing that bothered me is that the author never specifies where the action takes place but apparently it's not Britain. Is it the Netherlands ? Is the city Amsterdam ? I don't like being left in the dark.Alright, so that is just nitpicking but after Blom moves to "the city" things just get weirder and weirder. He sees (?!?) prostitutes and their clients all over the second floor of his seedy hotel, hanging out of the lift, over radiators and tables, he sees (?!?) circus people, jugglers, knife-throwers and an "invisible man", has a passionate affair with a mysterious waitress etc. etc. etc. By about a third of the book the author had lost me (or I had lost him). Mr. Blom and his lot were fairly obnoxious and the story seemed to be going nowhere so I ended up reading the last chapter and feeling I had saved precious time by not slugging through the whole book.
Do You like book The Insult (2004)?
This book was fascinating. It starts with a man being shot and losing his sight. Except... maybe he can see after all.... but only at night. The entire book is his adventure, investigating the disappearance of a beautiful woaman, or maybe she not really beautiful and his sight is just a delusion..... In the middle of the book, we suddenly change narrators and drop back in time fifty years and the reader is completely confused... until it all comes back together at the end, brilliantly. I cant wait to read more by this author. Crazy unique and exciting story, and extremely well written.
—Gina
I stumbled across this little psychological thriller at a thrift store. Something moved me to pick it up, and I'm glad I did; although it seems to take a kind of drastic curve toward the last third of the book, I urge you to stick with it. It's fascinating. The narrator is a man who has been blinded by a stray bullet lodging in his brain, damaging his occipital cortex. Because of this, his eyes still perceive light, but his brain is no longer able to form an image of the outside world. However, as the sun comes down outside his hospital bed, he notices a strange ability...To say any more would give too much away, and readers should experience the book for themselves; it's part of the ride to imagine you are blind like the narrator. All I will add is that the man becomes an unwitting participant in a murder mystery, and must use his strangely altered perceptions to navigate through a strange underworld as he pursues clues to the puzzle.
—Tcorey2000
WHAT IF… by a whim of fate we lose vision? And what if, after having adjusted to a our new flawed life, we recover it again… but in an unexpected way? This is the core of the story that The Insult tells, and is as fascinating as it sounds.I read this book through the recommendation of a friend –thanks again, Maciek - and one month after reading it I´m still affected by the originality of the story and the delicacy of its prose. Some of my favorite passages:"Loots was a man of many talents, and some of them were hidden. If anyone understood the value of secrecy, it was me.The fact that he also had secrets didn’t frustrate or discourage me at all; if anything, it lifted him higher in my estimation.""When she talked about her family, the words seemed to curdle in her mouth and, just for a moment, she reminded me of myself. She’d had some kind of bullet fired at her. The way she was behaving now revealed it. The path of the bullet, the rhythm of the knife.""Certain kinds of secrets, they’re quiet and dead; they can be kept. There are others, though, that are alive and growing, and have a tendency to reveal themselves."Nothing is more engaging in a novel than a powerful secret, and The Insult is full of these. And they are dark, as dark as someone who is condemned to live a life after the setting of the sun. The life of Martin Blom.The novel takes off with Martin waking up in a hospital bed just to discover that he was hit by a bullet and had become blind as a consequence of it. Trying to adjust to his new situation, a new life is revealed and he, Martin, is forced to keep the secret. As the action progresses, his secret becomes greater and more unbearable, isolating him more and more, confining him to the four walls of a hotel room. But just when the narration reaches its climax and it seems there´s no way out, a completely different story takes over and Martin gets dragged into it, taking us with him.The Insult is not read as a novel, but rather as two different books –a story inside of a story, with no relation between each other and only one thing in common: a growing darkness. The biggest merit of its author, Rupert Thomson, is to have given to its story its own voice. Both share a first person POV, and yet, one is told by a man, and the other by a woman; one takes place in the present, and the other in the past; one analyzes the isolation of a man in solitude, and the other, the isolation of a woman as part of a family. Still, they are both finely written, as if told by two different people. It struck me particularly the ability of Rupert Thomson to put himself in the shoes of a woman and the realism with which he describes feelings and touches on complex issues, like maternity, specific of women. The only flaw I found in this book and that has stopped me from giving it 5 stars was that the ending was too rushed. I did enjoy both stories equally, but I felt a little that after the second story takes over, its own intensity relegates the first one to second place. As a result, the first story rushes towards the end and concludes disappointingly. Paraphrasing Martin Blom: "I had a thought that was treacherous and yet seductive: secrets become more powerful if you dilute them just a little."The same applies to story endings, better to take the time to reach them than rushing, almost crashing into them.Nevertheless, this has been one of the best books I´ve read in a long time.
—Nhoa
