- Hardcover: 406 pages
- Publisher: Knopf (Aug 27 1996)
- Language: English
- ISBN-10: 0679446729
- ISBN-13: 978-0679446729
- Product Dimensions: 20.6 x 15 x 3.8 cm
- Shipping Weight: 544 g
- Average Customer Review: 4.0 out of 5 stars See all reviews (21 customer reviews)
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Product Details |
Product Description
From Amazon
If you haven't discovered the black-magic world of British novelist Rupert Thomson, this quality paperback edition of his psychological thriller, The Insult, is a fine point of entry. There are elements of both Franz Kafka and Raymond Chandler in the story, as Martin Blom--blinded by a shot to the head in a supermarket parking lot--finds out one night that he can actually see. Is it a result of what his doctors insist is a delusion often suffered by the newly blinded? Or does it have something to do with a bizarre experiment hidden in a secret file in a part of the hospital he accidentally stumbles upon? Martin is soon living on his own in a seedy hotel, using his unique night vision to explore adventures--social, criminal, and sexual--totally new to him. If The Insult gets you hooked on Thomson, Air & Fire is also available.
--This text refers to the
Paperback
edition.
From Publishers Weekly
Thomson (Air and Fire) can certainly write up a storm. The young English novelist has a remarkable bag of tricks at his disposal, with a tinglingly fresh eye and ear for the most fleeting of sights and sounds and a dashing way with metaphor and imagery. At first, it looks as if his tale of Martin Blom, a young man in an unnamed country who is shot in the head one night and blinded, is going to be a sort of contemporary Kafka vision. Blom is treated in a strange institution by a sinister doctor. Then he finds he can see again, but only at night; fleeing to a dour capital city, he begins to organize his lonely life around that fact. It is when Blom meets and falls for the mysterious Nina, and she disappears, that The Insult begins to go off the rails. What had been an absorbingly macabre study in solitude veers, in its second half, into a histrionic family history of Nina that seems only steps away from Cold Comfort Farm. After that, it is impossible to rekindle the intense interest Thomson had originally ignited in Martin's story, and the book, for all its incandescent writing and malign urban atmosphere, peters out glumly.
Copyright 1996 Reed Business Information, Inc.
Copyright 1996 Reed Business Information, Inc.
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Customer Reviews
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Most helpful customer reviews
5.0 out of 5 stars
Unforgettable in every way......,
By Alyssa Donati "phantjag" (New York, N.Y. United States) - See all my reviews
This review is from: The Insult (Paperback)
This book is magical. Thompson lures you into a strange yet captivating world and floods it with stunning images that are hard to forget. This book is many things: suspenseful, smooth, crisp, steamy, tragic, cryptic and haunting. The author knows how to set the stage. He pays close attention to detail and weaves an incredibly intriguing plot. I have owned this book for many years. It's a worn paperback now and I go back to read it sometimes just because it is that kind of book. The one you go back to because it's that good.
5.0 out of 5 stars
Lotsa stuff going on here. Dive right in!,
By Donna Maria (Seattle, WA United States) - See all my reviews
This review is from: The Insult (Paperback)
The Insult is like a breath of fresh air. A very interesting, twisty, weird tale about Martin Blom who is blinded in a freak accident. Once that happens he begins an odyssey that you'll never forget. Like nothing you've read before. Now for some cliches:a real page turner impossible to put down two thumbs up, way up!
2.0 out of 5 stars
Intriguing story that goes nowhere,
By Fanoula Sevastos (Lyndhurst, OH USA) - See all my reviews
This review is from: The Insult (Paperback)
Martin Blom gets shot in the head by a random bullet on his way home from the grocery store one night, which results in his blindness. While in the hospital recovering, he discovers that he can see, but only at night. Once released from the hospital, he leaves behind his old life and begins a new one -- sleeping all day, having breakfast in lonely diner-restaurants after dark, living in a sleazy hotel, associating with other nocturnal characters, dating a stripper. He also begins to believe that he is part of some larger experiment and that his doctor is behind the fact that he is able to see at night but not during the day, which slowly begins to disintigrate his grasp on day to day life. When his stripper-girlfriend turns up dead, Blom becomes a suspect and sets out to find her killer. The book is filled with a dark, hallucinatory atmosphere in gothic-like fashion. It lures you into this world with great promise. Problem is, it goes nowhere. Several storylines emerge, but none get developed. Characters appear and quickly drop out of sight -- there is very little consistency and zero carry-through. It's like Thomson had this cool idea but didn't have any clue what to do with it. As the reader, however, you're compelled to keep reading, hoping that this is all going to lead up to something. It doesn't. Then, after 260 pages, we enter an entirely new story. The narrator changes to someone we've never heard of before. This narrator begins telling her life story. We enter a completely different world. Talk about changing gears. The bigger problem is that this new story is better than the one the book begins with, mostly because it progresses with consistency, and pretty soon you forget the first half of the book ever existed. I actually had to remind myself that I was still reading the same book. Sure, it all comes together, marginally, in the end, but so marginally that it is completely ineffective. And besides, by then, you hardly care about Martin Blom -- he has become some interesting character in some book you once read. On the cover of the book there is a quote that reads: A psychological thriller that has just about everything." And it does have a little bit of everything: there is blindness and distortion and hallucination and paranoia and peculiarity, there is mental disturbance and murder and incest. It's a murder mystery and a gothic drama and a family saga. But most of all, it's a dud.
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