Garbo Laughs by Elizabeth Hay
2003, McClelland & Stewart Publishing, 384 pages, $21
Literary Fiction. A Globe and Mail Notable Book of the Year, Quill & Quire Top Five Canadian Fiction Book of the Year, Maclean’s Top Ten Book of the Year
This is a book about an elderly woman who loves old movies and doesn’t completely understand why people don’t share her enthusiasm for them. She lives in Ottawa at around the time of publication (2003), and dreams of living in Old Hollywood, or Old Havana, as she waxes and wanes on the characters and players of the silver screen, often assuming the characters and actors are the same people.
I try to be as positive as I can about these reviews, and if I don’t like something, then I try to see it through someone else’s perspective. I simply did not enjoy this book in any way. There is the adage that popular fiction focuses on story, while literary fiction focuses on character, and it seems that in “Garbo Laughs” that was the author’s intent. Maybe I should say, their over-compensation. This book rejects the notion of story or plot, and instead focuses completely on a character – as if to say “The purity of this character will not be tainted by anything so vulgar as a linear or appealing plotline!” The protagonist is flat, in the sense that she starts the book one way and ends the book the exact same way without developing. Flat characters can work, look at Sherlock Holmes, but this character is simply not interesting. She likes old movies, possesses some sexual hangups that get touched on but then dropped. She is not engaging in the world, I had difficulty engaging with her. I finished this book, but did not enjoy the company.
I’ve thought about not including this book on my list, because I want to keep things positive on here, but I’ve invested $21, and probably about 8-10 hours of reading-time on the nearly 400 pages, and I feel that I’ll never get back either. The author has a positive reputation for other books, which I’ll assume were better than this one, and that reputation allowed for this uninteresting project to make it to print. I cannot recommend this book to anyone.
★☆☆☆☆
