Saturday, May 16, 2015

"Three Dog Night" by Peter Goldsworthy



I read this book as part of the Aussie Author Challenge. I have now read 4 books by Peter Goldsworthy. While I loved "Honk if you are Jesus" and "Wish", I was not particularly blown away with "Everything I know", and I really did not connect with any of the characters in "Three Dog Night". It was one of those books that I just painfully struggled through, not enjoying it, but not wanting to give up on a book half way, particularly when I have really enjoyed other books by the same author.

The storyline - an Australian psychologist Martin falls for his beautiful UK trainee psychologist student, Lucy, they fall in love, marry, and decide after some apparently blissful years to move to Adelaide. In Adelaide, Martin parades Lucy around to his old school buddies as if she's a trophy. Martin's best old buddy, Felix, is a pretty strange bitter kind of character, obviously very intelligent but not easy to get on with as he seems to get pleasure out of making other people uncomfortable. It turns out Felix is dying, and his last wish as it were is to borrow his friend's wife for the last few weeks of his life and try to ruin their marriage. I found it pretty implausible, plus motives and actions were never explained properly for Felix or Lucy and Martin often came off as pretty immature. I found the characters were unlikeable and I did not feel empathy for them, so I really couldnt recommend this book unfortunately.  I thought this Peter Goldsworthy book had been recommended to me, but it turns out that there is another book with the same title but different author - Elsebeth Egholm, and that was the one that was recommended. I will keep looking out for that one. I still have another of Peter Goldsworthy's books on my shelf to read - "Navel Gazing" - so I hope it is more enjoyable than his "Three dog night".

Started reading: 12th May 2015
Finished: 5th June 2015
My score: 3/10
Aussie Author Challenge stats: Male author.

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