What are the weaknesses of this book, in your opinion?
In my opinion, the weakness of the book, “the Coma”, by Alex Garland is the short chapters and the continuous switching between one situation with another. The chapters are as short as one page or even half of a page. Although this book is very interesting because it keeps the readers anxious to know what really happens when one is in a coma. One of the flaws of this book is the chapters. It is pointless to me to see that this book have so many chapters when each chapter is really the continuation of the last. Reading it, I felt as though the author just made one section into another chapter to expand the pages. This story do captivates its readers but these chapters really annoy me and make me lose focus every single time. It completely made me neglect the reading and focused on the length of the chapters and compared one chapter’s length with another.
The other flaw of this story is switching the event and the scene. Although the content of the story is understandable, the way how the author writes makes it confusing because the reader would then have to remind themselves that the character is switching from being awake in the coma to being awake in real life but no actually awake at the same time. The author did try to italicized chapters where the main character, Carl, is awake but not awake at the same time. The italicized chapters did help with the transitioning but the narration switches. The way Carl explains the situation gets mixed up. For example, in chapter two of the second section, one paragraph states, “The next morning, I was lying on the bed. I was lying on the bed, and the nurse was walking across the room towards me,” (Garland 74). It was confusing the first time I read this line so I had to reread it again. In this book, there is one Carl, but there is also two of him: the coma version of him and the sleeping version of him. It transitions between both on some chapters and so it was confusing because of the need to reread it and to reread it slowly.
You said that the “switching between one situation with another,” is confusing, so you should give an example and the the reader would understand your confusion. You should also explain at least one chapter that does the switching situations. So the reader of you post would understand what you are talking about. I like the way you found a flaw on the book about “[..] the author writes makes it confusing because the reader would then have to remind themselves that the character is switching from being awake in the coma to being awake in real life but no actually awake at the same time.” Good job on spotting the author’s weakness.
ReplyDeleteSo like, this is a sequel to another book? If it is so pointless to read this because it recycles from the previous book, how come you haven't switched the book? I think that you are just reading through the intro. Because books do that. they repeat what happens in the old book to introduce it to those who havent read it. Im sure youll get to the good part soon enough
ReplyDeleteThis is actually a very good weakness that you spotted in the author's writing style. A good point that you can include in your final book review is the process in how you overcame the author's unique writing and organization. In addition, you can elaborate on why do you think that the author chose to alternate between the two Carls. Does the author intentionally want to confuse the reader or is there something else that the author wants to convey? Also you might want to clarify when using quotes from the book which Carl it is coming from - the coma one or the reality one, this would help the potential reader immensely in better understanding the context of the book.
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