I had such high hopes for this book but it drove me crazy. I will admit that the writing seemed very well-crafted but I found it over the top, the characters and the style pretentious and nothing about the book - people, plot, time - believable at all. esp. the ridiculous part where the main character flies around the world for years!

It took me a little while to get fully hooked, but once I did, I breezed through this one. A beautiful story with incredibly rich and complex characters. A heartfelt exploration of love and grief, the novel evolves in ways I didn't expect, which I really appreciated. The author's writing is lush and often poetic, with countless moments that lingered long after I finished reading.

Some good, occasionally great writing here. There were a few lines and situations here and there that I thought were openly cringe-worthy, and I didn't care much for the shift to second-person narrative in books two and three, but overall I liked this story quite a bit. It was a well-written tale of love, despair, and acceptance that I would easily recommend to anyone looking for a such a story.

Last year, I made a chocolate honey cake. The cake was chocolate and honey, the filling had honey and mascarpone, and the icing was, you guessed it, honey and dark chocolate. I almost gagged on it, it was so sweet. It's a shame, because the ingredients were all delicious and if I'd just left honey out of two of the three components, it would have been perfect. This is exactly how I feel about this cake book. The prose is well-crafted, even lyrical. The characters are a bit generic, but might have been fine in another book. But the tone of the whole and the machinations of the plot veer towards treacly, and I just couldn't appreciate any of its good points. So I'll leave the extolling of Van Booy's many writerly virtues to other people and just say, if you, like me, have a limited literary sweet tooth, stay away! I'm going to go eat a kale salad now.

While not among the best ever of books, there was a lot to love here. Mostly in the details and language. So many good, introspective phrases in this short story about finding love and losing yourself in the process. And then maybe even finding yourself again.

I almost gave this novel four stars, but I think what kept me to three is that I decided that Simon Van Booy's gorgeous prose is better suited to short stories. This is beautiful literary fiction, but the prose is almost overwhelming. That said, I certainly wanted to keep reading, because I cared about the characters and was fascinated by some twists and turns in Van Booy's style. (No spoiler here; you will have to read it for yourself.) I read both of his books of short stories before this and loved them.

Some readers may find parts of this novel too depressing but that kind of stuff is right up my alley.

I chose this book out of quite a few. It's always dangerous to go into a bookstore with no set title in mind. I must have switched my choice at least six times before choosing this one and finally making it to the register. And while I wouldn't say I'm a huge fan of Proust or "Swann's Way," reading the comparison between Simon Van Booy to a love child of Margarite Duras and Marcel Proust was simply too poetically shimmering a thought to pass up. Throw in Greece, which I'm always longing to visit, an archiologist (the most stimulating and, if such a thing exists, sexiest--of professions) and I'd found my latest novel.

I loved several aspects of the book. The overall omniscient narrative that switches between leading characters was nice, as everyone brings their own back story to the table and it's nice and efficient to know who's you'll be focusing on; coupled with the varying nationalities of the characters. The landscape and local color were as beautiful as the Proust/Duras comparison had lead me to believe, and I even enjoyed the 70 or so pages of pen pal/fax machine exchanges while Henry took a page out of "Up In The Air" and went from Heathrow to LAX and everywhere in between.

But, what I didn't like was the lack of solidity between points in the plot. I found myself unaware of the central plot catalyst until I was past it and had to go back to read a few pages to understand what happened to our heroine Rebecca. Additionally, I had a hard time keeping time, as they book didn't start with a linear time frame (despite the title, this still threw me, and I'm usually a fairly observant reader, more so than most I'd wager). And, over all, while realism wasn't the book's or Van Booy's purpose, I still found it distractingly difficult to believe (no, more than that, perhaps even sloppy) to assume Henry's parents would think it appropriate to not hear from their son for a year, that George would quietly give up drinking or Rebecca's family would find out she was lovingly and romantically tossed in the to Aegean.

More frustrating than all of the discrepancies combined was the chapter on Nathalie, Rebecca's twin, and her husband and little daughter. We're told to question the girl's paternity, but the question appears all at once and is just as quickly dismissed. Likewise, Rebecca didn't seem to keep a diary but it couldn't, as I imagined at first, have simply belonged to her mother. So was Rebecca a liar? Did she never work for Airfrance? Why was this important at all except to slightly (barely) hinder Henry's inevitable recovery?

All in all, I enjoyed aspects of this novel but don't feel it was well-formed enough to really call a novel. I'd call it glimmers. And they were beautiful glimmers, but not joined enough to make a solid book. I felt unfulfilled and a little exhausted after reading it, despite coming away with a mind full of beautiful black and white snapshots, the sorts with the scribbly annotations you can't quite make out well enough to give you a solid idea of who, what or when they came from, but just show you a pretty woman you knew more about in a silk flower dress...

Beautiful!

Okay, can a novel be absolutely beautiful while also confusing the hell out of you? Yes, yes one can, and this is that novel. Van Booy's way with words is remarkable- passages left me truly breathless, amazed at the way particular words came together. But, for much of the novel, I was unsure. Certain parts had a more traditional flow of the narrative, but others were much more poetic and lofty. I was much more pleased with the emotional depth and explorations in the novel- from tragic to sublimely beautiful. While it wasn't what I was expecting or usually gravitate toward for fiction reading, it was definitely a memorable reading experience.