The End Of The Alphabet - CS Richardson

Looking for a quick read, and a moralistic story, this title jumped off the shelf at me.

ISBN: 978-0385663410
format: Paperback
pages: 160
publisher: Anchor Canada
pub. date: 2008-01-08
started reading: 2009-02-27
finished reading: 2009-03-05

I enjoyed this book, though it didn't live up fully to my expectations. That said, given the awards it had won, my expectations were set abnomally high.
This is another first time author. Looking back through my recent month's reading and I have to admit that first time writers seem to be well worth it lately. Whether more people are writing, or there are better editors, I know that the books I've read by people new to the field are some of the best I have come across yet. Fantastic!

This book is writting in a different sort of style and occassionally it becomes hard to follow. Not in the same way that Blindness was hard, but rather in the way that you can lose yourself listening so someone else describe a conversation they had with someone. You know how it goes...

So I said to him How are you, and he said Good, so I said That's great and your wife. Who? Your wife, is she good. It's been a while. Yes it has. She is good then? Yes, though sometimes I wonder about her. It's hard. Who? My wife.

Odds are good that as I dropped the descriptions of who was talking you had to work to puzzle it out occassionally. Expect to do that a lot in this book.

The book is however well written and touching at points as it chronicles the dying days of a 50 year old man given a life sentence with illness and his wife who accompanies him on his last expedition to see the places that held value for him in his life. Though that makes it sound like the protagonist of the book is the 50 year old Ambrose, I felt in the end, that it is his wife - named Zipper - who is the real hero of the novel.

Though I found the book dragged a bit in the middle, it is a short read and most people could read it in a solid afternoon or over the course of a few days on the subway commute to work.