Oh, jeez. This sounded right up my alley. Contrary to other reviewers, I think Flynn spent too much time on the main characters - as uninteresting as they were, maybe it would have worked better if he stopped trying to say anything about them and just let them be stock plot vehicles. No, instead he goes on at bizarrely indulgent length about these self-satisfied characters. Vaguely pathetic husband who thinks he's better than he is; vaguely modern Wife With A Real Job who thinks she's better than he is too; Good-Hearted Religious Figure who also sees value in science, in order to be friendly to the modern agnostic/spiritual sci-fi reader; simple peasant who acts as a vehicle for GHRF's vague feel-good religiousy wisdom. Listening to any of these characters talk to each other is a singularly miserable experience, made worse by how Flynn really thinks he's providing insight on complex characters. And oh, how brilliant he thinks he is.His biggest crime, though is the peppering of the text with useless tidbits out of the English in order to make the book sound more intellectual. (For disclosure: while I'm only fluent in English, I grew up with a fair bit of Spanish and a smaller bit of Hebrew, later learning a bit of Mandarin Chinese and Yiddish, and teaching myself to read Cyrillic characters; with the appropriate language dictionary I can make quick work of short pieces of text in most languages I've dealt with so far, and my biggest obstacle to polylinguality is lack of persistence in retaining vocabulary.) There are a few reasons to switch language in the middle of a text:* There is a specific need to use a word or words in the specific language (this is why when Nabokov is translated, specific words are not). Maybe the word doesn't have a good translation, and so its usage by other-language speakers is something that happens with some commonality. Maybe it's normally said in that language despite capacity for translation, and to say it otherwise would be strange. Sometimes it's just logical for the character: one might say "That's the way it is" while another might say "Cést la vie", and if saying the latter, the reader will usually understand that the character is making a choice to say it in French, and will probably understand what it means or at least be able to infer its meaning.* The intended readers will understand the language used, or at least most of it. For example, a book in Spanish and English written to be accessible specifically to people with the experience of growing up bilingual in those two languages. For that matter, certain academically specific language fits into this definition too. This gets into complicated author choices, and unless you really know why you're not translating or defining, you should err on the side of translating or defining, or make it clear that the book comes with prerequisites of knowledge (again like many academic texts, which may state a brief definition of some terms while stating that other terms should be familiar to anyone with ____ knowledge).* It's necessary for the characters or story, and translated as necessary for the reader to be involved; if not translating because it's expected that the readers won't understand and don't need to, readers who do understand should be kept in mind. It's not a book, but Firefly is a great example of using a different language as it was necessary for the characters and story in a way that didn't require translation, while totally ignoring what it's like to actually be someone who understands that language. What the show got right is that with a word here or there, context fills in meaning if the reader doesn't understand those words; for those who do, hopefully, if there's any additional information in the translation it's unimportant to the plot and not distracting from it due to the author using a word that actually has a completely different and irrelevant meaning. The more text not in the primary language, the more a reader who doesn't understand the text has to be prepared to skim through what they're going to read as avaoxdn snelau s nvavsvvvv afelivserlv, scowense murisadc.It's not a bad thing to include language outside of whatever the book is written in, but when you do for no apparent reason, you sound like a pretentious tool and, often, are a pretentious tool. After yet another instance of Flynn having a character remark to themself several sentences in German or Latin or something - perhaps a logical choice for the character because of their background - and then not translate it at all, I wondered what the purpose of the language switching was and came up dry. As near as I could tell, the sentences were some sort of commentary on the character's outlook on the world (which, as mentioned, was already a waste of text), and there was no apparent reason to put a block of text in where a few words would impart similar meaning and depth, other than to up the word count.I gave up. After a few chapters any bit of plot that I was interested in was so loudly drowned out by the overwhelming pretentious twittishness and utter lack of anything to be pretentiously twittish about that I couldn't do it any longer. Is there something worthwhile to pushing through this book? Other reviewers tend to suggest nothing that can't be found elsewhere done better, but I don't know for myself and with luck I never will be so lacking for something to read that I do find out.
This book and I had a frustrating, love-hate relationship. We went to the movies and out to nice dinners. We went for long walks along the river. Then we battled over who should make the bed and who should empty the dishwasher. We fought and said hurtful things. But we also had some great make-up sex. The only thing as memorable as the love in this relationship was the enmity. Hence the three stars in my rating.First, the things I hated:Mr. Flynn apparently speaks several languages, including German, French, and Latin. He might also be familiar with Ancient Greek and Middle High German. That’s great for him. I am impressed by, and envious of, people who know lots of languages. I do not, however, appreciated it when those people show off their ability to me. I don’t speak or read German or French. I certainly don’t speak or read Latin, Ancient Greek, or Middle High German. So when Mr. Flynn writes entire sentences (in some instances entire paragraphs) in those languages I don’t know what he’s trying to tell me. Sometimes I can figure it out from context and but often I can’t, and I simply don’t have the inclination to pull up my web browser every time I hit some German or Latin and look it up. Maybe Mr. Flynn’s use of languages doesn’t bother you; maybe you know some of them or you don’t mind looking them up every three pages. But it really bothered me. At a couple of places it turned me off so much I had to put the book down ... and I almost didn’t come back.The priest, Dietrich, is way too clever. Not just too clever, but too enlightened and too open-minded for a Catholic priest in 14th century Europe. I had to suspend disbelief to take Dietrich seriously. But, that wasn’t so bad. I rolled my eyes a few times but it didn’t piss me off like the languages.The different writing styles used to fashion the medieval storyline and the modern storyline. I actually enjoyed both storylines and felt, for the most part, that they intertwined and connected pretty well. But it also felt like they were written by different authors. Maybe that was intentional? I don’t know. But instead of coming across as thoughtful I thought it came across as lazy, like Mr. Flynn just cut-and-pasted from his earlier novella of the same name. I haven’t read the earlier novella so I don’t actually know.The final thing I didn’t like: the end of the book felt sudden and rushed. It was like the author just got tired of writing, or maybe ran up against the publisher’s deadline, so he threw the remaining plot points in, put the cap on, and called it a book. The last 20 or 30 pages just didn’t seem as thoughtfully or carefully written as the rest of the book. Unfortunately this meant the book ended on a bad note for me, which probably contributed to me giving it three stars instead of four.Now, the things I loved:I’ve never read historical fiction that did such a good job of portraying the “alien” mindset of humans from another time period. Flynn understood something I had never given much thought: that humans living in another time period can be just as “alien” as any aliens. Just like plenty of sci-fi authors make the mistake of putting human brains in alien bodies, plenty of authors would make the mistake of putting 21st-century human brains in 14th-century human bodies. Flynn didn’t make that mistake. The medieval humans in Eifelheim were at least as alien to me (more alien in some ways) than the extra terrestrials. I don’t know how Flynn did that, but it gave me no end of fascination.Next, I loved the conflict between the medieval villagers. I loved the parallels between their conflict and the conflict in the modern storyline. Even more, I loved the parallels between the medieval villagers’ conflict and the conflict in our society today ... and this brings me to the thing I loved most of all about Eifelheim ...THE LOVE. Some of those medieval Christians exhibit love that ought to shame many a modern-day “Christian.” Dietrich and a few others take the command to “love your neighbor” very seriously.So many people forget that Jesus gave us two unambiguous, incontrovertible commands to hold above all others: love God, and love your neighbor. (Matt. 22, v. 34-39.) Dietrich recognnizes that Jesus placed no qualifications on his command to love your neighbor. Jesus didn’t say to love only those that look like you, talk like you, and think like you. So Dietrich embraces his new neighbors with unconditional love. I believe this is a message of which we all--regardless of personal faith--can use a reminder now and again. Perhaps it's the message that, more than any other, if it’s really taken to heart by people of all creeds, can save humanity from itself. I know, I know ... that’s cheesy, unrealistic, pie-in-the-sky thinking. But so what. I say love your neighbor and see what happens. What have you got to lose (besides getting the plague or being burned at the stake)?
What do You think about Eifelheim (2006)?
Eifelhiem is vaguely reminiscent of Connie Willis and is also similar to the writing style of Geraldine Brooks. One of the most interesting aspect of this story is the description of medieval philosophy mixing with contact with an alien race. Like Alienation and Peter Jackson’s film District 9 (and I imagine that Flynn’s aliens resemble the District 9 prawns somewhat) the author also creates an allegory to examine and explore xenophobia in all its forms. This is a good description of middle ages and the Christian church of that time but elements of a Saturday Night Live-esque dark comedy seems to poke through frequently and I am sure that was unintentional. Told in alternating narratives, the first and most frequent is of 1348 Germany, through the voice of a village pastor and the second is of modern times and of scientists researching the odd history of the little town; Flynn does a good job of changing his writing style to match the perspective. Interesting and entertaining, it could use some more stringent editing. There are many slow parts to the book, where the narrative dragged into tedium, however, the author provides a good ending and winds up the tale very well, worth the effort to get there.
—Lyn
But even though you could not finish it you still said it was okay under the Goodreads rating systemWas it truly not worth reading at all.How bad does a book have to be to be a total yuck
—Brooke
First of all, a shout out of thanks to Ceridwen who, in reviewing this book on Goodreads, introduced it to me. It was a great review BTW and you should read it too. We don’t often talk of the minor characters in novels: the walk-on parts with a few lines and no names. I think for this review, I just want to focus on two side characters. They are not terribly important, but their stories and the different trajectories they take lend added resonance to the main story. Julie Cao is a researcher and librarian. She comes into the story when Tom Schwoerin shows up in her library to conduct further research on the phenomenon of Eilfelheim. Theresia Gresch is a herb woman and healer who lived in the village of Eilfelheim when it was still known as Oberhochwald some 600 years before Julie. Both meet the aliens, the Kranken. Theresia meets them in the flesh; Julie only via documents and the stories told in them. Although perhaps it would be closer to the truth to say that Julie is the one who truly meets the aliens through her empathy and her imagination as Theresia never really sees them at all. All she sees, all she can see, are the images of devils in her head, put there by her religious beliefs and the rape she suffered as a child. That Michael Flynn so thoroughly fills out the inner lives of these two side characters is testimony to one reason why I loved this book. That their divergent stories so heartbreakingly echo the story’s theme of the need to reach out with empathy, to try to connect regardless of how cracked a glass it is that we look through, that was the other reason.
—Whitaker
