What do You think about Seven Lies (2006)?
I found this to be a disappointing read, all in all. Lasdun writes beautifully, but on occasion he has too fine a temperament to sustain the reader's interest for anything longer than a long short story. But in my opinion, a novel requires more than just endless psychological reflection; it needs at some point the drama of an intensely active life. The novel opens with the narrator having a glass of wine thrown in his face at a cocktail party in New York in 2003 or so. The novel is about why this happened, but given Stefan's past as a dissident poet in the former East Germany, it is not too difficult to guess. The first revelation is therefore not much of a surprise. The problem is that the exact nature of his betrayal is never truly made clear, and it is later revealed by someone other than Stefan that everyone else was doing it anyway. This lowers the gravity of Stefan's crime, such as it was, in my opinion. There is a second revelation right at the end, but for the life of me I could not see how this materially changed the novel's outcome. A surprise, in order to be one, should not only take the reader unawares but change the texture of the novel in some significant way. I felt that the second revelation did not do this: if everyone was a traitor, even those Stefan himself never suspected, no one really was. Perhaps that is ultimately Lasdun's message: do not betray too easily, because it may turn out to be unnecessary. But I think this message, initiated by a merely inconvenient splash of red wine in the face, is not enough to sustain a 200-odd page novel.
—Terry
Not in a horror-flick-gone-wild kind of way, rather in a chilling, squicky fashion. The story is like a particularly horrible, yet riveting car crash. Something verging on obscene, yet radiating a twisted human essence.There's East Germany post-Stalin. With all it's recursive layers of surveillance.There's the protagonist, Stefan Vogel. So explanatory. So lacking intent. So very quick to do the unthinkable for reasons warped-ly almost-understandable.There's Stefan's brother and father and mother. Each grabbing control when they can and slinking away when they must.There's Katje and Kitty and Inge.There's America shining in the distance.And of course the glass of wine. *splash*Let's just say it's starts out ending badly and you read on because you have to know why...
—bannikin
