| Title | : | The Nobodies Album (Chinese Edition) |
| Author | : | |
| Rating | : | |
| ISBN | : | 7544264769 |
| ISBN-10 | : | 9787544264761 |
| Language | : | Chinese |
| Format Type | : | Paperback |
| Number of Pages | : | 304 |
| Publication | : | First published January 1, 2010 |
The Nobodies Album (Chinese Edition) Reviews
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Carolyn Parkhurst makes me want to write novels. "The Dogs of Babel," one of my favorite books, reads like it was written effortlessly.
The skill involved in crafting "The Nobodies Album" is a little more apparent. The premise is that best-selling author Octavia Frost has decided to rewrite the endings of each of her books. The original and revised endings are woven throughout the book, as Octavia reconnects with her estranged son, a rock star, who has been accused of murdering his girlfriend.
My only criticism of "The Nobodies Album," is that the original endings don't read to me like actual book endings. There's a lot of recap to give readers the sense that they've read the entire book. I'm willing to forgive that, however, because for the most part, I found the excerpts from her fictional books as engaging as the plot of the "real" novel.
I didn't care for the excerpts from the first two novels Octavia rewrites, and worried that as I got to these dramatic interludes that I'd get tired of the formula and want to skim through them. But that wasn't the case. Within "The Nobodies Album," Parkhurst has developed four or five other multi-layered, revelatory novels that enhance Octavia's story.
The murder mystery itself is not exactly Hitchcockian, but "The Nobodies Album" is more of a family drama than it is a mystery novel. It's suspenseful and affecting. I loved it.
Like the best novels, I found it difficult to put down, and was sorry when it ended. -
I loved Parkhurst writing, how she so precisely describes human emotion where I can connect with the moment and say "yes, I know what you're talking about; I've felt that too." I love it when a book captures my own epiphanies and experiences in life and feeds them back to me.
It is because of this that I connected with Octavia Frost. Battling regrets in her personal life, she writes a novel compiled of the endings of her previous works with new endings. On the day she is submitting the project to her editor, she learns that her estranged, rock-star son has been arrested for the murder of his girlfriend. I think I enjoyed Milo's character more than Octavia's, not because I liked him more but because I didn't. He was a complex character I enjoyed exploring as much as Octavia did from outside his inner circle.
As she sets out to redevelop a relationship with him and delve into his innocence or guilt, her story is dispersed with the excepts from this novel of regrets. As a literary device, showing that Octavia had regrets and that an author always puts herself in her novels, I enjoyed the excerpts, but it didn't always work realistically. The excepts worked as summaries of these fictitious novels so I never believed they were actual excerpts of last chapters. They seemed more like discarded ideas that weren't enough of a story for an entire novel. My other issue with the excerpts were the interruption. The shorter ones I did not mind, but a couple of them were lengthier tandems that I would have liked.
My other complaint about the book would be the ending (no spoilers). It wasn't bad, but after Octavia's comment (which I can't find right now) that an ending should not be predictable but the reader should feel like it was the only logical conclusion, I was expecting that sort of conclusion. Instead I was given an ending like the excerpts, a summary that wasn't inevitable. It read more like an epilogue. I get the correlation to the excerpts and that Octavia did have to accept the ending her life was heading toward, that she could change her regrets, but I would have preferred to be wowed.
They are few and minor complaints. Since this was an ARC, there were also several mistakes, mostly with punctuation, but I expect will be fixed by the release. Even though it took me a good week to read this story, I was into it and savored much of it. Overall, I think Parkhurst is a very talented author. I will be checking out her other books, which I rarely am inspired to do. When I can find them, I'll come back and list some of my favorite quotes. -
I'm not sure what to do with this book. There were aspects I really liked but didn't like in the context of this story. I was bored throughout a good portion of the tale. Author Mommy playing detective pissed me off and the resolution to whodunnit would have made me throw this book across the room had it been a physical object. Ok, that's not quite true, I just sighed and rolled my eyes when the case was solved and was all, "Really?"
I do like the idea of an author rewriting the endings to all her books and publishing the collection in a volume. I like the idea of moving through a tragedy and benchmarking points of healing with new endings to, essentially, a bunch of best-selling counseling sessions (the novels). Actually, I found that I really wanted to read all the excerpted books. They sounded interesting. However, as a plot device, they were heavy handed. It was almost painful to hear at which stage of grief the author was in when she wrote each novel and how the revised endings showed her healthy healing. While it all served to frame the woman for us, psychologically, each time a novel popped up, I was thrown out of the main story in a jarring fashion. I'm not sure it really helped me appreciate...why can't I remember her name? Olivia! The author's name is Olivia. I think had Olivia not been trying to solve a murder case, had she not been so... Ok. Hold up. I need to take a moment to discuss Olivia. She's narrating the tale so you're thrown in with her immediately. She's both self-involved and a bit batty but also amazingly self-aware. I guess a lot of writers are like this, always in their heads because that's where their stories are but somehow very understanding of who they truly are despite the veneer of crazy they seem to adopt. It was frustrating to go along with her being all flippy and silly but then to have her check herself and bring reality back to the table. It was a little rollercoastery and while it was often amusing, it was also often grating. Back to the review: Had Olivia not been so cartoonish throughout the story, had she been less nutty comic amateur sleuth, the insights to her emotional state via her novels may have worked better but the novels seemed more literary and the story seemed more Sue Grafton-lite. I didn't feel like they meshed well.
Seriously, though, I would totally love to read Cry Baby Bridge and all her others, just not in the body of this particular novel. -
I received an advance copy of this book free through a giveaway here on GoodReads. Doubleday took an interesting marketing tact here; I was told when I won that, although I'm not required to write a review of the book, that that was kind of the idea and they hoped I'd review it. Sadly, I'm not sure they'll like the review I have to write about this one.
First, though, I want to say that I really like Parkhurst's work. I thought The Dogs of Babel was a wonderful book, and Lost and Found was a fun adventure. However, The Nobodies Album doesn't come close to equalling Parkhurst's earlier work. There are bits and pieces that are lovely, but overall the book was disappointing.
The protagonist, Octavia Frost, is a novelist whose estranged son Milo, a rock star, is suspected of murder. The book explores the murder mystery as well as Octavia's relationship with Milo and the past events that caused Milo to exclude her from his life. Interspersed with the main narrative are excerpts from Octavia's latest book project: she sets out to rewrite the endings to each of her previous novels, giving a new twist to the work she'd published before. We see a jacket copy description of each book, the last chapter as it was originally published, and a new rewritten ending.
The problem with this conceit is that, unfortunately, it really doesn't work here. The "chapters" are nothing like what an actual last chapter of a novel would be--they read more like the second half of a short story. There's a lot of summing up of key plot points, as if the characters knew that they would be represented only by this one chapter, and events mentioned on the "jacket copy" description happen in this last chapter, which would never be the case in an actual book. Plus the chapters were not very interesting--I wouldn't want to read the books that they were concluding. If Octavia Frost were a real writer, I can't imagine how she'd have published anything at all, let alone this stuff. I also couldn't see how most of this was really applicable to the main story: Octavia's relationship with her son. The chapter from the book that drove them apart, yes, but the rest of it? Not so much. I also didn't really know why Octavia made the changes she did--in some cases, she gave her characters a gentler, kinder ending, but in other cases she whipped out something completely devastating. I didn't really see how these chapters and these revised endings showed us a change in Octavia's character.
Italo Calvino did something similar in If on a Winter's Night a Traveler, except he did it well. Calvino interspersed the first chapters from several imaginary novels throughout his book. Each of these first chapters completely drew me in--the writing was wonderful and each story was compelling--I would have read every single book he writes the first chapter of! These first chapters are also integral to the story that Calvino tells throughout the book. It's an amazing novel. Granted, first chapters are better for this sort of thing than last chapters, since first chapters are intended to draw you in, and last chapters by necessity rely on the emotions you've built up over reading the book to that point, which in this case I didn't have since I hadn't read Octavia's "books". Understanding this, though, doesn't really endear Parkhurst to me--it just makes me wonder why she set herself up like that. Having read Calvino, Parkhurst's book seems like a sad imitation and, really, a failure at what she intended to do.
And that's terrible, because there's a lot of good stuff in this book. Octavia as a character is kind of a Debbie Downer with no sense of humor, but by the end, I was rooting for her to reconcile with Milo--that took some good writing. There were some beautiful passages throughout the book, and I thought the last chapter--the actual last chapter--was very lovely; the ending actually turned me around and kept me from writing a completely scathing review. The story about Octavia and her son didn't need all that filler of those extra chapters, is what I'm saying here. It's a strong enough story to stand on its own.
If I'd picked this book up and not been familiar with the author, I wouldn't have found it to be such a disappointment. However, as a fan of Parkhurst's previous work, particularly The Dogs of Babel, I feel really, really let down. She is capable of so much better than this. I cried at the end of Dogs of Babel. With The Nobodies Album I was just glad to be done. -
Two mysteries are intertwined in this third novel by Carolyn Parkhurst. The first occurred 18 years ago and both launched Octavia Frost's success as an author and ultimately, led to her estrangement four years ago from her son Milo. The event was an accident that took the lives of her husband and four year old daughter when Milo was only nine. However, the details of that event, and the uncoiling of Octavia and Milo's relationship is told in fragments as the novel proceeds.
The second mystery is unfolding in the present. Milo, now 27, is a successful song-writer, part of a band called Pareidolia. Just as she is about to submit her newest manuscript to her editor, Octavia learns, through the brutal crawl of the Times Sqare Ticker, that her son Milo has been arrested, and charged with the bludgeoning death of his fiancee. Octavia wants to believe Milo is innocent, but knows so little about who her son has become. What little she knows has been gleaned from website gossip, news clips, song lyrics and interviews. It conjures a touching image of parents forced to follow their grown children's lives by stalking their facebook pages.
The story is narrated in first person by Octavia. In the persona of an author she confides to the reader details of her craft. She bypasses the route of entertaining her readers, seeking instead to jar them from complacency: “You wish for a way to pull the story back out; you grow resentful of the very breath that pushed those words into the air. Stories like this have become a specialty of mine....Read my story, walk through those woods, and when you get to the other side, you may not even realize that you're carrying something out that you didn't have when you went in. A little tick of an idea, clinging to your scalp or hidden in a fold of skin.” She calls them stories no one wants to hear. It's a clever conceit, fusing the real author Parkhurst's voice with that of her character. In the persona of a character in the story, much of Octavia's narrative reads like a soliloquy.
Octavia explores the process of grief both in her narrative and in the books she writes. The manuscript, entitled “The Nobodies Album”, that she is about to deliver is a rewrite of the final chapters of seven of her novels. Each chapter and its rewrite is paired. The connecting theme is loss: the impossibility vs. the possibility of transcending grief. It's an odd choice for an author to make, Octavia acknowledges. It violates the customary transaction between author and reader. It is an apparent capitulation to modern day self-indulgence. It violates an expectation of inevitability flowing from the situations and characters depicted in a novel. However, the exercise is also an expression of the complexity of grief, a complexity glossed over by the prefabricated scripts of the media that seem to inundate the social consciousness. The forms her characters fashion from grief vary: cauterize it with rage; distance it with repression; shape memory to honor an idea of humanity; reforge it into mythology. The malleability of memory is yet another allusion to the idea of pareidolia.
The most vivid characters in this book are Milo and the older friend who has taken in, a former rock star named Roland. Unlike Octavia they reveal themselves unselfconsciously. That sense of candor gives them authenticity. Octavia hears an unreleased song Milo wrote. It's the only song where he alludes to his long dead sister. It was Milo at age four who thought of the idea of the “Nobodys Album,” a collection of songs that haven't been written yet. As for Roland, he has his own complicated history with the deceased. Even so, he presents a dry British wit that modulates his own quiet grief. He is the one element of stability amid this maelstrom of volatility.
This is a book with more cerebral than emotional impact. The story revisions to some extent build suspense. In addition to interrupting the present-day narrative, they contain clues about the accident and Octavia and Milo's relationship. However, only a second reading will reveal these nuggets of truth. Not all readers will be patient enough to do this. A second problem is that the technique of storytelling overshadows the sense of the characters. Readers will spend more effort puzzling over their reactions to Octavia's manuscript than to the dilemmas of the actual characters. Nevertheless, Parkhurst still remains one of my favorite writers. She is inventive. Each of her three novels is quite different. Her observations are filled with unconventional truths. Although this is my least favorite of her three novels, it still rates 4 stars. -
I’ve been craving a proper literary novel, but this one far exceeding any expectations. Or, technically, met every expectation I’ve come to have of such a reading experience…immersion, entertainment, beauty. Ok, that’s reductive, but those are the basic elements a book ought to have. Nobodies Album was an absolutely random find while browsing through the available library ebooks under psychological fiction. The premise and the title intrigued me and then the novel drew me in completely from the first chapter. Told from a perspective of a middle aged author of some renown who finds out through a newspaper of all things that her estranged son, a famous musician, has been accused of killing his girlfriend, this has all the elements of the murder mystery, but it isn’t one. At least not primarily. This is a story about motherhood or, on a broader scale, about families, the delicate alchemy of love, the complicated balance of fitting in, the intricate complexities of acceptance and forgiveness. Octavia, the novel’s protagonist, is a fascinating character. She survives a terrible tragedy that tears her family in two (literally) and proceeds to (directly and indirectly) to process her grief through writing fiction, which, despite its therapeutic effects, leaves her in a sort of isolation, all the more pronounced since her estrangement with her son Milo. In a misguided act of redemption she is working on a book of revised endings for her novels, in fact she is giving them happy endings, while trying to find her own, a second chance with Milo. Now I’m thinking that description sounds vaguely like women’s fiction of something and no, absolutely it isn’t that. The structure alone is much too clever for a subgenre, the way it intertwines the main narrative with Octavia’s fictional ones, the way the latter compliment the former, the emotional intelligence and terrific descriptions…this is proper, immensely satisfying at that, literature. Sure it helped that it involved so many plot aspects I’m partial to…books about books/authors, murder mystery, and so on, but it seems that with a talent like this the author might have a compelling washing machine manual even. I enjoyed this book tremendously, in fact this is one of the best ones I’ve read in a while and I read a lot. Just the pleasure of being under a hypnotic spell of a good story told well is lovely. What a terrific find this was. Enthusiastically recommended.
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When we first meet Octavia Frost, Dear Reader, she could come across as a smug, knowledgeable woman more proud of her novels than her estranged rock star son. But, as with other things going on in The Nobodies Album, don't come to a hasty conclusion. There's a reason why Octavia and Milo haven't spoken in years.
Octavia is in Times Square, going to her publishers to drop off her latest project. It's called The Nobodies Album, a name that came from her son, and is new endings of her earlier works. But Octavia is not introduced as a woman who wants a second chance. Instead, her genesis for the reader is a meditation on how she affects the life of every reader of her works, how she puts ideas in their heads that were not there before. When she sees on the Times Square newscrawl that her rock star son has been arrested in San Francisco for the murder of his lover, she's on the next plane. Oh yes. She wants a second chance, the opportunity to rewrite her own life.
In between the segments of the main storyline of what happens when Octavia flies across the country to see if her son will let her back in, and what she can do to help him, are interspersed the original and revised endings of her novels. These are stunning pieces of meta-fiction that add so much knowledge to what happened to this family, and a solid understanding of how those who survived a horrific accident have been shaped.
There is a lot going on in this novel, but it's all paced perfectly. As Octavia meets the people now most important in her son's life, she also shows how people find out about celebrities in today's online world. She's nearly a cyber stalker. Later, the tables are momentarily turned on her. It's another layer to the main story of how people who love want a second chance when things go wrong. They just want to know what's going on, to do a better job, brush the mistakes away, make the connections stronger.
Parkhurst, whose Dogs of Babel was so appreciated, has much to say about writing itself and what it demands of a writer. She also has commentary dropped in here and there about what readers may think they discern about the writer herself based on the works. Parkhurst even has Octavia do the same thing about a fellow writer. And not by interpreting that writer's books, but by watching a movie based on a bestselling novel. We all know how faithful those adaptations are.
It's this kind of human foible presentations that keep The Nobodies Album, well, human. Parkhurst has tremendous ideas about ficiton and the process of writing, about second chances in life and how parents mess things up without meaning to hurt. She also has kept this novel firmly grounded in realistic characters who are not perfect and who are viewed through a lens of compassion. Finding out about the murder makes for a pretty zippy story, too.
Present all of that with the distinctive voice of Octavia Frost, an accomplishment in its own right, and The Nobodies Album is a lotta book in roughly 300 pages. -
I saw Richard III, a play when I was 21 years old. I was in London at the time with my sister. With all the Shakespeare talk along with the British accents, I understood very little of it. In fact, I only remember the scattering of the white and red rose petals at the end. Something about the war of the roses. I was bored throughout. I left the theater yawning. Another girl from our group was deeply affected and and kept talking about the beautiful symbolism.
Phht! Symbolism. Boring.
I saw Richard III again when I was well into my thirties. I couldn't believe how much I had missed the first time.
Back to the book, The Nobodies Album. It takes a certain amount of experience, wisdom, and tragedy to interpret events in a certain way. It takes experience, wisdom, and tragedy for texture to be added to our own lives and meaning to take shape. It takes even more experience, wisdom, and tragedy to accept that endings are what they are based on our choices due to our experiences and how we have interpreted them.
In other words, our lives are one big Rorschach test.
Carolyn Parkhurst offered me a rare glimpse into a brilliant writer's brain. There is constant dialogue, testing, questioning, interpreting and answering. Sometimes the answers were painfully difficult to swallow as they hit so close to home. It is so far from my John Dorian (Scrubs) dialogue I constantly have going inside my head. I'm trying to connect humor. Octavia, the protagonist, is constantly trying to create meaning. The truth is, we are all creatures seeking patterns and predictability.
Octavia is rewriting the ending of all 7 of her published novels. As she narrates her current experience, dropping back to her past to provide a point of reference, it is clear that her stories, as any story, could take many different directions. The last chapter of each novel is intertwined within the book.
Yet I can't help falling back on my desire to create meaning (based on my own experiences) and question if Octavia, with her name taking on the root of the number 8, is symbolic of her 8th novel, the one not published.
Or perhaps it is Pareidolia.
I was going for witty, but I'm afraid I ended up with merely odd. Well, I never said I was good with words. Not ones spoken out loud, anyway.
- Octavia Frost -
Octavia Frost, the protagonist in Parkhurst's latest novel, is a bestselling novelist, whose career took off after a family tragedy. With several novels under her belt, Frost thinks she has come up with a revolutionary idea to create an anthology of the last chapters of all her novels, but with different endings. Is it really her novels she wants to rewrite or her own history?
Frost's rock-star son, Milo, has been estranged from his mother; but a murder accusation forces them to confront their issues and reconcile their past. Their relationship is slowly revealed and pieced together out of the pages of Octavia's novels.
Parkhurst alternately mixes Octavia's stories with the present. It was a wonderful way to develop Octavia's character and demonstrate how a person's words and actions are not always a true indication of their feelings and intentions. So often, people wish they had said this or done that, after the fact. I loved how Parkhurst made me question how we reveal ourselves to others and if we could rewrite parts of our past, would it be worth it. Not only was this a well-written and layered family drama; but it was also a great mystery. -
After reading some of the other reviews of this book on goodreads, I am in the minority on thinking this book was just "okay." I'm not even really sure I thought that it was just okay. It is, at best, in my mind, mediocre. The words agonizingly boring come to mind. To me, that's as good as it gets.
Octavia Frost is dropping off a manuscript for her most recent book in NYC when she reads a ticker saying her estranged son, Milo, has been arrested for the murder of his girlfriend. This book is books within books, as her manuscript is rewriting the last chapters of her past seven books. It's feel good and perhaps poignant for some. It's just annoying to me. Especially after the first go-round with the rewrites. It's confusing to me and I didn't want to do it again.
I really wanted to like this because I loved The Dogs of Babel and I thought it would be more of the same fabulousness. Alas, that's not to be. No doubt, Parkhurst is a great writer, but this book I thought fell short of what I was looking for. But like I said, by the reviews, I was definitely in the minority. -
Can we re-write endings? Octavia Frost is delivering a manuscript to her publisher that has rewritten the endings of all her books when she discovers that her estranged son has been accused of murder. Through the old and new endings, as well as in the telling of her story, we learn of her own personal tragedy and how it affected her and her son.
An exploration of love, loss, regret, relationships, and a mother's love for her child. I really liked this book! -
So this book is averaging out to a three, but it is better than that (a lot). Unfortunately, it is also worse. Parkhurst has good insight and there are great moments in here.
She is especially good at the emotional analysis between family members. In a family of four, alliances change frequently and over the course of a childhood, children change. Sometimes (as a parent) you fit best with the child most like you, and sometimes you don't; similar personalities find comfort and recognition in each other, but also rub each other entirely the wrong way at times. Raising kids is TOUGH and doing it alone (whether from divorce or death) is much tougher. I felt like Parkhurst grasped some of this and expressed it well: "I didn't understand yet the way that love can scoop you out; I didn't know each time a new channel of care and attachment forms, it scrapes something else away" and even more so: "But children are people, right from the moment they're born, and in every human relationship there's a question of compatibility. It's quite separate from the matter of love. It's about fit and friction, the carpentry of daily interaction. Some joints dovetail easily, while others scrape at every contact.".
She also totally hit me in the face with the eternal mother-connundrum: "'Time to myself,' that grail forever sought and lost by mothers of young children--that was what I thought I lacked back then. I was always waiting for Mitch to come home or the babysitter to arrive so I could slip away to spend a clandestine hour inside my own mind. And then, coming upon the two of them in a moment as sweet as that one, I'd stand and observe, my heart in my throat, my arms hanging empty." I am so absolutely wonderful at this one. It is the PLEASE KIDS JUST GO AWAY AND GIVE ME A MINUTE TO FINISH. Followed by the finish, and the discovery that everyone else found something fun to do without me. Of course, I can weasel my way in, but I also just all of a sudden feel unnecessary. What we all want (as mothers, I think) is the fabulous pause button in kid's movies about magic. As soon as the kids come in to interrupt, we just lift a hand and time freezes for everyone but us. We finish up and then unfreeze time, so the child is met with a grand hug and a "yes, mom would love to do that". Yes, impossible I know, but there is something unbelievably lonely about living in a family sometimes and this is a key part of it.
She also gets the possessive mother-child relationship in a way that I have seen few people honestly reveal: "All of those nightmare figures, real and legendary, drowning our children in bathtubs and rivers: we are not monsters. We are human. Nothing less, and certainly nothing more. Ordinary women until you appeared, our children, making us into something else. You, floating, a nucleus. You started off inside us: no wonder we think that to protect you we have to consume you." My kids are now 11 and 14; we were young when we started having kids and most of my friends have children younger than 11. My husband and I had many interesting conversations as we watched people become parents (after we were already parents of at least 1, but often 2 kids). We watched how the women went from people we liked to some weird psychotic version of their former selves. Truly, we would state over and over again "having kids makes people a bit crazy, and it's worse for the mother." Or, "we used to like her, but once she had kids she just went off the deep end." I'm not talking about people actually murdering their kids, just losing perspective. I'm sure we underwent it as well, but change is often not noticed from the inside.
And then she also threw in a murder mystery (so there was some plot compelling forward, rather than just a character piece between re-unioning mother and son). Which was just meh. I liked the high drama (many illegitimate kids, lots of money and glamour) of the rock star scene, but it all of a sudden felt like a 2 star plane book (rather than a literary character piece). If she wanted to do murder mystery, she maybe shouldn't have tried to get so deep with the relationships.
And to make matters worse, there is the meta-aspect of the re-written endings. This was just total crap. Okay, the main character is a writer (fine, lots of good ones do that). And she has regrets (fine again, that is the source of her character change and growth). But she only needs to have the idea of the Nobodies Album book. She didn't need to share all of these original and re-written endings with the real reader. I mean, come on. This became a book within a book. And the book within was pieces of 10 books, all of which are under construction. Seriously? What is the gimic here other than to just pad this novel with an extra 50ish pages AND to spill a bunch of story ideas. Really, Parkhurst should have just saved these in case she wanted to use them as separate novels (or not, most of them were odd and terrible ideas).
Overall it was a good book. I wish it had less murder and fewer rock stars. It could have been a 5 star character piece about mother-son relationships and instead she just cheapened it into a bad whodonit (yep, it is the obvious murderer to top it off). I do recommend it, but with caveats. -
I enjoyed the mystery and the characters, particularly the not-always-likeable narrator, bestselling author Octavia Frost. My one complaint is that the insertion of excepts from Octavia’s fictional novels disrupts the flow of the real novel. I get what Parkhurst was going for, but it didn’t quite work for me. Overall, however, I liked it. Special note about the audiobook: it’s fine if you speed it up to 1.25 times regular speed, otherwise it’s too slow to listen to. But at 1.25 times faster, it sounds totally normal and I quite liked the reader at that speed!
-
I thoroughly enjoyed Carolyn Parkhurst's first 2 books, Dogs of Babel and Lost and Found, which were both fast paced, light, and intriguing reads, so I was excited when I heard she had a new book coming out. The idea was certainly unique; the different nature took a bit to get used to but was engaging after that.
Octavia Frost is the best-selling author of 7 novels who has just traveled to New York City to personally hand in the manuscript for what she hopes will be her next novel. In an unprecedented twist, Octavia has changed the endings to all of her novels and compiled them in her new book she's entitled The Nobodies Album in reference to a conversation she once had with her famous rock star son, Milo Frost; the book is also an indirect attempt to re-initiate a relationship with her son with whom she has been estranged for the past 4 years for reasons that are cleverly intertwined with the other plot points.
Upon walking through Times Square, Octavia is gobsmacked when she reads on the news ticker (I assume above the Good Morning America studio -- go GMA! check out my love for GMA and all things New York here) that her son has just been arrested for the murder (MURDER?!) of his girlfriend, Bettina Moffett. Octavia quickly drops her manuscript with her agent, canceling lunch, and rushes out to California where she hopes for the chance to support her son and prove what must be his innocense.
Mingled within the story of Octavia and her son, are the original and revised endings to her previous novels. Each novel is introduced with the title and year of publishing followed by the synopsis from the jacket cover. We then read the entire original ending, and, after that, the parts she changed. This was initially difficult to get used to because of its choppy nature in the narrative and also because I didn't find most of the first featured novel that interesting. After that, though, I was surprisingly entranced within the endings of the other stories, finding that I almost forgot I was reading a slice of a novel within another novel.
The story of Octavia and her son, however, was even more interesting than those endings and was the driving force that kept me hooked. Parkhurst evoked such genuine emotion in her character, Octavia, that I felt as though I were reading the deeply personal reflections of a mother's struggles to reconnect with her son combined with her regrets over her actions that led to their estrangement; the emotions were so genuine that for the majority of the novel I confused myself on more than one occasion, feeling as though I were reading non-fiction. She describes, without necessarily stating bluntly, the way in which she walks on thin ice around her son for fear that if she says or does something wrong she'll be alienated from him again. In addition to the strained nuances of the mother/son relationship, Octavia delves deeply into the life of a writer and cogitates on what it's like to be a writer and how each book is and is not an extension of the authors themselves.
The Nobodies Album was an interesting and satisfying read. While reading it I felt like though I enjoyed it, it wasn't as much as I did with her previous novels. But the more I've thought about it since completing this book, the more I realized how well-done this novel was and how it deserves it's own consideration rather than being compared to the other novels. The one thing I didn't quite catch on to was what each of the stories had to do, if anything, with the primary storyline. They all related in some way to the author's life, but I feel like maybe I missed some of the significance.
Regardless, a good read -- Carolyn Parkhurst has a part of her site dedicated to this book... it's set up like the website for Octavia Frost, and they even have covers to some of the novels we read about in The Nobodies Album. It's sort of fun... check it out!
Taken from my blog at
www.takemeawayreading.com -
Author Octavia Frost is fighting a whole host of personal demons. She's estranged from her rock star son. Her daughter and husband died many years ago in a tragic accident. Since so many of her novels carry an element of personal truth contained within her fictional words, she decides to rewrite the endings of her novels in a supplemental volume titled The Nobodies Album. She'll erase any truth out of the endings and by doing so, may help to erase the pain of her past.
After completing The Nobodies Album she decides to hand-deliver it to her agent in New York. When she arrives there, she finds out some shocking news- her son, Milo, has been arrested for the murder of his girlfriend, Bettina. Shocked and unable to make sense of the tragedy, Octavia flies to San Francisco to try to re-connect with her estranged son. Although she's not welcomed at first, she and Milo slowly form a relationship of sorts, and the events of the past couple of years of Milo's life are slowly revealed.
"The Nobodies Album" was absolutely riveting. I was sucked in from the very beginning, and wasn't released until the very last page. The way is which this story is told is what made it so compelling. Parts of the story are told from Octavia's point of view, but other parts are excerpts from her fictional novel The Nobodies Album. First we read the original ending of one of Octavia's stories, and then we read the revised ending. Each of these stories were relevant to the story of Octavia and Milo in some way and we, as the reader, are the ones who get to decipher how it is relevant. The mystery- did Milo kill Bettina? If not, who did?- is revealed to us piece by piece, and the characters are not privy to any information that we don't have. It was wonderful to be able to figure out the mystery along with Octavia and Milo, and to not know from the beginning who did it. The ending was not at all what I expected that it would be, but in a good way. For once I couldn't see it coming from miles away.
How much I could relate to the characters in a book often determines how much I will like the book in general. Happily, I loved the characters contained within the pages of The Nobodies Album. Octavia was easy to relate to as a woman who has lost so much, and is afraid to lose more. Although we don't get the opportunity to see inside his head, Milo was extremely likable as a heartbroken and often confused rock star who does not remember much of the night in question. Joe, Milo's childhood friend, was someone that you instantly approved of, and even Bettina, who we only get to know posthumously, seemed like someone with a generally likable personality.
Engrossing and often stunning, "The Nobodies Album" is one that you'll want to read as you return to the thought-provoking novels synonymous with the fall season. -
Octavia Frost is on her way to drop off her latest manuscript to her editor in NYC, when she sees a news blurb that her son is accused of murdering his girlfriend. This is only big news because her son is Milo Frost, lead singer of the very popular band Pareidolia. Though it's been more than four years since she's seen her Milo, she flies out to be with him immediately. When she gets there, she meets the colorful cast of characters Milo has surrounded himself with, begins to salvage her relationship, and piece together the specifics of what actually happened on that terrible night.
Parkhurst's novels have yet to be anything less than extraordinary. Dogs of Babel is one of the few books I continue to recommend to anyone who hasn't read it yet. Her second book, Lost and Found, was not quite on par with her first, but was still a fantastic read. And now with The Nobodies Album, she has returned to the gasp-out-loud high impact story I have come to expect from her.
Let me start by saying I often find reading stories-within-stories to be tedious and distracting from the actual story I want to read. But in The Nobodies Album, the pieces flow together seamlessly. In fact, I came to look forward to the excerpts of Octavia's stories, as they were equally as engrossing as the main plot. The whole concept is based around changing the ending to a story after it is written, and in this sense Parkhurst plays with the readers mind, making them wonder if endings truly aren't written in stone (as they say).
Parkhurst's writing gets deep into the psyche of Octavia, a mother having to go through more than her fair share of tragedies. There are some truly graphic scenes that made me have to pause my reading and think of something cheery, just to be able to go on reading again. However, there are plenty of tender moments in the book as well, and I found myself not wanting the book to end so soon.
Parkhurst is an author I will always look forward to reading more of! -
I have been waiting eagerly for something new from Caroyln Parkhurst, and with The Nobodies Album, she does not disappoint. This novel weaves a story about overcoming family tragedy and conflict, with an author’s attempt to rewrite her own history.
While Octavia Frost, a best-selling author, is in the process of publishing a revolutionary tome in which she rewrites the endings to all of her published novels, she discovers that her estranged rock star son has been arrested for murder. Though she hasn’t spoken to Milo in years, she flies across the country to be by his side. From there begins a murder mystery that is as touching as it is tense, as Octavia struggles to repair ties with her son in his darkest days and get to the bottom of what happened on the night of the murder. Interspersed are the rewritten novel endings, which – stroke by stroke – paint a picture of the tragedy that Octavia is trying so hard to leave behind.
Although I’m usually not one for murder mysteries, I flew through this book and enjoyed every second of it. The novel excerpts jarred me out of the story at times, but I found it appropriate – after all, isn’t that what it’s like to live with tragedy? No matter what else you are focused on, it is never far from your mind. Parkhurst is a master of the slow reveal and the details of the story were paced perfectly; the story unfolded both forward and backward as we learned more about the Octavia’s past and Milo’s future.
Readers who love Parkhurst’s other novels will enjoy the new twist on familiar family themes. Fellow writers will be able to relate strongly with Octavia’s observations and quirks – many that only a writer can truly appreciate. And everyone will be swept away by this engrossing tale of family struggles and rising above circumstances. -
This was a really innovative book. It drew me in, and the story was so layered I felt like I was reading in 3-D as opposed to 2-D.
The theme of this book is death, so it's kind of melancholic, thoughtful, and philosophical. Believing the genre to be a straight-up murder mystery, I was surprised that "death" was not an exciting fast-paced type of feel, but rather the thoughtful, slow-paced feel I just mentioned. I was surprised to find that the present-day mystery wasn't nearly as important as the mystery of what happened between Octavia and her son Milo that caused a 4-year rift. Octavia wonders if there was something along the way that if changed could have altered their present relationship and prevent Milo from being in this current situation (a murder suspect of his girlfriend).
I was intrigued that it was told mostly in first person present tense, with a little bit of future tense as well. The tone throughout is very reminiscing.
Perhaps the best part of the book is the inserted "last chapters" from Octavia's books, along with their revised endings. That upped the pace for me, and it was a welcome divergence from the current storyline. Carolyn Parkhurst shows her range with these chapters: mostly different genres and different types of narratives from each other.
I felt challenged when Octavia tells us at the beginning that after reading her books, "whether your life will be better for it or worse, I cannot say. But something's different, something has changed. And it's all because of me." I believe that Octavia Frost, and therefore Carolyn Parkhurst, were both right.
p.s. For those who want to know, this has minimal bad language in it, but when there are bad words, they're f-words. -
I almost didn't read this after I discovered that the author also did Lost and Found, which is by far one of the worst books I have ever read. So glad I gave her another chance because this was wonderful. I love books where you have to figure out the back story on your own even though the narrator speaks as though the reader already knows everything. In this book, the narrator is an author whose son has been accused of murder. The story unfolds in present time, but the real story is in the excerpts from the narrators novels, a final chapter of each one followed by a revised ending (as that is her current project- rewriting the endings of all of her published works). The idea was so fascinating to me, and the stories from her novels scared me though they were not "scary" books. It was unsettling to see so much of the narrator revealed in her stories. None of the stories were autobiographical or even contained characters based on anyone in her life- but you could plainly see her reflections on what happened in her life in her stories. I really recommend this one, it was great and I had a hard time putting it down!
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I finally got around to reading this, even though I won it as an ARC ages ago... It's a story within a story, that has more stories within. Confused yet? The main character is an author who is rewriting the endings of her novels, which are excerpted throughout this novel. The problem is, they read more like short stories to me; I don't quite see how they succeeded as actual novels. There's also a huge detail conveniently left out and revealed at an opportune time, affecting the murder investigation (and therefore the plot). Things like this keep me from giving it more stars, but I did enjoy the book and its unique concept, though it had such an overarching tone of sadness that I'm quite relieved to have turned the last page.
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I love this author. Very unique. And I think it’s brilliant how she basically weaved short stories into a novel. Very clever.
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I didn’t get on with this one at all, and in the end I raced through it just so that it was over.
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The Nobodies Album by
Carolyn Parkhurst is a book unlike any other that I've yet read. The title is taken from a concept the protagonist's son creates - The Nobodies Album contains every song never song, never recorded. Ever heard The Beatles cover of "The Wheels on the Bus"? Well, that's on The Nobodies Album. The concept is extended to the various endings of books that weren't used, weren't written. The different outcomes that could have happened had things gone differently - everything left unsaid.
The book is focused upon that very premise - things left unsaid, things that could have been said differently, chances untaken. The book opens with the protagonist learning that her son, who she hasn't spoken to in over four years, has been accused of murdering his girlfriend. She travels out to see him, and the mystery begins to unfold. Did he do it? Is he capable of doing it? She finds herself wondering that, and wondering if the very act of wondering makes her a bad person...
Carolyn Parkhurst is exemplary at exploring these uncomfortable questions and the spaces between thought and action. The mystery, while satisfying, is secondary to how the characters come in and out of their lives. Even now, months later, I find myself wondering about the characters and the endings - chapters and revisions - presented throughout this text.
Carolyn Parkhurst has a reader for life in me. -
The book about beginnings and endings. But mostly endings. I read the books last few words, full of moments that show beginnings, while crossing the Golden Gate Bridge into San Francisco and saw what the characters witnessed. The ocean spreading out below the bridge and beyond, full of ever changing and infinite conclusions.
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This is a msystery and a story about parenting. Carolyn Parkhurst spoke to the way I often felt I was the wrong person to raise two children who were sometimes perfect and beautiful.
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The protagonist is punchable, sure, but I haven't read anything like it.
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I don't remember what it was that first called this book to my attention, but I suspect that it was my previous experiences with the author in The Dogs of Babel (enthralling, well written and sad) and Lost and Found (a bit jumpy for me in the telling of the tale, with switches between POV, but still compelling.) The basic story here, in The Nobodies Album really captured me. Maybe because I am the mother to a son, maybe because I've often played the "what if" game when looking back, to wonder how life would have played differently. I've wished that do-overs were real. I can think of 2 or three moments in my I would definitely redo completely.
Basic premise: Olivia is an author of moderate success and much personal tragedy (Her husband and young daughter had died together, leaving Olivia and her 9-year old son to pick up the pieces and carry on with life) On the way to deliver her latest manuscript to her publisher, she learns that Milo, her now-estranged rock-star son, has been arrested for the murder of his girlfriend. Olivia's manuscript, The Nobodies Album, takes the last chapters of her previous novels and gives them different endings -- new opportunities for the characters, new interpretations to the stories. Her son's arrest gives her the chance to possibly do the same with her life and their relationship.
The author has interspersed Olivia and Milo's story with the original endings and then the redos of Olivia's books. Given that normally, I really like stories within stories, it was somewhat surprising that I really disliked the interruptions in the basic story line here. I speculate that maybe it was because I was only fed an ending, not told a full tale, or that maybe because I wouldn't have read Olivia's novels, since they were so full of sadness as she worked out the death of her husband and daughter years before. And maybe, it's because I have mixed feelings about alternate endings. (After all, it would have been just plain boring if Eliza had married Freddy, so I can't object to authors changing endings too much!) If you re-write history, especially personal history, do you change who you are? Or can you learn from your mistakes, the things that would have been "re-dos" and grow even more?
I think this is my favorite Parkhurst book of the three I've read, and it has given me much delicious food for thought.
Many thanks to the LibraryThing Early Review program for sending this on (from the July 2010 batch, and arrived mid January 2011.) -
Carolyn Parkhurst is an amazing novelist; if you've never read The Dogs of Babel (2003) then you definitely need to add it to your wish list right away. Her ability to shock readers and to write characters so intimately is truly a gift.
Octavia Frost is a bestselling novelist whose latest publication features re-writes of all the last chapters of all the books she's ever written and is entitled "The Nobodies Album". While en route to delivering the finished manuscript to her editor, Octavia catches a glimpse of a newsreel in which her famous musician son Milo has just been arrested for the murder of his girlfriend. Despite the estranged relationship between her and Milo, Octavia can't help but follow her motherly instincts and fly directly to Los Angeles to offer support to her son. Accompanying this storyline is the side-plot in which Octavia evaluates whether or not her family's past and Milo's upbringing has caused Milo's apparent meltdown. In addition, all of the final chapters from Octavia's "The Nobodies Album" are interspersed throughout Parkhurst's novel, revealing secret details about Octavia's and Milo's family past.
The first page of chapter one in The Nobodies Album is beautifully written and will immediately draw you in, all but demanding your undivided attention. The proud voice of Octavia Frost defends her written works, referring to the impact she has on her audience:
"But isn't that the point -- to write something that will last after the book has
been put back on the shelf?"
Why yes, Octavia, it sure is, and readers will nod with approval upon accepting this truth, knowing right off the bat and feeling in their bones that Carolyn Parkhurst has a fascinating tale in store for us.
The Nobodies Album is undoubtedly an original piece of literature and the book within a book just adds to the richness of the plot. Carolyn Parkhurst has the same effect on me as does Dani Shapiro; both authors write their characters so candidly, open and honest that you can't help but become emotionally involved. The Nobodies Album proves that family is what you make it; blood ties don't necessarily mean you know another person and that your intrusion into their life is always welcome. Parkhurst demonstrates how one must tread carefully when re-entering somebody's life after tragedy has torn apart the relationship.
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