I sat down at a cafe, ordering myself a Flat White (even though that's not very usual in Norway, so I can consider myself lucky...) and I started reading the book Carthage. It has gotten really good reviews so I was excited to start reading, and after a little while I got pretty into it. The rain was pouring outside, but I was happily wrapped up inside with my book and my coffee.
First of all, the book seemed to me as sligthly unusual. I love travelling novels, love stories and a thriller once in a while - but this book is different to my usual liking. It didn't have a lot of character descriptions, except for the missing girl, the lost daughter. The father is not much described. A scene in the book that I reacted to was the scene where the father thinks he finds his missing daughter, lying down by a waterfall, only to discover that it is a carnage of a dead deer. The descriptions were painful, but I can understand that the author is talented, and it gives a dramatic effect to the plot.
I want to comment the way he writes, and the author uses a lot of more difficult words. It might be my vocabulary in english that can be lacking, but it kind of looks like he is trying to find the most difficult words to make his book more spectacular. It makes the book harder to get through, but it will help me expand my vocabulary - so I should definitely see it as a good thing.
Another thing I want to point out is the section where there is a conversation between his other daughter and her fiance Brett, where the conversation is one-sided. It was difficult to understand the situation at first and I am not a particular fan of this kind of writing, but the more I read, the more poetic the novel got.
These are some of my first impressions, and I can tell that it is a good book that I am definitely going to enjoy. I am excited to read the rest, and also having an excuse to have some me-time, no matter if I read in the bath tub, or sitting down at a nice cafe. What is not to like about that?
