Bests & Worsts Reviews from Amazon

...that's why I bought it, but I had to quit after 167 pages. The temptation was there after 60 pages, but I steeled myself and fought on - alas, in vain. I must admit defeat. The story is about 2 people, one a doorkeeper in a fancy Parisian building where only hoity-toity elite live; the other, a twelve year old girl who plans to kill herself because life is absurd, because no matter how much you struggle you end up in the same golden fishbowl as an adult (that is, you end up disappointing your younger self, and conforming to vain dictates). Now, basically nothing happens until page 167, except that one old dude dies, and an old Japanese dude moves into the building. So this is a novel of IDEAS, thoughts that must carry all the water, since there is no action. Very well, let's then look at some ideas: First of all, there is the idea that a young girl wants to kill herself because life has no meaning. How very French, you say. It's not that she's poor, or depressed, or terribly ugly and shunned by others. Oh, no, she has decided that life is useless, and she plans to kill herself and set the building on fire (when nobody's there, of course). Eff this, I say, as a father myself - a little supersmarty deciding that life has no meaning before she has even had a chance to live, just based on OBSERVATIONS. And then she writes in her journal, all sorts of profound thoughts, like how a little misstep ruins things in life and sport (she knows both from TV and books): "all those things that pass before us, which we miss by a hair and which are botched by eternity"; and then she has another idea, about how literature is a television, showing us all the things we have missed. Yes, for sure: there never is another chance to make up for your mistakes, and literature shows a mirror to the world. That's why I never try anything if I fail once and why I read Dostoevsky (to see the nineteenth century Russia I could never visit). I'm being ironic, in case you can't tell. I mean if this is a novel of ideas, let's take it on at the level of ideas, no? (aside from the fact that I think that a novel should have both ideas and action of some sort). What is with the doorkeeper being all snobbish about how superior she is to the rich people because she reads Tolstoy and has a cat named Leo whereas they are big dumb phonies? I mean she revels in it: "And I sit meditating, savoring the unexpected and incongruous nature of our conversation. Who has ever heard of a maid and a concierge making use of their afternoon break to ponder the cultural significance of interior decoration? You would be surprised by what ordinary little people come out with." Well, no, see. I lived in North America, and I know plenty of people who read and don't have academic jobs, of PhD's doing menial labor, of drunks in bars having read more than the average college professor. This kind of reverse cultural snobbishness is just as bad as the illness it attacks: yes, the people in that building are snobbish, rich, insufferable pricks -but so are you, Madame Michel, with you worship of Japan (have you ever been there?), with your displays of culture, with your so-called profound thoughts. Sorry for the rant, but I think this book deserves it.