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Title: Vain effort
Review: It is easy to assign quite a few positive literary judgements to Markovits' novel: the text is carefully constructed, the author is well-read, the images are well-chosen and so on. Still, he doesn't manage to captivate neither the reader nor his imagination. The points Markovits has to make are not trivial, but they aren't new either. As a consequence, the whole text appears to be a literary "etude" rather than a work of art.The characters are passed on from chapter to chapter - each a short story in itself. The spotlights from each form the "whole picture" in the end. But due to the novel's fine but rather artificial construction, the detail spent on character description is finally lost: all is artifice without live.Through Markovits' need for controlling his characters as well as his style, the whole text seems strangely out-of-date, as if he had written it along the rules set down in a creative-writing-guide from the fifties.
