The Imperfectionists: A Novel by Tom Rachman

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When I finished this book my first thought was: “Just what genre is this supposed to be?”. I suppose it’s .. Literary Fiction? But I’m not really quite sure.

I’m also in the middle on it. The entire book felt as if it were short stories all circling about one central theme, the newspaper. I got the feeling the author wanted to make the paper itself the main character of the book and to an extent he succeeded. However, I’ve already read a book this year with an inanimate object as the main “character” (see: A Romance on Three Legs) and was thoroughly impressed by Katie Hafner’s treatment of the subject and the people involved around it. Sadly, Tom Rachman’s book fell a bit short as a result.

That’s not to say it wasn’t interesting, because it was. The issue was – I was more interested in the people who worked and were connected through the newspaper then I was with the newspaper itself. I had little to no interest in the history of the paper or the people who created it because their lives, in comparison to the others stories being told, were dull.

And this is a big pet peeve of mine but in no way influenced my rating of this novel. I really dislike pages upon pages of italics being used, especially when they could have been avoided by a simple date/place stamp. It’s difficult to read and really off-putting and made me struggle more than I should have. Does anyone else have this problem when it comes to huge chunks of books italicized?

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