You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.īoth comments and pings are currently closed.ģ Responses to ““The Imperfectionists” by Tom Rachman” On Tuesday, July 6th, 2010 at 7:45 am and is filed under 2010 Books. This was a short, intense read, far more sad than I’d expected because I cared so much about the paper and its people. Those who have worked at a newspaper or in a copy department will likely recognize many of the characters. In its workplace dynamics and relationships, the small joys and the big tragedies, this book often reminded me of Joshua Ferris’ Then We Came to the End. I read the end of that chapter several times, marveling at the swiftness of its punch, even as I continued to wish it had gone differently. Then in a very few lines, the knife twist occurs. Near the end of the book, I was exulting as one character’s chapter seemed to be ending without tragedy. This book has moments of terrible, terrible sadness, if only because I cared so deeply for the characters who experienced them. I kept hoping for them to be happy, and ached for them when tragedy occurred. But it’s the characters that drew me in and held me. This book tells a lot with very little Rachman’s background in journalism shows itself in his eye for detail and in the sharp jabs of humor. Over the book, all of these overlap and interweave. In between are brief pieces of the paper’s history. Most are employees of the paper, but a few are peripheral: a reader, an applicant, and a girlfriend. There are eleven chapters, each focusing on one character, which are also linked short stories. The balance sheet is a catastrophe, losses mount annually, the readership is aging and dying off. The paper is hardly at the cutting edge of technology–it doesn’t even have a website. Rachman’s first novel is about a struggling international newspaper and the people involved with it. It lodged on my radar, then was recommended to me by the Biblioracle at The Morning News (Great fun for book geeks like me.) So when I found it on the shelf at Half Price Books, well, who was I to pass it by when the universe was so obviously putting it in my path? (Moi, good at rationalization?)
I read about this book first at Entertainment Weekly, then again online somewhere. But finishing Volume 1, not to mention schlepping it everywhere for a month, made me want to take a wee break, which I did over the long weekend with Tom Rachman’s The Imperfectionists. Yes, yes, I know I’m supposed to be reading The Confusion, volume 2 of Neal Stephenson’s Baroque Cycle.
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