Reading this was like watching a fringe foreign film with subtitles...
919357
This was our book club book last month, I chose it because I was raised in Budapest and was eager to read something that brought back good memories.  This selection didn't cut it by a long shot.  While there was some Hungarian interspersed throughout, the fact that the author failed to once step foot in such a magical city really showed.  Our book club rated this selection with 4 stars on a scale of 10 (10 being a best friend for life and 1 being a shameless waste of paper).  Our readers found the book confusing, sliding from dreams to reality and interchanging characters in the process.  The plot doesn't go anywhere and neither do the characters - a frustrating combination.  The agony was cut short by the fact that it was a quick read.  The artwork for the cover was well done, too bad the content between the two engaging covers didn't provide more structure and development.  Reading this was like watching a fringe foreign film with subtitles that jumps from place to place, character to character without any rhyme or reason.  When it ends you are left scratching your head wondering if you simply "missed something."  In this case, you didn't.
4281180
The grim horror of this Jose Saramago novel is just this side of Chuck Palahniuk. The difference is that the desperate conditions and reprehensible human behavior somehow feel as though they're meant to be instructive rather than gratuitous.

What would happen if one after another, people began to go blind? Would the character one already possesses push through to this new other world that lacks routine and logic? Or would this sudden blindness trigger something else inside?

I would have liked to have been able to read this book in its native language rather than the British English I was limited to. The author, who has used a loose, fluid style that becomes almost lyrical, comments occasionally upon how humorous and absurd some situations would be were anyone able to see them. And I felt that, too. It makes me even more curious about the movie interpretation. How can it possibly come off without some element of comedy? I will find out soon.
911855
Most of this film is in French and it has fixed subtitles that are very good. A small amount of German is also subtitled. Unfortunately the English is not and this is a great irritant. Scott Thomas speaks both French and American English and hops about between the two. As French is dominant one tends to rely on the subtitles and every now and then they are not there and one realises she has just said some words in English. The dialogue is not always 100% clear and one has to fiddle with the volume control and of course if one is hard of hearing part of the dialogue is then missed. This is a stupid and very annoying fault. The UK disc is the same. This disc is not cheap and I suggest a rent as I found this dialogue defect too troublesome to want to watch it again. This is a pity as if they had only thought about this carefully it could have been a much better view.
4578532
saw this at a film festival and it was lovely. searched high and low, got a region-free dvd player for this because it supposedly had english subtitles. i popped it in, only to find it only had maybe 20% of the subtitles in place. completely useless. why not add all the subtitles to such a great film?  wish i could get money back. :(
4898300
This is (imo) a supremely dreadful book.  Its confusing plot, paper thin characters and laugh-out-loud dialogue, however, are no worse than can be found in the average Ludlum-type thriller.  What truly lifts it to so-bad-you-can't-stop-reading status is the quality of the expository prose.

I could reproduce a representative example of Ruskinism run amok here (a sex scene, for example, so strewn with overwrought cliches as to defy parody), but why bother?  On practically every page there is a passage that could be a finalist in the annual Bulwer-Lytton bad writing contest.  As I meandered through its pages, I kept saying to myself "Retire the trophy, it can't get any worse."  But it invariably did.  That's what kept me going to the bitter end.

One might contend that this is a translation and the author may be suffering from the excesses of his translator.  But note the translator's name.  It's my guess that she is Manfredi's wife.  So unless her translation was specifically designed to trigger a pre-nuptial agreement, I'd imagine that it's probably a faithful rendering of the Italian.
3142249
The cinematography is top notch.  I could taste the dust and sand by watching the movie.

  The problem with the DVD is no working english subtitles in the movie (spoken in French, I believe) using the WINDVD program in Windows XP.  The movie is dialogue-driven, so watching the movie takes a lot of guess work to understand what's going on.  I stopped watching the movie as I burned out in guessing the storyline in the movie.  If someone has a better DVD player program to properly access the subtitles menu, go for it.  I recommend finding another foreign title to purchase other than this one.
4495791
I was reminded of Nabokov's Pale Fire or the movie "A Beautiful Mind" within a few pages of reading this book. The narrator of Pale Fire gradually reveals himself to be psychopathically disassociated from reality, but the reader has to discern the narrator's unreliability for himself.  Inside O'Reilly World,  there are plenty of hints,  but no definite statement that the author realizes he's not significant enough to be targetted for KHAD assassination or skilled enough to be of any value in jihad.  The prose is so overblown that I wasn't sure, at first if this was supposed to be a parody of derring-do;  alas,  I have concluded it is offered with a straight face.  I marked a couple of hilarious examples, e.g. "Churchill must have known I would sit my horse one day and stare at the scene of his first triumph."  The egomaniacal narrator presents as though he believes it, and he expects the reader to swallow it too.  The book is full of "nameless villages" that the reader can discern "Wait,  just because this know-it-all a-hole didn't bother to learn village names, doesn't mean they actually have no names!" Everything is "old before insert biblical reference here" - tediously repeated at least once a chapter.  There are some good visual descriptions of scenery,  but so many factual inaccuracies and inconsistencies of plot that this book's target demographic must be either those for whom English is a second language and those without any knowledge whatsoever of the setting.  Clearly,  not for me.
P.S.  I recently read another book with practically the exact same story - Islamic prostitute and American ex-pat - that appears to be based on the same source material.  I checked the copyrights, and this one was published first, but the other one, "Some Time on the Frontier"  appears to be the authentic first person version.
782712
I read the first two parts. When I got to the third book I could not read it. I just could not understand it at all. I was at a loss. It needs to be redone with proper English and editing. It was like reading in a foreign language. I hope the next one is better.
2015756
The subject matter is interesting but the subtitles are not easy to read and at times not left up long enough to finish the sentences. I didn't watch past the first 15 minutes. If it were dubbed in English or translated I may have continued.
2005811
I couldn't get thru the preview. The language usage was just too much to handle. Was this translated from a foreign language or something ?
2070158
Well,If you are a fan of Dario Argento or Lucio Fulci "ENJOY" !
This is one subtitled nightmare of a flick,Watched in broad daylight and glanced at internet to calm my nerves during the plot unfolding.
There is twins who communicate,Even when one is dead.
A porno being filmed like a snuff film.
Zombies being made by a madman in a mask with some kind of mean dart gun as a numbing tool.
4055152
I kinda like the setting for this book and the plot is pretty good.  The problem is that it reads as if it were poorly translated from another language.
1255313
I tried to watch this film twice.  I gave up early the first time because I couldn't understand a lot of the dialogue.  The Cockney accents did me in.  Most of the time the girl spoke is a very low voice and I missed most of what she said.

However it looked so good that I tried again the next evening and got through almost half of it.  I could tell that the acting was first rate and I wanted to stick it out.  When George, the hero went to sleeze joints and houses of prostitution to find Cathy for his friend, I found it too hard to take.  I just wasn't in the mood to see 15 year old girls with bruises on their faces turning tricks for slimy pimps.  Too depressing.

Perhaps if I could have understood more of the dialogue I would have made it through that rough spot.  Reading the reviews here makes me want to have seen it. I'm not really reviewing the film here.  I just wanted to warn others who may have a similar hard time with English films.

I really do wish that English made films supplied subtitles for our American ears.
2869902
If this attempt at rendering Jules Verne's Mysterious Island wasn't such an obvious attempt at serious movie-making, I might have enjoyed it as a farce. Everything about it smacks of amateurish cinematography, so I won't belabor this review with critiques of the alleged acting, editing, writing, directing or production. Unless a viewer possesses a decidedly odd sense of humor, I recommend passing this one up.
2026386
I just finished reading this book. I had it on me for about three months. I read it in Kuwait, Cuba, and Korea. And I didn't get it.
I tried it with wine, with coffee, with one too many Cuba Libres. Nothing.
It was tedious. I couldn't keep up with the characters. Did he end up sleeping with his mother? With his sister? With his aunt? I don't know. It felt like something fishy was going on at all times, but thats not what bothered me. What bothered me was that I wasn't bothered by anything. I was bored. Every time I picked up the book I either fell asleep, or my mind wandered to other places in real life. I couldn't get a grip of the story. It felt like none of the paragraphs had anything to do with the ones before it. I was lost in time. All I knew was that I was stuck in Macondo for one hundred years no less.
For this I give it a one star rating.

I decided to see what it sounded like in Arabic. Maybe I was missing out on something since I was reading it in English and it was written in Spanish. I often hear that linguistically Arabic is pretty close to Spanish. Luckily enough I found a full pdf version online for free. I now finished reading the first three chapters (my eyes hurt), and with Arabic Im giving it a four.
Suddenly it makes sense. Let me first tell you that Ive never read literature in Arabic out of school so I had no idea what I was getting myself into. But somehow I found the story flow. The characters came alive. I still know that nothing they did made any sense, but now I see that as a cohesive whole, the family had one soul. Although each individual person had a random story, as a whole it all comes together. Destiny is unavoidable. I personally don't believe in destiny, or in that things happen for a reason, but this is the sentiment I got from the story as I was reading. I think precisely it was because I was reading in Arabic that the novel took a mystical turn. It was like being thrown into a vortex of one thousand and one nights. Anyway, my point being: try avoiding it in English at all cost. And Im sticking to my one star rating in English. It was utterly flavorless.
2675449
Subtitles are 2 seconds behind making it reaaaly hard to watch!
2855725
This is the kind of thing you need a degree in literture to appreciate.  The characters just sort of wander from here to there purposelessly to no real impact on the world around them.  Sex is rampant, but brings little happiness.  Family ties are burdensome and intrusive.  There is no fidelity.  Religion is constantly referenced, but resolves nothing.  Mysterious dwarfs and hags lurk in the fringes, affecting people in subtle ways. Are they working towards evil or good?  It doesn't seem to really matter either way. Opression, environmental destruction, fascism, nihlism and terrorism topped off with heaping dollops of enui.  I kept reading waiting for something to make me care or feel for the title charector, or any charactor for that matter, but in the end, I felt like I wasted $20 at the airport.