The novel with the expressionless pop title "Last Chance" was written last year by the Argentine author Federico Aksat. Despite the fact that this is the fourth book of the writer, only she brought him to the international arena: the novel was translated from Spanish into English, and subsequently into Russian. Aksat writes twisted thrillers designed to blow the reader's head, so "Last Chance" was no exception.
I have no literary associations, because I am not a fan of the genre, but if this book were filmed, the film would be like something like "Trance" or "Machinist": a story with many plot twists, in which truth and fiction merge together, and the hero is no less confused than the reader. In general, this story would definitely take a well-deserved place in the list a la "10 films / books, with an unpredictable ending".
It is absolutely impossible to say what the text is about without spoilers, I will only say that there is a place for hallucinations, brain deceptions, homicidal maniacs, lunatics, childhood injuries and domestic violence, secret societies, infidelity, and even poker with chess. The official annotation from the publisher will tell you best about the tie, however, it reveals less than 10% of what eventually awaits the reader on the pages of the Last Chance.
In this book, everything is based solely on the plot, this is a typical set of "deceptions" for some thrillers, with the help of which the author repeatedly clicks the reader on the nose. As soon as you come up with some good explanation of everything that is happening, as what you read on the next page crosses out all your guesses with a bold red line, you begin to build the following - and again the same thing, and so on throughout the reading process.
To be honest, if they had asked me after the first 100 pages what would happen next, I would have just spread my hands, everything was so incomprehensible that there were no versions, but after 200 versions there were too many, so it was unrealistic to predict the ending with some minimum accuracy for the time being.
But such a result is a double-edged sword: on the one hand, it's bad when a reader of such literature finds out what the joke is too early, then it becomes boring to read, and the text quickly becomes insipid and tasteless, on the other, the more you twist the plot, the more inconsistencies, random coincidences and other things in it, so that in the end what you read loses its truthfulness. The ending of "Last Chance" became for me a text from the fiction section: well, wow, and this is here, and they didn't forget about the maniac (although they didn't say anything before) - no-way!
Another reason to lower the rating of the "Last Chance" was the author's disdainful attitude to the details, or rather even the images introduced into the text of the novel, which at first are given a lot of attention, and then suddenly they are thrown out for uselessness. There is a set of such images here at once: possum, horseshoe, chess (in general, there are a couple of slightly less frequently mentioned ones, such as a red swimsuit).
I was once taught that there is nothing superfluous in a good work and everything is important, but sometimes I forget that this rule really only works for good works, and I try to apply it to mediocre ones, like the novel of Aksat. Do you remember how in the first scenes of "Alien: Covenant" the camera focused on a bolt hanging on a Daniels chain?
The audience naturally thought that this bolt would still manifest itself at the right moment, maybe save everyone's life or kill some hefty xenomorph. But Ridley Scott (or maybe the editors under the yoke of the producers) decided otherwise, and we didn't see this ill-fated bolt anymore. There is a similar situation in "Last Chance": if they try to explain the possum somehow (although I did not understand at all what everything written means, except that the dude actually saw the animal once, and the author still did not forget that he mentioned it an indecently large number of times), then they score everything else.
The author's attempts to present the hero as another Alexander Luzhin or Bobby Fischer, a chess genius, whose doll has moved and chess logic has overcome the vital one, also look ridiculous: of course, I understand that psychiatric diseases also have remissions, but here all this is sewn with white threads, and inserted into the novel solely for beauty. Look, they say, what an unusual brain the hero has, that's why he's so crazy!
Even more strange is everything related to the reasons for this shift: that is, at the age of seven, the hero swallowed what he saw, digested it, pretended that it did not happen, at twelve he could not digest a less significant thing, well, at eighteen he suddenly remembered that he actually had a childhood trauma, everything was fine. Uh... in general, it would be better if Federico Aksat still reread what he wrote, otherwise somehow everything turns out strangely.
I have repeatedly complained that a good part of entertainment books seem to be written solely in order to be filmed, and "Last Chance" is also on this list, moreover, the writer is clearly asleep and sees how his film adaptation will happen in the Hollywood Hills, otherwise why are all the characters Americans and the action takes place in the USA.
Part of the secondary storylines is the most formulaic template, from the set of "what should be in every movie", which is probably why, for example, there is a completely stupid and unnecessary love line leading nowhere. The language is not the most stingy, and the descriptions are not the shortest, but there is nothing to enjoy here, let's explain it, so be it, by the fact that the author did not want to distract the reader from the twisted plot with beautiful words.
221.904 SRY