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Zuky the BookBum (15 KP) rated The Dumb House: (Scottish Classics) in Books

Mar 15, 2018

This book was nothing like what I thought it would, and for that reason, it disappointed me.

I believed this novel was going to be a creepy, man-holds-children-captive kind of story, but unfortunately it wasn’t. This was far more intelligent, with lots of complex writing than I had expected, and due to that, I couldn’t really get into it. I’m not the sharpest tool in the shed so I feel like a lot of this book went over my head.

There’s no doubt about it, our narrator is one of the most terrifying and disturbed narrators I’ve ever come across, and thanks to my love for the macabre, this made reading his story sometimes enjoyable. When he was simply recalling his actions in the here and now, I was interested, but when he got into his ramblings about his ideas on testing the innateness of language, my mind moved onto different things. Hence it taking me almost a week and a half to read 204 pages.

Burnside is an incredibly beautiful writer, it doesn’t surprise me to see he’s a poetry writer as well as a fiction writer. I’m always one to praise an author for their poetic prose, but sometimes things get a little too complex for me and all meaning is lost on me. This happened a lot throughout reading The Dumb House.

In terms of the story, this wasn’t exactly what I had hoped it would be. It was very slow to get anywhere, and even when we did get to learning his experiment on his children, that whole section was equally slow-moving. It didn’t feel like an awful lot happened other than several uncomfortable sex scenes and some horrifying violence.

Unfortunately, this one didn’t do it for me, which is a shame, because I was so looking forward to reading it. I suppose if you love intelligent fiction that is reasonably ambiguous, this might be great for you. I personally like a book that challenges my mind, but this one went too far for me.