"When you're dead, you're dead," Mrs. Clausen had said.

Dear Becca,

This was hands down my least favorite of the books we’ve read so far. (Get it – hands down?) Despite the fact that I did not enjoy this particular novel, I can tell that Irving is a talented writer so don’t worry, I won’t judge based on this one read.

 (Hebrew Cover)

It wasn’t so much that the story is bad – it’s just that I didn’t like it.  I expected the book to center more around the concept of the hand transplant. (Before this book, I didn’t even know that such a thing was possible! I had to doublecheck to make sure Irving wasn’t just making it up.) I can’t even imagine having someone else’s hand (or any body part for that matter). I understand Patrick’s embarrassment about only having one hand and struggling to wear a prosthetic, but I didn’t feel like he wanted a new hand badly enough to merit the transplant. I didn’t feel like his heart was in it. Actually, I rarely felt like Patrick’s heart was in anything.

One of the biggest problems for me was that I didn’t like any of the characters in this book. The only character I was ever close to liking was Dr. Zajac’s housekeep when she decided to lose weight and change her life – and actually did it! But even she turned out to be a little too quirky for my liking. If I’m being honest, my favorite character would probably be Otto but he is so mistreated (in my opinion) that liking him only makes the story worse.

Yes, the more I think about it, I realize that my real problem with this book is the fact that I feel like Mrs. Clausen is so traitorous to her husband. Otto is haunted by the idea of his wife having a relationship with Wallingford while he is still alive. It’s horrible the way she pressures him to sign the agreement to donate his hand if something were to happen. And then something does happen and he dies and what does she do RIGHT after he dies? Has sex with Wallingford! Who does that? Poor Otto must be rolling in his grave!  Mrs. Clausen says it herself: “When you’re dead, you’re dead.” There is something so deeply wrong with her logic…She holds onto Otto’s hand even though she acknowledges that when you’re dead, you’re dead.  A part of me thinks that she is actually obsessed with Wallingford, not the memory of her dead husband, and just uses the hand as a means of developing that relationship.

Going back to my problem with Patrick not feeling invested in the hand transplant… it struck me as very strange that he had no reaction to losing Otto’s hand. Wouldn’t that be really disappointing? Here you’ve had a hand for a year and then you lose that one, too. But he’s so obsessed with Mrs. Clausen that he doesn’t seem to care about losing the hand; it’s losing her that he’s worried about. I suppose this should be romantic in theory, but I didn’t find it to be so.

I found this book to be haunting in that it really made me wonder about people. I’m going to draw another Audrey Niffeneger comparison here. It reminds me of her book, HER FEARFUL SYMMETRY, in which the characters are equally mind boggling to me.

Okay, that’s the most ranting I’ve done in a post so far!

Until we read again,

Megan