The Insult

This book is magical. Thompson lures you into a strange yet captivating world and floods it with stunning images that are hard to forget. This book is many things: suspenseful, smooth, crisp, steamy, tragic, cryptic and haunting. The author knows how to set the stage. He pays close attention to detail and weaves an incredibly intriguing plot. I have owned this book for many years. It's a worn paperback now and I go back to read it sometimes just because it is that kind of book. The one you go back to because it's that good.

A beautifully written text. Begninning with a bullet-shaped punch, Thompson introduces new elements of the tale at precisely the right moments - the main character's initial 'flaw' becomes his saving grace, but in the end only serves to guide him into another story, one of which even his condition could not be aware. A novel about what it is to be blind to life, instead of being blind to light.

This was a startling novel about a man who may or may not be in touch with reality. The descriptive first person narrative worked not once but twice in this story of a blind man, who has made his world bend to his truth. The second portion of the book was especially fascinating because we are drawn into another story about lust, betrayal which was subtle. Excellent read!

Although I will recommend this book to my friends as the best "noir" since Kerr's "Philosophical Investigation," the author that Thomson most reminds me of is - improbably - Tolstoy. Like Tolstoy, Thomson is interested in everything about his characters. Like Tolstoy, he never loses his narrative grip. If it means a 100 page diversion into another character's life to get from A to B, so be it. Like Tolstoy, he's thinking about God. (The invisible man is missing - have you seen him?) Other reviewers see the more tightly structured and less character driven Kafka and Chandler as influences. They are, but this book is so much more. Thomson has given us something challenging and different. Like "Philosophical Investigation," the book seems fated to live only in the noir genre. While I like that genre, it's placement there is a pity.

I loved Thomson's Five Gates of Hell, and it's awesome to read another book that uses such different sections and twists them into each other like this. My only advice is to read carefully, because so many details that are brought out in the last hundred pages are scattered through the book. I got lost in a lot of places and had to backtrack, but it was worth it.