Рецензия на книгу

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  Pavel_Rodionov28 апреля 2025 г.

  Nobody's Fool is still a better book than Empire Falls, even considering that Empire won the Pulitzer Prize. Probably it wasn't the book that won — it was the author. Although who really knows with those awards. They're irritating.

  It feels like prizes are given not for brilliance, not for liveliness, not for that strange truth that makes people read novels in the first place, but for a kind of correctness. For smoothness, for social relevance, for the ability to stay within the bounds of propriety even when dealing with bitterness, hardship, or fear. In that sense, Empire Falls is the perfect laureate. Everything's in place: a rundown town, broken families, old grudges, nostalgia, the dreary heroism of small lives. Only it feels like there's a drop less soul than there should be. Or maybe it's just too neatly arranged on the shelves.

  In Nobody's Fool, it's different. The characters are alive, rough-edged; they carry both humor and absurdity — and, most importantly, an unpolished sadness that doesn't pretend to be something greater. They don't shout about themselves; they simply live. And that's where the strength lies.

  Overall, I liked Empire Falls. But it's pure melodrama: who's with whom and how, and — guess what — "I'm your brother." Though, of course, it never quite goes that far. But almost.

  Empire Falls is the story of a dying American town and the people who live there, clinging to their dreams, their memories, and their old resentments. The main character, the quiet manager of a half-collapsed diner, struggles between debts to the past and fears of the future, trying to preserve a shred of dignity in a place where everything seems long since lost.

  And there's more melancholy here than in Nobody's Fool, because Empire Falls is a more dramatic work.

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