I was intrigued by the premise of Denis Thériault’s novel, The Peculiar Life of a Lonely Postman. There seemed so much you could do with such an idea. But in the end I was profoundly disappointed, and for two main reasons.
The first is that there is some clumsiness in the writing here and there, though whether the result of the original, the translation, or the publisher’s editing it’s impossible to know. And there are inconsistencies too. For example, near the end Bilodo is in a restaurant eating soup – and then, three sentences later, he is chewing on shepherd’s pie. The editor should have spotted that, I think.
However, the second – and primary – disappointment is that the novel seems an excuse to show off Haiku-writing skills. There are dozens of them, many of the early ones not conforming to the western standard of 5-7-5 syllable count. Then the tankas appear. In terms of narrative flow, they simply get in the way and seem self-indulgent, showing off. I just stopped reading them about half-way through. You can’t read poetry (and perhaps haiku especially) in the same way you read prose; they demand a different mindset, pace, interpretation. The words are doing a different kind of duty. Inserting so many in the narrative placed a stop-start demand on the reader which I simply couldn’t accommodate. I daresay the story could have been written without a single poem being inserted – and been more effective as a result. They seemed to make the book neither one thing nor the other – and the sheer volume of them detracted.
I really wanted to like the book, but I’m afraid I didn’t.
Ian Gouge - Writer 