![](https://image.librarything.com/pics/fugue21/magnifier-left.png)
![The Last One: A Novel Tekijä: Alexandra…](https://images-na.ssl-images-amazon.com/images/P/1101965088.01._SX180_SCLZZZZZZZ_.jpg)
Pikkukuvaa napsauttamalla pääset Google Booksiin.
Ladataan... The Last One: A Novel (vuoden 2016 painos)Tekijä: Alexandra Oliva (Tekijä)
TeostiedotThe Last One (tekijä: Alexandra Oliva)
![]()
Ei tämänhetkisiä Keskustelu-viestiketjuja tästä kirjasta. I REALLY wanted to like this because I love Survivor and other reality shows it it just didn't succeed for me. I think the concept is good but the author didn't quite come to a satisfying resolution for me. I especially hated the misunderstanding towards the end of the novel. Absolutely ridiculous that such a thing would go on for so long. I'm not...what did I just read? OK from the top. I have a serious yen for reality style fiction right now. I blame THE HUNGER GAMES and also Unreal, since for some reason it appeals to me (I don't watch a lot of reality TV anymore, I used to watch almost every one, but its so fake...but the process of building a reality show and the behind the scenes stuff? All over it). Anyhow. Do any of you remember a show from a couple summers ago called Siberia? It was on NBC and the basic premise was that a group of contestants were competing in Tunguska (you may know this as a pretty infamous paranormal spot) hoping to win $500,000. The first episode is pretty good at selling it as a reality show - you have your reality show archetypes (the nice girl, the strong man, the sneaky one, etc) and while the filming seemed less polished then say Survivor, the show was interesting enough to keep you hooked. Until the end of the first episode when a contestant disappears and the host reveals he died. Things take a turn for the suspicious after this and by episode 3 you understand this is a scripted "reality" show (NBC's marketing team helped to keep the "mystery" going by having the first commercials treat it like a reality show, the previews treat it like a reality show, and put out fake news about it). What was really fascinating was watching the contestants "in character" justify some pretty messed up shit. A fellow dies and they're like "well accidents happen, isn't that why we signed a contract?", a crew member is mauled in front of some of them and they say "we're in the wild, shit happens". They lose contact with civilization, a weird mystery metal box appears giving them "clues" and they lose a couple more folk and still these guys rationalize it. The premise of THE LAST ONE reminded me of that and so I was excited. In a show its easier to see the scripting (reality is reality, so as soon as supernatural/paranormal stuff starts happening suspension of disbelief is needed), but a book where "reality" can be modified and suspension of disbelief can last you can keep the premise going for a while. How much was part of the "reality" show? How much was staged? How much was the MC's (largely "Zoo/Mae/Sam", hereby known as ZMS) perception of things effecting our perception? Here's a spoiler - ZMS is REALLY unreliable. To the point where even when shit is confirmed by another character, I don't trust it because she's the first person POV so god knows if she's even remembering it right. In between her POV we have the beginning of the show (leading up to when we first see ZMS wandering by herself) and Reddit style forum commentary from viewers with speculations and theories. This worked less for me as I don't use Reddit because of the trolls, though Oliva did a good job replicating "feel" of it. I did enjoy chapters about when the show began and the first few days of it. Its written as a "let me tell you the secrets" kind of way, with details about how the scene unfolding would be edited and such. But this is where it breaks down, ZMS is our primary character we follow. Much of what's going on in the present time is seen through her. If not for the first chapter spoiling the fact that a pandemic is spreading, I may have been more inclined to trust ZMS. But we know that something bad is happening, so having ZMS wander around for more than half the book whining about how "realistic" the prop department had gotten decaying bodies (and their smell) or the fact she can't find supplies because the other contestants must have gotten to it becomes grating. Not once does she think the death, decay and abandoned wasteland is because of a real problem - she figures the TV show just sunk a lot of money into making it feel authentic. The reason? Not because she was burying the trauma of reality so deep she was delusional (which also would have been cool). No the truth is so mundane and aggravating (like the rest of the book) that I nearly threw it. I put a lot of the rest behind the spoiler cut here because I don't know, maybe you want to find out for yourself. And this is more a personal thing, but I found her anti-maternal attitude really off putting. At some point she convinced herself that if she had a kid, she would accidentally kill it in a variety of completely off the wall ways (why would you carry the kid to the top of a mountain? Or leave it in a situation where if it rolled over asleep it would catch fire?) . I'm not sure where that belief came from, but she had it to the point where if she had sex (one night stand or otherwise) she'd have crippling nightmares about it. Is this normal? I know people who have dealt with anxiety of being a new parent, but hers seems REALLY extreme. I grew so frustrated throughout reading that honestly the ending was just another stick to add. Like ZMS I had given up hope that any good could ever happen...not that I think ZMS deserves a happy ending. Many a book has been written about a virus wiping out almost the entire population. Personally I've read my share. But given the popularity of reality TV shows, to my knowledge, none have been written about reality TV. I know I haven't read one. So being a fan of reality TV (we all have our guilty pleasures) this book piqued my curiosity as to how Olivia could combine these two themes. Let me say she did an absolutely wonderful job. I was actually surprised by how much I enjoyed this novel. By all means give it a read. ei arvosteluja | lisää arvostelu
PalkinnotNotable Lists
"For readers of Station Eleven and The Passage comes a dazzling and unsettling novel of psychological suspense. In Alexandra Oliva's thrilling fiction debut, survival is the name of the game, as the line blurs between reality TV and reality itself--and one woman's mind and body are pushed to the limit. She wanted an adventure. She never imagined it would go this far. It begins with a reality TV show.Twelve contestants are sent into the woods to face challenges that will test the limits of their endurance. While they are out there, something terrible happens--but how widespread is the destruction, and has it occurred naturally or is it man-made? Cut off from society, the contestants know nothing of it. When one of them--a young woman the show's producers call Zoo--stumbles across the devastation, she can imagine only that it is part of the game. Alone and disoriented, Zoo is heavy with doubt regarding the life--and husband--she left behind, but she refuses to quit. Staggering countless miles across unfamiliar territory, Zoo must summon all her survival skills--and learn new ones as she goes. But as her emotional and physical reserves dwindle, she grasps that the real world might have been altered in terrifying ways--and her ability to parse the charade will be either her triumph or her undoing. Sophisticated and provocative, The Last One is a novel that forces us to confront the role that media plays in our perception of what is real: how readily we cast our judgments, how easily we are manipulated. Advance praise for The Last One: "The Last One seamlessly melds two of our contemporary obsessions--the threat of global catastrophe and the staged drama of reality TV--into a fiercely imagined tale of the human psyche under stress. This is an uncompromising, thought-provoking debut."--Justin Cronin. "Haunting, moving, and remarkable, Alexandra Oliva's debut novel is clever in its concept and gripping in its delivery. This propulsive book is for everyone who ever thought reality television signaled the end of the world."--Karen Joy Fowler. "Taut, tense, and at times almost unbearably real, The Last One is both a compelling read, and a terrifyingly believable evocation of survival against the odds."--Ruth Ware, New York Times bestselling author of In a Dark, Dark Wood. "Page-turning and deeply unsettling."--Rosamund Lupton, internationally bestselling author of Sister"-- Kirjastojen kuvailuja ei löytynyt. |
Current Discussions-Suosituimmat kansikuvat
![]() LajityypitMelvil Decimal System (DDC)813.6Literature English (North America) American fiction 21st CenturyKongressin kirjaston luokitusArvio (tähdet)Keskiarvo:![]()
Oletko sinä tämä henkilö? |
In an interesting and perceptive technique, in the chapters that are presented in the third person, the contestants on the show are referred to by nicknames, like Engineer and Air Force and Asian Chick. Our protagonist, Zoo, is so called because she works at a wildlife center. We come into her story in media res, as she discovers an abandoned supermarket and scavenges for supplies. She steps over what she assumes are very well-made prop bodies. The reader knows that people are dying in large numbers and those bodies are almost certainly real, but out of touch with the outside world, what can Zoo think but to assume that it's all part of the game? Which is exactly what she does think, in the chapters that are told from her perspective. Knowing that the point of the show is to push her to her limits and drive her to quit, she pushes through a bout of severe illness and an attack by a wild coyote, among other things, by rationalizing them as just tricks by the producers.
The obstacles she faces and the turns her journey takes are best left to discovery by the reader. If you're anything like me, you'll get to them quickly. This is the first book I've read in a long time (even of ones I've really enjoyed) that's honest-to-goodness kept me up at night to read more. Most of the time, books I blow through really fast have a lower rating, because when I don't like I book I'm more inclined to push through it as rapidly as I can so I can move on to something I might like better. This book I raced through because I genuinely didn't want to put it down. I read it at lunch, while I got my oil changed on my car, while I was waiting for a meeting to start. The power of the human mind to convince itself of whatever it wants to is not to be underestimated, and the suspense of waiting to see when it would be that Zoo would finally see that the world around her was in real trouble keeps the narrative tension low but constant (her inability to see is literal as well as figurative...early in the book, her glasses are damaged and that helps the suspension of disbelief that the actual magnitude of events doesn't impress itself upon her sooner). I absolutely loved it and highly recommend it! (