There are a lot of people who are convinced that Quentin Tarantino is a genius auteur director and that everything he does is a masterpiece. They love all his movies and, when he wrote this first novel based on his most recent film, they praised it for being a literary masterpiece.

While I respect the uniqueness of Tarantino's voice and admit he has a real talent for dialogue (in most cases, more on that below), I do not think he's a particularly visionary director and I've found that I dislike as many of his movies as I like. I actually haven't even seen The Hateful Eight or Once Upon a Time in Hollywood yet despite the fact that the latter is totally my subject matter and I literally worked on the former movie at a prior employer-that-shall-not-be-named. When he published this book, I told myself I'd check it out because I want to see what Quentin Tarantino can do with another medium other than film.

Me the entire time I was reading the book:

The writing is just legitimately bad, even giving him the benefit of the doubt and assuming he's writing in the style of a cheesy 1970s movie. The dialogue is constantly tripping over itself and doing that thing where one character says something and the character they're talking to literally restates what the other character just said. The narrative constantly dives around into different characters' heads within the same scene with no rhyme or reason. And the scenes go on forever. The opening scene is a washed up actor going to talk to an agent about starring in Italian films where he's a familiar face and not so washed up... the entire conversation can be summed up as the journeyman actor wondering if his career is over and the agent saying, "I can get you work in Italy." And that exchange goes on for more than 20 pages.

I still want to watch the movie to compare the two, but this book is one of two things. It's either (1) one of the most subversive, intricately styled books designed to masterfully and seamlessly tell a historical drama in the style of a bad film from the era, or (2) it's the work product of a guy who's been a screenwriter his whole life, decided to write a novel, sat down at the typewriter and cranked something out, then went, "Yep, I'm a genius" and had the connections to get it published. I know plenty of people who would argue in favor of #1, but I'm not convinced. My money's on #2.

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Created Apr 06, 2024 at 12:46pm • Submit your own review...