Xstabeth by David Keenan

​   Ah, the literati strikes. You can almost hear the acclaim as you read this book. The praise for its moody ambiance, its peculiar structure, its wild disregard for convention, be it plot or punctuation. This is the sort of book that wins award and leaves the regular readers at best bewildered.
   To be fair, there’s a basic plot here, it’s to do with a young woman and her father. The latter is a musician, the former is…um…sleeps around and gets knocked up. The daughter first gets obsessed with her father’s musician friend and later with some random golfer. She has these passionate(ish) affairs. The father plays music.
    There’s another musical presence in their lives named Extabeth. She’s oh la la.
    There just isn’t much here, though to be fair, the book does have the mercy of brevity. It’s a weird and thin plot populated with not especially likeable characters doing not much at all.
     It touts itself as a Scot’s take of the great Russian novel and fails lamentably at that. Just doesn’t have the same soul. Vodka soaked or not.
     Overall, this isn’t so much a work of literature as an experiment and for me it didn’t work. Thanks Netgalley.