Outside Reading 5-2

Date: Mar 21st

Title: A Love Triangle From Brazil to Brooklyn

Author: Leland de la Durantaye

Type of reading: Book review

             Leland de la Durantaye’s review for Thomas Pletzinger’s Funeral for Dog has made me want to read the book within the first paragraph. The syntax of the very first line “Thomas Pletzinger’s first novel, “Funeral for a Dog” is about sex, love, Brazil, a form of ménage-a-trois, children’s books, Finland, dogs, Ping-Pong, New York—in short, the good things” was very interesting first of all, it listed all the words that are related to the book and in the last it condenses into two simple but attractive words: good things. And the following line has a parallelism: “a Brazilian police dog loses a leg, a German-Finnish love triangle loses a member, a boy loses his friend, a woman loses her baby, an ethnologist loses his calling, a journalist loses his way.” These paralleled sentences do not only sound interesting but also clearly indicates the contents of the novel. There was another obvious parallelism appeared in the following paragraph: “It is relatively rare for contemporary German fiction to be translated into English, and unreservedly rare for a novel by a young and largely unknown German writer to be published with such fanfare.” The term “rare” is repetitively used twice in this sentence, and the use has clearly shown how rare such case is and that amplifies the readers’ curiosity towards the actual novel. Also, by using diction like “unreservedly,” the reviewer triggers the readers’ curiosity even more. Talking about diction, in the third paragraph the author talks about the overall plot of the novel, which is “strange but realistic” and says “after a thoroughly confusing first few pages.” The use of diction “thoroughly” has shown the degree of the strangeness of the novel well and also triggers more curiosity about how could a story be so strange and realistic at the same time.