Book Review of Elliot Perlman’s Seven Types of Ambiguity
The first time I read Elliot Perlman’s Seven Types of Ambiguity I was very impressed by the fact that the same story could be recounted by several different narrators without a dull moment, cover to cover. This novel gives new meaning to the concept of “repetition with a difference.” Perlman was also very effective in the art of subtlety: showing how a relatively insignificant event could assume enormous proportions, affecting the lives of the main characters. Seven Types of Ambiguity is, above all, a psychological thriller. It tells the story of Simon’s obsessive love for his former college girlfriend, Anna, who left him ten years earlier. But the novel’s strength in creating dramatic tension out of a relatively small psychological event also turned out to be a stumbling block the second time I read it. Because, ultimately, Simon was not a compelling character. In fact, none of the main characters were. This novel is an absolute masterpiece in layering its narration in concentric circles around a main event through radically different points of view with distinct personalities and voices. Yet, in my estimation, Seven Types of Ambiguity wasn’t as strong in creating three-dimensional characters. For a novel built upon psychological suspense and the strength of its characterizations, this is a weakness that can’t be completely overlooked.
Claudia Moscovici, Notablewriters.com
About the Author
Claudia Moscovici is a Romanian-American novelist and art/literary critic. She’s the author of Velvet Totalitarianism (Rowman and Littlefield Publishing, 2009) a critically acclaimed novel about a Romanian family’s survival in an oppressive communist regime due to the strength of their love. This novel was republished in translation in her native country, Romania, under the title Intre Doua Lumi (Curtea Veche Publishing, 2011).
In 2002, she co-founded with Mexican sculptor Leonardo Pereznieto the international aesthetic movement called “postromanticism” (see http://postromanticism.com/), devoted to celebrating beauty, passion and sensuality in contemporary art. She wrote a book on Romanticism and its postromantic survival called Romanticism and Postromanticism, (Lexington Books, 2007) and taught philosophy, literature and arts and ideas at Boston University and at the University of Michigan. Most recently, she published a nonfiction book on psychopathic seduction, called Dangerous Liaisons (Hamilton Books, 2011) and a psychological thriller called The Seducer (forthcoming in March, 2012), which tells the story of a woman lured by a dangerous psychopathic predator.
My work – Fineartebooks blog- Frédéric Jousset and Bruno Julliard: From the Beaux-Arts tradition to the innovation of Art Explora
- The Dynamic Abstraction of Nicolas Longo
- Darida Paints Brancusi
- Paola Minekov’s Undercurrents: The cover for Holocaust Memories
- The Impressionist movement and the artwork of Chris van Dijk
- Rodin’s Muses: Camille Claudel and Rose Beuret
- Art and Emotion
- Auguste Rodin and the Physicality of Emotion
- Classical Sculpture
- The Classic Style of Patrick Demarchelier
- My work – Romantic love poetry blog
- Stars orchard
- the ideal cat is one that purrs at the state’s expense, by Paul Vinicius
- the blue birds
- one of those days
- and still brancusi
- sometimes
- a story of (still) winter
- the first moment of insanity expired on an April first
- a night like a counterfeit Picasso, by Paul Vinicius
- “Poems for sick butterflies” by Lia Faur
Claudia Moscovici 