The Rise and Fall of Great Powers

The Rise and Fall of Great Powers

Rating

7.0

The Pequod Review:

The plot of Tom Rachman’s second novel, The Rise and Fall of Great Powers, is more convoluted and less cohesive than his first (The Imperfectionists, 2010). But Rachman remains is a fine writer:

People kept their books, she thought, not because they were likely to read them again but because these objects contained the past—the texture of being oneself at a particular place, at a particular time, each volume a piece of one’s intellect, whether the work itself had been loved or despised or had induced a snooze on page forty.

[…]

He was a man who formed opinions as he spoke them, or perhaps afterward, requiring him to ramble at length to grasp what he believed.

[…]

Everyone's their own nation, with their own blog.

Recommended.