May 102013
Care of Wooden Floors
A witty debut novel about a housesitting gig gone terribly, hilariously wrong.
A British copywriter stays for a week at his composer friend Oskar’s elegant, ultramodern apartment in a glum Eastern European city. The instructions are simple: feed the cats, don’t touch the piano, and make sure nothing harms the priceless wooden floors. Content for the first time in ages, he accidentally spills some wine. Over the course of a week, both the apartment and the narrator’s sanity fall ap
List Price: $ 24.00
Price: $ 10.41
Find More Floors Products
Review 1,
A well-written and intriguing book. Both sad and laugh-out-loud funny. Lots of wonderful observations about life. Difficult to pigeon-hole into a genre – certainly amusing, but the central characters are so flawed that one feels a deepening sense of despair as the story progresses. Wiles manages to describe an unfolding series of disasters believably, without the whole descending into farce; but, events towards the end are so startling and unresolved that I lost empathy with the main character, which spoilt the book slightly for me. However, I would certainly recommend ‘Care of Wooden Floors’ as a good read.
Was this review helpful to you?
|When troubles come…,
One or two other characters make brief appearances, but basically there’s just one character, our unnamed narrator who carries almost all of the weight in this novel. Naturally clumsy and careless, he is a Mr. Bean sort of person who inevitably damages or breaks things and makes the situation much worse when he tries to undo the damage.The experience of living by himself in his friend Oscar’s pristine, perfect, ultra-modern apartment, after the squalor of his own basement flat, puts a great deal of strain on him, and it’s not long before he has his first minor accident when he spills some red wine on Oscar’s precious hardwood floor.
Various misadventures involving the floors, cats, wild dogs, more red wine ,vomit, and a crazy cleaning lady follow, each of which makes things worse and complicates our hapless hero’s situation, until, by the end, events seem ridiculous and strain reader belief to the breaking point.
The book is well written, clever, and, especially at the beginning, very funny; however, I would have enjoyed it a lot more if it had been closer to two-hundred pages, instead of the three-hundred which it is.
Was this review helpful to you?
|Flawed Imperfections,
This tells the story of our hero, who we never get to actually know the name of, who has been asked to look after his friends flat. He is a minimalist composer and has some sort of OCD perfectionist thing going on. He, Oskar, has to decamp to America to sort out his impending divorce and leaves his friend to `care’ for his flat. That is he must look after the two cats and not damage to very expensive French oak floor that Oskar has had put down.
What follows is a catalogue of mini disasters that are blown out of all proportion as they are juxtaposed to the reaction Oskar will have when he finds out. Our hero likes a drink and it is fair to say that wine has a hand in many a misfortune. The ending is well thought out and took me by surprise. I actually really liked this book because of the writing style. Will Wiles can spin a yarn and has a style that is both intelligent and yet has that common touch that you need when being funny in prose. There is a lot of tension and schadenfreude around the antics that are taking place. It is the subject matter that I found a bit off putting, the title says it all, we are talking about a novel whose central theme is that taking care of a dysfunctional floor, for an obsessed nutter who writes symphonies about tram time tables.
That said it is an easy read, but the intense lack of action is sometimes padded by the overly long analysis of how our hero is feeling – it has a touch of the 19th Century Russian Novel about it in places. Still this is far from a dull read and I would happily read any future offerings from Mr Wiles.
Was this review helpful to you?
|