Today is the eighteenth day of the 30-day book challenge, in which I will be writing about a different book or book series every day for 30 days, with each book chosen according to the daily prompt. Today's prompt is: "a book that disappointed you".
WARNING: I suppose this post might include some minor spoilers for The Boy with the Cuckoo-Clock Heart, but also I remember it so poorly and care about it so little that I'm likely to get parts of this wrong anyway. You have been warned.
After another few days off from posting, we're back once again. It feels a little strange to be writing about books right now, when the world is in a collective panic over the COVID-19 outbreak. Still, if it seems flippant for me to be doing a post like this during a pandemic, I can only say this: writing is providing a much-needed distraction for me during a time of worldwide crisis, and I would like to think that maybe reading this post could do the same for at least one person. So, I am going to try to continue writing and posting as normal - if perhaps a little more regularly than I have been.
When I was a child, I used to think that the worst emotion in the world was disappointment. I'm not sure I'd make the same statement now, but I still believe there's something uniquely tragic about the way the pain of disappointment follows previous hopefulness. Disappointment of the bookish variety might not seem the worst of these at first - it is not as though, in expecting a book to be good, I had prepared myself for something obviously, tangibly life-changing, like a dream job opportunity or a cure for a pandemic (ahem). Still, in my experience book-related disappointment can be as saddening or annoying as many other kinds. I learnt this lesson the hard way, in around 2009, when I read The Boy with the Cuckoo-Clock Heart.
I hope you can see, from the picture above, why I was initially so intrigued by the look of The Boy with the Cuckoo-Clock Heart. Its cover design is gorgeously Tim Burton-esque, for one, but even the little of the book's concept conveyed in its title struck me as enchanting in a gothic sort of way. It was originally published in French as La Mécanique du cœur, written by Mathis Malzieu, lead singer of the rock band Dionysos. So far, so charming. The plot description only intrigued me further:
Edinburgh, 1874. On the coldest night the world has ever seen, Little Jack is born with a frozen heart and immediately undergoes a life-saving operation. But Dr Madeleine is no conventional medic and surgically implants a cuckoo-clock into his chest. Little Jack grows up different to other children: every day begins with a daily wind-up. At school he is bullied for his 'ticking', but Dr Madeleine reminds him he must resist strong emotion: anger is far too dangerous for his cuckoo-clock heart. So when the beautiful young street-singer, Miss Acacia, appears - pursued by Joe, the school bully - Jack is in danger of more than just falling in love... he is putting his life on the line.
Add to this fascinating plot the fact that I first encountered the book via a glowing review by a book blogger I trusted, and I was guaranteed to read this book. I ordered a copy and soon received a pretty hardback edition with the cover you see above. Everything looked promising and I was excited to dive into this seemingly magical little book.
Unfortunately, the reading experience itself turned out to be utterly disappointing.
As always, I feel the need to state that I read this book in translation, so there is a degree of uncertainty as to how much of my dislike of the book is owed to the original writing versus the way it was translated. However, I think it would be a disservice to both Malzieu and Ardizzonne (the translator), to assume that a book could so easily be ruined purely by translation. So in order to avoid insulting both of these people, I must assume that The Boy with the Cuckoo-Clock Heart was simply terrible to begin with.
Perhaps terrible is an exaggeration, but if my expectations for the book were high to begin with, that just means its fall seemed that much further. To begin my complaints, let's start with the writing itself. I'm not a fan of incredibly poetic books in general, as I find it can be a challenge for the writer to balance prose and pretention. Malzieu, sadly, tips the scales firmly in the latter direction. For every one occasionally genuinely-poetic line, we get ten others with painfully stretched metaphors and weird anachronisms:
For example: 'I watch as she hides her huge eyes under the parasols of her eyelids.' (If I remember correctly, this parasol-eyelid comparison is made more than once).
Or, another one: 'Eyes wide open, I spot Dr Madeleine with her arms in the air, like she's just scored a penalty in a World Cup final.' (as far as I know, the first football World Cup took place in 1930, while this book is ostensibly set in the late 19th century)
And, for one final example: 'Our lips take over, in the softest relay race in the world; they mingle, delicately and intensely. It feels as though her tongue is a sparrow gently landing on mine; curiously, she tastes of strawberries.' (ew)
These are not even the most flowery lines in the book, but they are a few samples of its cringey writing. Barely a page goes by without this aggressive floweriness. But, if you will briefly direct your attention back to the third quote (if you can bring yourself to do so), then I would like to mention my second gripe with the book: it's weirdly sexual.
The emphasis here is on the 'weirdly' part. It wouldn't necessarily be a problem if the book was sexual - lots of books are - but the way this book is seems, quite frankly, a little odd. First of all, perhaps I am alone in thinking this, but the book initially struck me as a story for children. Combine the Tim Burton aesthetic with the many reviews referring to it as a 'fairy tale' or 'fable', and I just assumed that the book was created with a younger audience in mind. Apparently not. While the main character in the book starts as a baby and spends much of the story as a teenager, I can only presume the book was going for a 'fairy tale for grown-ups' angle, because of how things take an oddly adult turn partway into the book.
Besides random allusions to sexual topics that are present from near the beginning of the book - like the fact that Jack names his pet hamster Cunnilingus after learning the word (but not its meaning) from his two sex worker friends, Luna and Anna - things get suddenly more intense about halfway through the story, when Jack begins a relationship with his childhood crush Acacia. I say that as though there is a big gap between his childhood and when they start seeing each other, but in reality they start their sexual relationship when Acacia is about 14 or 15 years old.* I don't know about anyone else, but I find that highly uncomfortable to read.
The author didn't even have the decency to make Jack and Acacia's intimacy implicit; instead we are confronted with drawn-out scenes that, in my opinion, could have been real contenders for the Literary Review's Bad Sex Awards. To make all this worse, we are also treated to the frequent use of Jack's clock as a phallic symbol. It's all very awkward and unnecessary.
My third and final problem with The Boy With the Cuckoo-Clock Heart is that it didn't make me care at all about the characters. Malzieu might have a few whimsical ideas and an addiction to metaphor, but he doesn't have the literary skills needed to make us actually invested in the characters and their stories. Jack himself is at a disadvantage, being the voice of the book's first-person narration and thus likely to experience second-hand annoyance from the reader whenever they get fed-up with the book's painfully overdone writing. Yet even the other characters, like Dr Madeleine and Acacia, are flat and uninteresting. My only motivation in continuing to read the book was not a desire to see how it concluded or what happened to my favourite characters - it was that I couldn't wait for the book to end and release me from my misery.
Perhaps the message here is in line with that old adage: don't judge a book by its cover. Or maybe it's to not get your hopes up too much over a book you haven't yet read, although I would argue that I'd find this book irritating even if I hadn't heard anything about it beforehand.
One other thing: I haven't seen the film adaptation of the book, Jack and the Cuckoo Clock Heart, that came out in 2013. I actually think it may be better than the book, partially the bar isn't terribly high, but also because I think it would benefit from a clear target audience (the film being PG) and the book's little gimmicks (cuckoo clock heart, eccentric doctor in a house on a hill, etc.) would possibly come across better on-screen.
To end this post on a positive note, I will say this: the existence of disappointment necessitates the existence of hope, and even if that hope is disappointed, it still means we saw the potential for something to be better than it was. Perhaps this hope can be something that drives us to do better and to create better things, sometimes by building on the flaws of the work that came before. I think that the film adaptation may have the potential to be better than the book. Maybe there will be those who write similar but better books than this in the future as well.
*I no longer have my copy of the book so I can't confirm the exact age, but I remember finding this weird and uncomfortable when I read it the first time.
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