— Anonymous
I felt that the book “Remembering Babylon” by David Malouf shouldn’t be considered a great work. It was a hard book to decipher, and I had to use other sources to help get the true meaning of the texts. This ruins the whole purpose of reading a book if at the end of the day we have to get outside information on what the book is about. In addition, the fact that the book was hard to understand led to my mind wondering off to other things and not fully focusing on the book. Furthermore, the themes in the book were sort of hard to relate to as well. The theme of Gemmy being an “in-between” and the fact that darkness relates to fear. Don’t get me wrong the themes were portrayed well throughout the book and the author was able to send his message across to us well. However, the themes seemed a bit historic. The theme of darkness being relatable to fear was mainly for the fact that the colonist were afraid of the natives. This event happened quite a long time ago not in our age so for me to relate to that text and theme was hard. Also, the flashbacks that occurred throughout the book sort of made the book even harder to understand. There were some points where I was just lost and didn’t know whose point of view the story was being told from. In conclusion, I feel that this book should not be considered part of the great works because it’s just not a novel where one person can fully understand it by himself/herself and it also seemed more of a history textbook.
