Eccentric Musings (jakaEM)

Sorry, Dave ... not one of your finer efforts. Please go back to fictionalized journalism like What is the What or Zeitoun, both of which are brilliant and among my favourite novels. I don't mind your autobiographical stuff (and this, I sense, is part of what this is) and I've not read the Sendak book upon which The Wild Things is based (I don't think - or maybe I have but it left no impression, clearly), so it's not that I have any particular allegiance to the original. And it's not even that this treads dangerously close to fable / Life of Pi-style territory for me (which it does, and which never fails to get my dander up).

No, it's really two things: first, Max is a snot-nosed little brat whose mean-spirited destructiveness erodes my compassion for him, despite what I clearly recognize as acting-out behaviour the result of inattentive parenting, childhood trauma and lingering abandonment issues. And second, I don't much care for monsters, metaphorical figments of childhood imagination and fears or not. These ones are neither scary nor funny nor near as fantastic as I think Eggers thinks he's made them, so ... m'eh.