Reading Well: Only Human by Sylvain Neuvel

Only Human (2018) is the conclusion of Sylvain Neuvel‘s trilogy that started with Sleeping Giants and continued with Waking Gods.

If you liked those, you’ll enjoy the conclusion of the series. For me, I was happy to see the story end, and I found the final book more inventive than Waking Gods–the protagonists do, after all, spend time on a foreign world.

The most striking feature of Only Human is Neuvel’s continued rejection of prose and description: the entire book is told in either dialog or journal entries. There is literally zero prosaic description.

It’s an admirable effort in experimentation, and Neuvel is successful with a handful of characters in keeping their voices unique enough to maintain a distinct narrative flow. As a reader, it also releases the imagination virtually entirely: your picture of what is happening may vary dramatically from my picture, and there is no “authorial truth” for reference.

Only Human also retained the page-turning nature of the earlier entries. A solid conclusion, for sure.

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