Katerina is Frey’s attempt to relitigate his Million Little Pieces nightmare.
Hello everyone and welcome back !
I hope each one of you that still has to suffer through piles of literature notes and a dozens of coffee cups on the dishwasher ( I love you btw, !) is doing well and if you’re struggling , I’m sending you my endless love and support. Let’s kill this back to school season fellas !!!
Now typically if you’re a follower of my blog then you probably know I don’t usually publish book reviews where I list a million reasons for you to not buy a specific book . However , today is the day . Today you are going to read one of the hardest and most judgmental reviews ever written by me .
The book we are discussing is Katerinaby the controversial author James Frey. If you don’t know his story , let me break it down for you in simple words :
James Frey is famous for all the wrong reasons. He thought he was clever enough to write a semi-fictional memoir called A Million Little Pieces that duped people into thinking it was entirely true, but instead ended up with a really furious Oprah Winfrey .
A Million Little Pieces supposedly documented his own drug- and alcohol-fueled nadir and after promoting it on “Oprah” in 2005 , it became a bestseller. But everything turned into a nightmare for Frey when The Smoking Gun published a review reporting that many details of the memoir as well as it’s sequel had been forged including a violent clash with the police, a three-month prison stint and his scapegoating by the cops for the death of a classmate in a car accident. In James’ words , 17 publishers had turned it down as a novel because it didn’t sound as appealing as a true-life memoir of someone’s journey to sobriety.
With these words being said , let’s dive into Katerina!
In Frey’s situation, I tried to be an optimist and judge the book only on its creativity, style and narrative power. But after reading the book , I highly doubt it .
Katerina is most obviously a fictionalized approach of James Frey’s life. His protagonist Jay narrates through two distinct eras of his life: when he was young, drug and horny in Paris (1992-93) and when he’s middle-aged and depressed in Los Angeles (2017). A mysterious Facebook friend request bring him back down memory lane and makes him live through painful memories again…
These novels typically don’t get published. But in the case of such a famous author (again, why?) as Frey, the novel has been presented to us ― in royal purple hardcover and an inside dust jacket festooned with a painting of a naked woman ― as a work of a misunderstood literary genius.
So, this is a novel about Jay, is a successful and happily married but artistically thwarted 40-something writer in Los Angeles. He starts getting mysterious messages from someone in his past on Facebook, and they strike up a conversation. Meanwhile, he flashes back to his time in Paris 25 years ago, when he was a young college drop-out with a severe alcohol addiction , visiting museums, eating baguettes, having sex, blacking out and falling in love with a Norwegian model named Katerina, his enigmatic Facebook correspondent.
That leads me to my second major point with Katerina. Katerina herself. She’s a fantasy and a plot device. She’s also the only character in the novel I can guarantee never existed. She has long reddish hair, brown eyes and a slender frame. She likes books and art and cocaine (maybe that’s why she loved Jay ! ) . If I had to describe her in one phrase I’ll say she is just the imaginary happily ever after James Frey never got but keeps dreaming of.
Warning:
In the real word there is no such a thing as girl who exists only to satisfy a young man’s needs. Boys, don’t search for her !
Moving on , one of the most frustrating things about this book is the lack of punctuation . It’s like the book never got checked by a person who has basic grammatical knowledge and knows where to put commas and dots . And that’s what got me to believe that this so-called book, is more of the dairy of an alcoholic or the essay of a patient in the AA meetings .
Aside from the paucity of commas, Frey’s language is broad, nonspecific and obvious. His favorite words include classics like “life,” “crazy,” “pain,” “sex,” “art” and “love,” and he’s unafraid to reuse them, often many times on the same chapter (repetition all the way !) .
It’s as though Frey can’t think of any fresh ways to say or describe things, so he resorts to repeating his words, hoping the repetition will stand in for throbbing inspiration.
When he does use a metaphor or simile, he’s so proud of the result that he repeats those as well, even if they’re incoherent. Katerina is described, page after page, as having “thick pouty lips like cherry pie” and “brown eyes the color of cocoa,” though cherry pie isn’t pouty, and cocoa can present in any number of shades of brown.
Suddenly, I can understand Frey. It’s an annoying thing to be a writer but lack the tools to express oneself in writing.
On the other hand , they were times where I enjoyed reading the character’s or more specifically the author’s opinion about
matters like love, literature and being an artist :
“I dream of crazy crazy mad love the kind that starts with a look, with eyes that meet, a smile, a touch, a laugh, a kiss. The kind of love that hurts and makes you love the pain, makes you want the pain, makes you yearn for the fucking pain, keeps you awake until the sun rises, stirs you while you’re still asleep.”
“When I look at art I don’t have to consider whether the work of art is fiction or nonfiction, whether it is a genre painting or literary painting, whether it is serious or commercial…. I want to make books in the same manner.”
“There are rules with books. What something is called, how it is read, rules of grammar and punctuation,” he writes. “I go to art when I think about how I want to write books. There are no rules in art. No governance.”
Additionally , to the question whether James Frey can write or not , my answer is yes ! His style is a little neoteric with the telegraphic sentences and the random splashes of improvised poetry, but it’s still a style and it makes reading Katerina a smooth and easy to read novel. But that's it.
Because if it would be reviewed by a harsh professional critic , it will be a toxic memoir distinguished as a fiction book that passes to the world stereotypical ideas and beliefs about life that everyone knows but chooses to ignore because why not ?
In conclusion , Katerina is a book that shouldn’t have been published but rather buried deep in one of the messy notepads writers keep when they start their journey in becoming the next Hemingway or Hugo . In my opinion this is not a novel neither a memoir but the diary of an alcoholic , drug-addicted man who prefers lying to the public rather than owning up to the failures of his life and not hide under the power of literature and poetry who many of us enjoy and love .
James Frey , you are a good storyteller but not a writer , not an author. You have the maybe-gift of making up stories and feeding them to people just like our grandma with her Snow-white fairytales . But we were innocent kids . You’re audience was just people being trapped in lies you thought it would not do harm to publish as truths.
2/5
XoXo,
Miss Reader aka Leni
P.S I rated it with 2 stars because I love Paris and the mentions of the most beautiful city on the planet even though I don’t visit bars or clubs and chunk one whiskey bottle after the other , like water for the runner’s high .
