Due to a sudden, unexpected passing in the family a few years ago and another more recently and my subsequent (mental) health issues stemming from that, I was unable to download this book in time to review it before it was archived as I did not visit this site for several years after the bereavements. This meant I didn't read or venture onto netgalley for years as not only did it remind me of that person as they shared my passion for reading, but I also struggled to maintain interest in anything due to overwhelming depression. I was therefore unable to download this title in time and so I couldn't give a review as it wasn't successfully acquired before it was archived. The second issue that has happened with some of my other books is that I had them downloaded to one particular device and said device is now defunct, so I have no access to those books anymore, sadly.

This means I can't leave an accurate reflection of my feelings towards the book as I am unable to read it now and so I am leaving a message of explanation instead. I am now back to reading and reviewing full time as once considerable time had passed I have found that books have been helping me significantly in terms of my mindset and mental health - this was after having no interest in anything for quite a number of years after the passings. Anything requested and approved will be read and a review written and posted to Amazon (where I am a Hall of Famer & Top Reviewer), Goodreads (where I have several thousand friends and the same amount who follow my reviews) and Waterstones (or Barnes & Noble if the publisher is American based). Thank you for the opportunity and apologies for the inconvenience.

Good book, not like anything I've read before. Enjoyable from a writer who is new to me. Would recommend.

Not for me, this one. I found it very demanding, very challenging, and the ultimate pay-off wasn’t worth the effort involved in trying to understand what was going on. The writing is certainly imaginative and the plot intriguing but most of the time I didn’t see where it was going. Essentially it’s the story of 2 families from Dresden whose lives are upended by the Allied bombing, and about their subsequent fractured and often painful lives. But it jumps about so much in time and space and theme, and I couldn’t really relate to any of the characters or their plight, so that I soon became disengaged.

Sorry, not for me. I prefer more of a straight narrative. DNF

Will appeal to you if you're a reader who likes experimental writing and books that are more about ideas.

This novel is rather like a set of Russian dolls, one story nesting within another, although not progressing from the big to the small as neatly and predictably as Russian dolls. Of course, there is also the metaphor of the doll – of women, in particular, even ones the men obsess over (or particularly the ones they obsess over) having to be the beautiful silent partner, or being viewed as a possession.
It challenges the hegemony of ‘received’ narrative, showing us that everything is always open to interpretation, and that we need to be open to new ways of looking at things. Our stories are constantly being constructed, and never quite finished. Almost certainly a book that needs to be read several times to be fully understood or appreciated.

I have to admit this book was a little bit challenging for me. It was very difficult to keep track of all the threads created, facts, names, peoples, the connections between them.

The first part of the book is definitely more engaging. I love how the story kicks off, and the characters of Mr. Vogel and Isaac Dresden. The conversations between them, which were mostly one-way conversations, but nonetheless interesting, how their lives come together, it was all beautiful to read.
Then the story shifts and turns into something completely else, and I started to feel more disconnected from the characters and the story.

I enjoyed it, as I do like a good story within a story. The story within the story was a bit too much for me, too complex, and I found myself struggling to keep up.

It has wonderful quotes, paragraphs, sentences, lessons that you can take away from this book. We can say that there is a lot to debate about, as it can get quite philosophical at times, at least for me.

It's a short read, and it's easy to get through.

This is both a challenging book and also one which is whimsical, the combination flagging its postmodern stance. Narratives set off and then are waylaid, there are disconcerting shifts in time, characters are ciphers, themes become circular and ask us to review our perceptions and understanding. Music with its non-linear structure is perhaps a better model for making sense of this than conventional narrative. At times I was reminded of Samuel Beckett - at others I was, frankly, lost!

Kokoschka’Doll by Afonso Cruz translated from the Portuguese by Rahul Bery. It’s the story of Bonifaz Vogel and a young Issac Dresner, who takes refuge in Vogel’s bird shop. Vogel starts to hear voices from the cellar assuming that it’s voice of God and soon he relies on the voice. They both survive the bombing of their city and they get entangled in the life-sized Doll.

It started well for me and I was quite intrigued to the story right from the beginning and as I invested more into the story, I felt I was lost and the story fallen flat as you are introduced to different characters all of sudden. Though it was a quick read I see there are some loop holes in conveying the story.

Engaging book and (book-within-a-book), really enjoyed the style and the translation.
Well crafted story and interesting characters.

Kokoschka's Doll was an intricate and twisting tale within a tale--perhaps sometimes too complexly woven for its own good. The opening of the story was interesting and caught my attention, but I did feel a little lost once or twice in the middle, before things settled down again in the final part. This is not a book that will appeal to everyone, but if you are keen to read something a little different and like the idea of a Russian doll-style narrative of layers within layers, Kokoschka's Doll is worth checking it. For me, it is still a four-star read, as despite my brief confusion in the middle of the piece, I found the book intriguing both stylistically and in terms of the plot, which did unravel itself by the end.

(This review will go live on my blog on 4 January 2021, when I will also share on Goodreads and across social media.)

Whilst this did have some amusing moments,I felt I didnt really "get it".
The book within a book thing has been done before,but for me,this time,it just wasnt that great.
I enjoyed the first part set in Dressden as the trio came together,but then it just lacked something.

Well, this looked very much like a book I could love from the get-go, which is why I picked my review copy up and flipped pages over several times before actually reading any of it. I found things to potentially delight me each time – a weird section in the middle on darker stock paper, a chapter whose number was in the 20,000s, letters used as narrative form, and so on. It intrigued with the subterranean voice a man hears in wartorn Dresden that what little I knew of it mentioned, too. But you've seen the star rating that comes with this review, and can tell that if love was on these pages, it was not actually caused by them. So what happened?

Well, an energetic start where we see the reason for the voice played out was all good. It turns out to be that of a young kid, Isaac, who flees from a Nazi soldier and hides in the basement of a pet bird shop that only he knows about, due to his father having been its builder. Our nonplussed avian retailer is bemused by the voice, but for all the sweets he's ordered to leave out at night, he gains months' worth of business advice. The two mismatched males survive the war, only to have a young woman latch on to them, whereupon the trio almost picaresquely get to be in Paris, in publishing.

And that's where the problems lie. While Isaac runs the world's worst publishing house, from the world's worst bookshop, he takes it upon himself to publish the book within the book that caused those off-colour pages I mentioned. And while I can well imagine it takes a lot of craft to write readably badly, this does not get it right. Yes there are some smirks to be had, and yes they are of a suitably different timbre to those we've had in Part One, but they're nowhere near enough, and so we're left with the ever-erratic chapter numbers (again, see above) to point out the ineptitude here.

And unfortunately, once I'd read that part, and we got back to the actual narrative, I found the shift back far too minimal – I was still hearing the 'so bad it's bad' voice in my mind. What we have in our hands tries to be nested like Russian dolls, or some fancy diagram of circular connections and suchlike, but all we get from that is far too many instances of being told the same thing twice.

Now I like a meaty bit of meta, but this was ultimately a disappointment. Intending to be a singular love story, where fallout of one love leads to another and another, it was not so much fallout as fall flat. Presented in an affectless (and effectless) style, we don't ever see any love story we would want to be part of, however often we turn the kaleidoscope and see the colours link up and split, link up and split…