Artist's Retrospective, written by David D. Levine, is very strange. It disoriented me toward the beginning, before I had a good guess of the plot. Odd enough, it never threw me out of the story.
There is only one character in this story, the artist. He narrates the story from the 1st-person. You never get a great sense of his character, but you don't really need to. Only a few of the artist's qualities are important to the story. Those were were done well enough.
The plot is difficult to grasp during the first couple hundred words. It was clearly intentional. By the time I finished reading I understood. The concept was clever, although hardly revolutionary.
My typical decider for science-fiction is the setting. This setting is simple. As with character, setting wasn't overly important to the story. Plot and atmosphere complemented the single controlling attribute of the setting.
Overall, Artist's Retrospective gets a 77/100. There could've been more flesh in places, even for flash, but the story worked anyway.
I've never read that much flash fiction so it's really interesting to see how you review and critique it. Thanks for this :)
ReplyDeleteYou're very welcome. Flash fiction has ended up, to my surprise, my concentration in the world of fiction, at least for now.
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