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    You Were Wrong: A Novel
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    You Were Wrong: A Novel
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    You Were Wrong: A Novel
    Ebook197 pages3 hours

    You Were Wrong: A Novel

    By Matthew Sharpe

    3/5

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    Currently unavailable

    Currently unavailable

    About this ebook

    Meet Karl Floor: friendless, motherless, put-upon, living with his loudmouth stepfather and pretending to take satisfaction from teaching high school math. Karl returns home one day to discover his apartment being robbed by a beautiful woman named Sylvia.


    So begins a strange and mostly inadvertant saga: Karl, now in love with this unexpected woman, finds himself introduced to her friends and family, making promises to her, defending her honor (which she definitely has) against assailants (which she only might have). Sylvia is devastatingly attractive, and caught up in a situation that Karl, bless his heart, does his best to understand. As he gets pulled further into her life, and begged to solve her problems, Karl also begins to see his own limitations.


    Confronting his confusing paternal situation, his issues with class and responsibility, Karl emerges as an ingeniously funny, memorable, and heartwarming anti-hero.


    Matthew Sharpe addresses his heady themes with warmth and charisma. You Were Wrong is a lovingly satiric, intelligent, and deeply enjoyable novel with a voice all its own.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherBloomsbury USA
    Release dateSep 5, 2010
    ISBN9781608194858
    Unavailable
    You Were Wrong: A Novel
    Author

    Matthew Sharpe

    Matthew Sharpe teaches philosophy at Deakin University, Australia. He has written books on Albert Camus, Slavoj Zizek, critical theory and contemporary politics. He is presently working on a history of philosophy as a way of life in the West (Bloomsbury, 2019, with M. Ure).

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    Reviews for You Were Wrong

    3/5

    44 ratings17 reviews

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    • 4/5
      I received this book through the Early Reviewer program by LibraryThing. I was really excited at having received this particular volume because the jacket summary sounded like something I’d appreciate and, frankly, I’m a sucker for good cover art. The slim volume tells the story of a “loser” math teacher and his interactions with his students, step-father, and some unknown relations. While I thought the quirky characters and funny dialogue enjoyable, I lamented the lack of a real story line and a discernible resolution to the conflict in the novel. Also, for a novel to really resonate with me, I like to have some connection or sympathy with the “hero” of the book – neither happened in this case.Overall, I liked the book and am glad I spent the time reading it, but it felt more like a series of connected short stories than a cohesive novel.
    • 4/5
      Matthew Sharpe is an impressive writer, and he sure knows how to pack a sentence with wit and intelligence. You Were Wrong is a strange family odyssey, told through the eyes of Karl Floor, a sad sack, high school math teacher, who is still mourning the death of his mother five years after the fact.

      I was barely fifty pages into this short novel when I had already decided to make it my next featured staff pick at the bookstore, where I am employed. I also felt that (as far as ratings go) You Were Wrong was well on its way to being a 5 star read, but the abrupt ending took me aback, and I am still trying to figure out whether I consider the end a disappointment or not. Either way. the preceding 180 or so pages contains some of the best writing I've encountered in years.
    • 4/5
      Great writing always compels me to read on, and Sharpe is a great writer. There are some pretty ingenious uses of figurative language and imagery here. The story, though, and the characters, situations, plot, etc, struck me as almost surreal. There are little or no consequences for many of the actions, but I still can't decide if I enjoyed that or not. It kind of left me floating. Anyhow, I'm not making any sense, so I'll just say, I enjoyed it for the great writing.
    • 4/5
      What the damn deuce?
    • 3/5
      I'll start off by saying I didn't get it. I didn't mind the ride, but I didn't get the book as a whole. It needed a lot more contemplation than I felt like giving it. What definitely helped was that I went into it knowing it would be a very strange read. I was prepared and I was able to go along for the ride. It's definitely written in a very poetic and almost caressing style. I've never read a book before that felt like the main character's point of view was separated from the world by a layer of gauze.
    • 2/5
      I got this book in the Early Reviewers program. The review quote front and center on the book cover reads, "This book is strange, original, and devastatingly clever." I would revise that to something more like, "This book is strange, original, and tries very hard to be clever." I only got as far as page 30 before putting the book down in-- not frustration exactly, but... disinterest, at least. None of the characters were catching my interest (I don't have to LIKE them, but I have to be interested in them), the story (such as it was, so far) was neither catching my interest NOR making a whole lot of sense, and the writing style felt like someone who specifically set out to write in what he thought was a clever way. It is pretty original (or at least, I personally haven't read anything quite like it), and there was a dark humor in it that I liked. Despite that, though, I simply wasn't enjoying reading it, and I'm not someone who feels an obligation to push through a whole book if I'm not liking it. I read for pleasure, and if I'm not getting pleasure out of it, then what's the point?Here's an excerpt: "Where was his hat? Someone had stolen his hat. An individual or group of individuals had absconded with his head covering. A man of Karl's light skin and facial challenges would do well to have something useful on his head of a late spring day, and he had done a good job of keeping his on his on the whole trip till now--well, not till now but till a time between his last moment of knowing he had it and now, and he hoped that moment would be returned to him just as he hoped his hat would, especially as the location of the two--time and hat--likely were connected."I rather like the line " An individual or group of individuals had absconded with his head covering." There's probably a word that describes this sort of sentence, the type that purposely uses slightly "bigger" than necessary words to say something simple like "someone had stolen his hat," and somehow makes it sound funny. Sharpe should have stopped there and called it a win. Going on as he did (and does, all over the place) is just too much.
    • 4/5
      I received this book through the Early Reviewer program by LibraryThing. I was really excited at having received this particular volume because the jacket summary sounded like something I’d appreciate and, frankly, I’m a sucker for good cover art. The slim volume tells the story of a “loser” math teacher and his interactions with his students, step-father, and some unknown relations. While I thought the quirky characters and funny dialogue enjoyable, I lamented the lack of a real story line and a discernible resolution to the conflict in the novel. Also, for a novel to really resonate with me, I like to have some connection or sympathy with the “hero” of the book – neither happened in this case.Overall, I liked the book and am glad I spent the time reading it, but it felt more like a series of connected short stories than a cohesive novel.
    • 1/5
      Full disclosure: I received a review copy of this book as part of the LibraryThing Early Reviewers program.

      You Were Wrong is a short book, but manages to wear out its welcome in no time at all. I was ready to throw it against the wall after two chapters, but forced myself to continue reading so that I could finish and give it a fair review. The good news is that I got used to the writing style after a few more chapters, but the bad news is that I think that may have just been Stockholm Syndrome in action.

      The main character, Karl Floor, is a sad-sack twenty-something math teacher who shares his dead mother’s house with his hateful stepfather. When the book opens, Karl is beaten up by two of his students, only to stumble home and discover that his house is apparently being robbed by the beautiful and mysterious Sylvia Vetch. Sylvia doesn’t act like a normal robber, however, and tends to Karl’s wounds before taking him on a journey across town to the house where she lives. As Karl’s life becomes intertwined with Sylvia and her circle, he wanders aimlessly through a series of mysterious encounters with people who abuse and confuse him. Karl is entirely passive by nature, and spends most of the book whining, getting dragged along against his will, or just plain lying down and passing out.

      The book feels a bit more like a series of rambling vignettes than a novel. There is the slightest hint of a mystery concerning Sylvia’s real motivations, and the story almost swerves into crime fiction at one point before course-correcting, but mostly it’s a shambling collection of long-winded character studies. Sharpe describes the most mundane of things in excruciating detail, often employing digressions within digressions that bloat single sentences into page-long tangents. Characters don’t speak like actual human beings; either they monologue for pages about vaguely related matters, or they utter terse exchanges full of thudding importance and implied mystery.

      The best I can say about the book is that Sharpe occasionally pulls off a fine turn of phrase or throws in a decent joke. For the most part, however, I found it both overwritten and crashingly dull, and was glad to see the back of it.
    • 2/5
      While I was intrigued by the description of this book and the first few pages, I quickly realized that the main characters were just annoying and I felt no connection with any of them. I simply didn't care what happened. While some of the language is entertaining and the metaphors are nice (such as describing a pool table and piano as "two hippos cooling in the swamp of bourgeois culture surrounding them"), the book as a whole just didn't work for me.
    • 3/5
      I was excited to get this from the Early Reviewer program. One of the blurbs mentioned John Barth and David Foster Wallace. I don't really see it, but there was still a lot in the book to enjoy. It's not perfect, but I liked getting to know the narrator and the relationship between the narrator and his step-father. The main relationship didn't work as well for me as it could have. The love interest was supposed to be mysterious, but in such a short book, having someone remain mysterious for that long of the book just kind of makes them a non-entity. I liked the style of Sharpe's writing for the most part, so even though I was only so-so for the book, I'd be interested in looking up some more stuff by him.
    • 1/5
      I had a hard time getting through this book. The author's description is excellent, but there's way too much of it. Do we really need half a page to describe a hat?The wordiness and digressions clouded the story, and there wasn't much of a story to begin with. This was disappointing.
    • 2/5
      I enjoyed reading this little novel while I was doing it, but I don't think it's likely to stick with me very long. The dialog was funny at times, but there just wasn't much to the story. Maybe it was that I didn't know enough about the two main characters to understand why they'd even be interested in one another, much less in some bizarro love triangle. Maybe it was that the stepfather started out funny, but in the end was so annoying he made me want to kill him too. Or maybe it was just not all that compelling a story.I don't feel like I wasted my time on the book, but I can't really say I'm drawn to pick it up again or push it on any of my friends.I think it would make a great airplane book. A good way to kill a couple of hours when you're bored, but nothing you have to think about too much, or would feel guilty about if you left it in the seat pocket.
    • 4/5
      It's hard to get a grip on whether I loved or hated this book, which I suppose is saying something that it had that reaction in me. I loved: the surreal feeling, the utter unreliability of every single word, the math--the way it defines and defies Karl--, the subtly aggressive moments of sexuality and the subtly sexual moments of aggression, the dead mother and her weird influence over her son, and sentences like this: “His life had been a series of slow, dull shoves through time toward the grave, which she had disrupted by existing in proximity to him, and now the sun was coming up on a post-Vetch life that was pathetic, intolerable, and that he could have prevented just by forgiving her—or even not forgiving her but living with her in unforgiveness and accepting the beating and any subsequent treacheries and lies as the modest price of loving and being loved, which was what he assumed most couples did.”I didn't like so much the exquisite descriptions of vomit sliding and pooling and congealing on things, the way Karl’s “voice” and the rambling of the evil step-father were so similar...the long stretches of page-long sentences in Karl’s brain have the same tone and cadence and sardonic humor that Jones has. Is this a comment about how he resembles the man he detests? Does the step-father not actually exist, or not actually exist apart from Karl? Or is it unintentional, the result of a certain style overtaking the book? The plot, or lack of it—especially the ending...though it kept me reading, waiting for the big reveal at the end, it wasn't as satisfying as I had hoped (although I loved the last couple of lines--hysterical!), and, sadly, I didn't much enjoy the dialogue, which seemed to be trying too hard in some places.Overall, I enjoyed the book, and it's one of the better ones I've received via the Early Reviewers' program--I can appreciate what Sharpe was aiming for and what he achieved in many places in this book, and I like it when authors take risks like this. An interesting and complicated book!
    • 3/5
      Got this through Early Reviewers as well, kind of liked it. Not quite sure how to describe it nor exactly sure where it went. Oddly compelling to read, enough humor (humour here in Canada) that I stuck with it. Short, but not really to any point. Though I liked it not sure I can recommend it very strongly to anyone. Sharpe has a good way with words and at least Karl and his step-father seem real, but the rest of the characters are just outlines and the story much like Karl is confused and wanders aimlessly from place to place. In the end, the story just sort of stops without ending. Like Sharpe's wit at times, but overall a bit of a thud.
    • 5/5
      Matthew Sharpe's novel [you were wrong] is something I highly recommend.A detective story of the oddest kind, where the mystery trying to be solved is life itself, which is sometimes too large, cruel, and ever-changing to seem anything but confusing. The book is narrated by a guy named Karl, who has been apathetic and coasting through life, until an event near the beginning of the novel causes him to realize what he's been missing... sort of.Because Karl hasn't been participating in society for the entirety of his adult life, he doesn't really understand the subterfuge that people participate in on a daily basis. He's not an idiot, he's just innocent. Rather than interacting with other people his age, Karl has mostly been interacting with the high school students to whom he teaches math. Karl is actually somewhat of a math genius, and tends to try to understand the world in mathematical terms. This trait he has is endearing - Karl's sense of logic is impeccable, whereas his grasp of emotions is clumsy and incomplete. His innocence makes his fumbling with the situation unfolding throughout the novel confusing and large and interesting, like the adult world seen through the eyes of an extremely precocious child.You should go get a copy. Now. & read it.
    • 4/5
      Good read, fast, I enjoyed it very much. It's about a high school math teacher named Karl Floor. Kind of a down on his luck guy, his mom is dead, and he still lives in the house his mom and stepdad had. His step dad is still alive, and thinks K arl is an idiot, and let's him know every chance he get's. Karl winds up getting mixed up with some weird folks, but I will leave it at that. I f I tell too much about the weird group it will reveal a twist that is very important to the story. It takes place in New York state, Long Island, Brooklyn. As the story unfolds, Karl realizes he has to reexamine his life, past, present, and future. I only gave it four stars because, it could have elaborated alittle more about Karl's and the other main character, Sylvia Vetch's, past. I highly recommend this book.
    • 3/5
      This novel is interesting and seems to be part of a series of novels by upcoming literary talent that use language in elaborate/unusual ways to disguise the fact that not much is happening. Sharpe's turns of phrase are cerebral but not so much that they are non-relate-able. They are structured in very unusual manners, prompting the reader to distrust his/her comprehension of the text. That perhaps is the biggest strength of the novel and it is that more than the plot that kept me moving forward.The plot, as the other review noted, is airy, sporadic, and unsatisfying. It staggers drunkenly through the novel, never quite falling in any one area that is developed or addressed at length. The characters, while unique, and the story itself really have nothing to say. The book seems to be written for Sharpe's sake more than any reader.Not without charm, but certainly without substance.