One of my passions – books about books. It can be something like The Thirteenth Tale where the whole novel is built on Jane Eyre and Wuthering Heights, or it can be something more like Reading Lolita in Tehran where reading books is an important part of the novel. Changing Places is not just about books, it’s about literature professors. Vain, arrogant and dried up academic from one of the best of the US universities goes to Britain for six months to teach in some crappy place in the middle of nowhere. His place is taken for these six months by nerdy loser from that crappy place who didn’t even get his PhD, and never wrote a single article. Sounds like fun?
Surprisingly, it is fun. Though the main characters are absolutely disgusting, it’s interesting to see how the narrator plays with them.
There is also a comparison between American and British educational systems (and neither looks really attractive in this representation). Looks like professors do not really care about the students, though students do not look nice either. They care only about having fun and getting good grades for nothing, and even their protests and sit-downs (the action takes place in 60s, so the students in the book do protest a lot) are kind of hypocritical, and looks like all they care about is to get stoned or drunk and to fuck. The courses that are taught are strange too, one of them, for example, is called “How to Write a Novel”. Not even creative writing, but novel. Of course, the course is taught by people who have no idea about writing, and all students think of themselves as future bestseller writers.
What I didn’t like the most is the open end. I’m Jane Austen girl; I need stability and restoration of the order at the end. And I did expect marriage here in this book. No marriage, not even some certainty about something. I feel like kid who was promised to get an ice-cream after taking out his tonsils…