Book review - An obese white gentleman in no apparent distress

I started reading the book with little knowledge about who it was about, mainly, who Terry Dobson was. I have seen videos of O-Sensei throwing around a big Western person but I didn't know who that person was. All I had known about Terry Dobson before reading this book was that there was a famous story on the everyday use of aikido by him.

I was planning to post an ojective review in this blog about the book based on his life but I can't really be objective about my personal experience of reading it, so the following paragraphs contain what I think about the book and what I was thinking when reading it.

The book is essentially about how Lena (the author Rikki Moss) and Max (Dobson) met, what they experienced together, what happened with and around them. As it turns out, the story is actually based on their life but it's not entirely fact-based, and not entirely fictional. It's interesting and new (to me at least) to use the novel format but it makes the reading a different experience from what people would generally expect.

To be honest, I struggled with reading until at least the middle of the novel. All I could think about was a question and some ideas I was forming. The question was "why does someone use the name Max in the novel when everyone knows it is actually Terry?" It was very distracting, it kept me busy between chapters. It is only towards the end of the book that makes it clear why a fictional name is used, so if you are planning to read it please be patient and try to accept the fictional name usage (if you have the same problem as me). There was also another issue that kept me busy thinking: at the beginning of every chapter there is a 2-3 page part that starts with 'Max says:', which is followed by the next part of the actual novel with its sometimes seemingly long and descriptive parts. The Max says parts are relatively short but they were much more interesting to me than the rest of the text, at some point I even considered reading only those because the other parts were too 'womanly', and I was more interested in the aikido aspects as the book is supposed to be about an aikido master. The Max says part is by Dobson Sensei, they are about Japan, O-Sensei and aikido, with little description about who is wearing what colour clothes. The other parts are the parts much less about aikido, more about life, personal experiences and thoughts mainly from a woman's point of view, with descriptions of houses, thoughts, dogs and people. The book indeed contains the famous aikido story I posted some time ago but ,interestingly, not in the Max says parts.

Until about 2/3 of the book, this - for me - unusual format and structure were more frustrating than clearly enjoyable but I kept going because I wanted to see the end of the story and I hoped to learn something deep about a life based on aikido. The end of the story is a quite sad one, although I can't say it's without any uplifting moments. As Max is getting closer to his inevitable death he goes through various stages, and people surrounding him also change and everyone seems to become better persons, at least this is how I see it.

I don't have a lot of experience with novels, and I have been reading quite different types of books lately, so my thoughts about the quality of writing might be completely different from yours. However, it seems that by the end of her first book, the author has become a really good one. The first part of the book does not seem to be completely mature, sometimes I was lost in places, times and people (not so much in dogs). Some swearwords seemed to be very unexpected in the described conversations but maybe it was just the way people should have been thinking and talking there. The end of the book has been much more enjoyable for me, there is something to learn from. I noticed that I started to read faster towards the end, I just wanted to know what happens next.

Based on the above, I can recommend reading it as you can learn a lot from it. Don't read only the second part though because a lot of details will be lost then.

A quite unconventional book about a similarly unconventional person and his relationships to himself and others. I'm lending the book to the first person in the dojo who asks for it. :)