Still Life With Woodpecker is a little too weird for me. It’s fun and clever and rich - with language, scenes, ideas - but takes everything much further than usual. It does demonstrate what’s special about books as a format, that they can build worlds and situations more fantastical than even the most high-budget CGI can fake. Woodpecker zooms around, it indulges in long soliloquies, it breaks the fourth wall. It is thoroughly free spirited and experimental.
It’s fun, of course. It’s maybe too fun?