Unreliable

So you think I shouldn't have started that story in the middle, descending a staircase in an unidentified building and proceeding to tell the end of the episode only to return to its middle and then beginning?  I could have started it thus:

On Tuesday morning I took a train to an Ophthalmology clinic to have my eyes checked. I decided not to drive because... etc.  At the registration desk I learned that I had three not two appointments scheduled  within the next 70 minutes.  Etc, etc.

I thought the story wasn't worth telling in that form, though when speaking it rather than writing, the order suggested above would have been more appropriate, I suppose.  Note that the second story proceeds chronologically, perhaps unexpectedly and unpredictably so after the strange order of the first one.

I recently finished reading a long bestselling novel recommended by many press reviewers, where the narrator starts out seemingly in the present, recalls events from 14 years earlier up to the time of the novel's beginning, all of it chronologically related, only to then move forward and end up two years later than the time in the opening chapter. And it all works just fine.

What doesn't work, and this is, if you allow me, a separate though related subject, are historical references in this novel, which have left me puzzled.   The character uses an iPhone before the device was introduced by the manufacturer, and his friend nicknames him 'Potter' before the Harry Potter series of books was published. There are other such errors.  (While the novel doesn't explicitly list years of the events, certain assumptions can be made, such as that it isn't happening in the future, and that 14 or actually 16 years earlier had to occur at the latest calculating back from the year of the book's publication, and considering that it was being written over a decade, even much earlier than that.)

None of this has been noted by the press reviewers whose pieces I checked, or most of the readers who made it a #1 bestseller, but then, to most readers, a bestseller is a sufficient proof of other people's good judgment.  A bestseller feeds itself, in other words.  So what's up with that? The reader reviewers who agree with my dismayed reaction point to many other problems with the novel and we all concluded that it is a sloppy, unedited work.

I'm still scratching my head, not completely certain of such judgments.  Is the author telling us that the narrator is a unreliable, a liar, a fantasist, it occurred to me just a few days ago?  I recall reading book reviews where this kind of observation is made of a novel's narrator, though at the moment I don't recall reading such works.  How would the author hint to us of the narrator's unreliability?  I see no such hints in this novel.  Why would the narrator invent a housing crisis in Las Vegas of the 1990s reflected in the state of the community where he resides,  when no such crisis occurred (as far as I know)  until in the late 2000 decade?

And just today, I picked up a novel by a Brazilian writer to find on its first two pages how it's done.   Before we know who the narrator is, he is revealed slowly, gradually, as we learn whether to trust him or not. On page 2 he describes his mansion to which he proposes to move with his unidentified listener, saying:

There are palm, avocado and almond trees in the garden, which became a parking lot after the Danish Embassy moved to Brasilia.

Come again?  And in case there are any doubts, four sentences later, he says:

In fact, they built an eighteen-story medical centre on our land, which reminds me, the mansion isn't there any more.

And so, that is how a competent writer handles his narrator unreliability.