I have always been an emotional reader: if a book moves me, I am immediately on its side. What to say about A Place For Us, then, a book that made me I have always been an emotional reader: if a book moves me, I am immediately on its side. What to say about A Place For Us, then, a book that made me cry so hard and for so long that I woke up the next day with swollen eyes? (I wouldn't have humbled myself and shared that last little tidbit if I didn't think it was so illustrative of how much I loved this book.)
Let me try again: I have always loved warm novels, and A Place For Us is a novel that is just suffused with warmth. It has such a big heart, the love and tenderness of its story, its characters, its writing palpable and felt on every page. This alone is no easy feat: there is no recipe for how to make a story moving; it's not necessarily, or not always, about "sad" things happening, and it's not quite about how many "emotional" things happen, either. We call a story that's clumsy with big emotions "sentimental." A story that handles those big emotions with finesse, with authenticity, is a much rarer thing, and A Place For Us is one of those rare novels. The central question to my mind is, Does this story ring true? And in the case of A Place For Us, it absolutely does.
The broadstrokes of A Place for Us are familiar--a religious family, strict parents, children that chafe under all the rules--but where another story would stop there (and let's be honest, we've seen plenty of Western depictions of Muslim families go this route), this one takes the time to shade in those broadstrokes so that what is drawn in stark lines becomes blurrier, more nuanced. More than anything, Mirza's novel is about the lived experience of a family, and as such it's a novel that is antithetical to any kind of stock narrative where parents are Evil or religion is Bad. As a book about that lived experience, A Place For Us dwells in its complexity, the realities of being part of this family as a father, a mother, a daughter, a son. Again, I could describe these characters to you in broadstrokes--the strict father, the mother who is trying to understand her children, the eldest daughter of whom the most is always expected, the young son who feels himself unable to fit into this family--but they are so much more than these broadstrokes could possibly convey, and indeed the entire novel is a testament to how irreducible they are to any handful of traits or experiences.
To me, A Place For Us is a novel of lived experience not just because it so deftly evokes the idiosyncrasies of life for the people in this particular family, but also because its very narrative style feels true to life. The story is told to us non-linearly, shifting between scenes from these characters' childhoods, adolescence, young adulthood, and everything in between. In any other author's hands I would've been concerned, but at no point in this novel did I feel like the non-linearity disrupted the story in any way. In fact, it lends the narrative a sense of authenticity and richness that it wouldn't have otherwise had. A linear story makes it too easy to draw a line from beginning to end, from cause to effect; as one character puts it, "Hadia could draw no straight lines from the past"--and so the novel won't either. We don't get straight lines from the past, but rather a kind of patchwork quilt approach to time. We get different kinds of scenes--tense, painful, joyful, contemplative--from different points in time in these characters' lives, and it feels like the novel is remembering things about its own characters, granting us access to these characters by way of this patchwork of memories and all their attendant emotional experiences. All of this is to say, the scenes in the novel don't have to be chronologically related for them to still feel related; a scene from the past helps reflect on the present, is a chord that gives it a different resonance, that changes the tenor of the subsequent scene.
So A Place For Us takes us through different moments in time, but it is also critically anchored in a particular time and place: the eldest daughter Hadia's wedding. The novel starts with this wedding, and so it exerts a kind of gravity that the rest of the story bends to. We know, from the wedding, that things have ended up a certain way--the son, Amar, estranged from his family for three years--and so are able to pay attention to how that came to be, and why. There is also a section of the novel that comes after that I won't talk about so as to not give away anything, but suffice it to say it made me cry like a baby.
Earlier on, I talked about how A Place For Us handles big emotions with finesse, but what stands out to me, too, is how it is able to evoke big emotions in small moments, to show that even while those moments are small they are still tied to everything that came before them, and everything that they will continue to influence thereafter. There's this scene in the beginning of the book where the characters, still children, are at a park marveling at a fireworks display, and it encapsulates so perfectly what it feels like to read this novel: to have that big and wondrous and moving thing of the fireworks, and to have it juxtaposed to, and enmeshed in, this ordinary and everyday thing of sitting on the grass at the park.
I just adored this novel. That it made me cry so much, affected me so deeply, is not because it was a tragic or sad novel (though it does have those moments), but because it is simply a well-crafted, compassionate, and generous novel, one that is empathetic to its characters, attentive to their psychologies, open to their shortcomings, but also, and importantly, their capacity for growth....more
Glassworks is a novel in four parts, exploring the lives of different characters across four generations. Each of those four parts is distinct, not juGlassworks is a novel in four parts, exploring the lives of different characters across four generations. Each of those four parts is distinct, not just in its plotline, but more importantly, in its effectiveness as a narrative. It would be much easier to review each of those four parts separately than to review the novel as a whole, and therein lies the problem.
The first story of Glassworks is an almost 5-star read for me. It is just sublime, a beautifully written and tender exploration of trauma, mental illness, and intimacy by way of a focus on naturalism and craftsmanship. Needless to say, I was utterly drawn in, hoping that the novel would continue in the same vein, even if the subsequent stories focused on different characters. Then I got to the second story, which I enjoyed, but not nearly as much as the first. It didn't feel quite as impactful, lacking the narrative thrust that the first story had. By the time I got to the third story, it became very evident to me that as the novel progressed from one section to the next, the stories got weaker and weaker. The third story was really depressing to be honest; its plotline felt forced, like the author was grasping at straws to try to tie it back to the characters from the first two stories whilst at the same time setting the stage for the story that would follow it. Speaking of: the fourth story was the final nail in the coffin for me. I enjoyed/tolerated the other three stories to various degrees, but this one I just outright disliked. I didn't like or connect to the characters, there was far too much going on plot-wise, and altogether it just felt like such an underwhelming way to round out the novel (if indeed it can be called that).
How to review Glassworks, then? Does the brilliant first story make up for the increasingly disappointing stories that follow it? Or do those latter stories overshadow everything that impressed me about the first? Ultimately, I think it's more of the former: when it comes down to it there were just more things I disliked than things I liked about this novel. I feel a bit bamboozled to be honest; I loved that first section so much that I thought Glassworks would become a new favourite, and then it felt like the novel went out of its way to disabuse me of that notion....more
"He wondered if time was a form of love, a way of dolling out affection in reasonable pieces, in parts small enough that you weren't aware of their si
"He wondered if time was a form of love, a way of dolling out affection in reasonable pieces, in parts small enough that you weren't aware of their size, and of what was slowly disappearing from your own form as you gave them away."
The Other Mother is, to me, a perfect novel: a masterclass in character work and prose, skillfully structured and thematically rich. It's a multigenerational family saga, one that embodies just how capacious and powerful that genre can be. In saying that this novel is a "multigenerational family saga," I'm also saying that it's able to encompass so much: the thorny and complicated family dynamics, the tangled threads that by turns connect and bind these characters together, the change and growth from one generation to the next, and the expansive sense of time and place that is facilitated by a narrative that unfolds over the course of decades. What's more, it all comes together with such impressive command; it is a real testament to Harper's skill that she is able to write a story that is so large in its scope and yet so intimate in its focus; the narrative is at once sweeping and minute, giving you access to a plethora of interconnected characters and colouring in their histories for you, but also allowing you to get to know and understand them in an incontrovertibly real and grounded way. "The whole is greater than the sum of its parts"--what we get here is both a sense of the whole and of the parts, of the family entire and of the person in particular.
Part of why The Other Mother manages to so effectively balance scope with detail is because of the way it's structured. The novel is split into seven "books," each of which consists of seven chapters, and which focuses on a specific family member. We begin with Jenry, who is the linchpin of the narrative, and then branch out to the key characters connected to him: his mother, his "other mother," his uncle, his grandfather, his other grandfather, and so on. And there is not a single section in the novel that is even close to lacking in any way. Certainly, some characters are more important than others--Juliet, Jenry's "other mother," in particular is the real heart and soul of this book--but regardless of how much they shape the narrative, every one of them gets a section that fleshes out their inner life and highlights their place within the novel's core family. Usually, with stories that switch POVs from one character to the next, I tend to dread that switch because I inevitably get attached to a character and don't want to leave them for another's POV. With The Other Mother, though, that was never the case. Part of why I adored this novel is because I trusted it so much: I had complete faith in Harper's writing, and so I was never nervous going from one POV to the next. That is to say, I had complete faith in Harper's writing, and her writing never let me down. (That being said, my favourite sections were easily Juliet's and Jasper's--Jasper's especially I will probably never forget; it was that poignant.)
"She fingers a groove in the soft wood, wonders why time wears some things down, makes them softer, more malleable, yet other things like bones and brick--things that make up structures, that are designed to carry weight--become more brittle."
Implicit in everything I've praised so far about this novel is the fact that it is extraordinarily well-written. Harper writes with piercing clarity, her prose lean and lucid, allowing the story to organically and seamlessly unfold over the course of the novel. And she has such remarkable control of this story, too. A lot happens in The Other Mother--there is plenty of loss and grief, secrets and lies--and in another writer's hands, it could've easily been a morose, overwrought melodrama. Under Harper's control, though, the prose and tone are pitch perfect, measured without being cold, moving without being sentimental. Every once in a while, I read a novel that makes me want to stop for a second to process just how impressive its writing is, and The Other Mother is one of those rare novels. Scenes with dialogue--literally any conversation between these characters--are especially brilliant. You're able to glean so much about these characters by how they talk, what they take from conversations, how they interpret what's said to them, what they notice, and what they don't. The way that Harper renders the minute details of her characters' demeanour and mannerisms throughout these scenes is just exquisite; it's what I mean when I talk about the piercing clarity of the writing, and what's more, these details--observations, habits, quirks--recur throughout the novel, adding to the sense that these are fully fleshed out characters whose idiosyncrasies carry on throughout the years that the narrative spans.
"His mother used to always say, I can recover from any death but my own, but he thinks now that it's the other way around: your own death is the easy one; what befalls the people you love most in the world, that is the most difficult thing to survive."
The last thing I want to talk about is the thematic focus, because The Other Mother is incredibly sympathetic and tender in the way that it approaches its very complex exploration of family. As I'm sure is evident from the title, the novel is interested in examining what motherhood looks like outside the bounds of what's dictated by patriarchy and everything that attaches to it. In taking motherhood as one of its central thematic concerns, though, the novel is also able to more broadly interrogate and look at the family as a unit. It's interested in asking what makes a "mother," yes, but it's also interested in asking what makes a family. We look at all sorts of family dynamics, here--mothers and sons, fathers and sons, fathers and daughters, brothers and sisters--and to be sure, none of those dynamics are ever simple or straightforward. It's a book that very much underscores how family at once drains and sustains us, holds us up and lets us down, and the story is adamant in depicting these family members as flawed. After finishing the novel, I watched a bunch of interviews where Harper talked about how she really had to take her time with this novel because she wanted to be able to embody every character's POV without judgement, regardless of whether she agreed with their decisions or not. And that's really the crux of the novel, I think: you don't agree with all these characters' decisions, but you do sympathize with all of them, and understand why they made those decisions. The beauty of the story is that you always have to hold these two things in tension: the fact that these characters hurt each other, and the fact that they do so not out of malice, but out of love.
The Other Mother is so many things, but more than anything it is a novel that is just brimming with love. Heartbreaking but hopeful, it's written so feelingly, a product of such care and nuance on the part of the author, that what you get in the end is just nothing short of brilliant. I cannot recommend it enough....more
This book reminded me of The Most Fun We Ever Had by Claire Lombardo, which is just about the most damniAn irritating and deeply frustrating read.
This book reminded me of The Most Fun We Ever Had by Claire Lombardo, which is just about the most damning indictment I can give it. There are some books I dislike, and there are some books I actively hate. This was the latter.
Let's begin with the characters, who are, according to what I've written in the notes on my phone, "absolutely fucking insufferable." And I stand by that statement. The characters in this book are, by all measures, adults; in their 30s and 40s, in long-term relationships or marriages or even with kids. Tell me why, then, they act like children all. the. time. "Petty" doesn't even begin to cover it. Like of course adults can be immature or childish and petty, but god these characters just stretched the limits of what I was willing to tolerate--and then promptly broke through those limits and became absolutely intolerable. I am not exaggerating when I say that every single character in this book infuriated me. Every single one. First of all, it feels like everyone is constantly cheating on everyone else in this book. Wives cheat on husbands, husbands cheat on wives, boyfriends cheat on girlfriends, girlfriends cheat on boyfriends. If there is a character in any semblance of a long-term relationship in this book, rest assured that they will cheat and/or will have already cheated on their partners. Cheating can be explored in a way that's interesting or engaging--simply giving me a book full of cheaters is not really the way to go about doing that.
There are a lot of characters in this book, and all of them are annoying in their own unique ways. We have Mazna, the matriarch of the family, whose chapters give us a look into her childhood and lost love. This is all well and good, except that Mazna is judgmental, sanctimonious, and snobby; everyone constantly sings her praises and yet there is not a single sympathetic thing about her that the reader can latch on to (at least this reader). Then we have Mazna's children, who I'm just going to quickly go through because I hated them all: Ava, the cheated-on mother, which is a tired trope that is no less tired in this book; Mimi, the sad, failing musician who's held a grudge against his sister for the last however-many years because she has a successful music career (like??? GROW UP); and Naj, whose life seemingly and exclusively consists of concerts, partying, and drugs, all rendered in a very boring way for all their supposed excitement. So yeah, not to beat a dead horse or anything, but I really did not like these characters.
Aside from that, there were also a couple more things that I didn't think this book did very well, to say the least:
- Tonally, this book is SO melodramatic. It needed to be toned down like several thousand notches. I can't be invested in a touching family portrait if the characters and story are crafted with the subtlety of a brick to the face.
- I hated the way this book talked about women's bodies. Are women conditioned to constantly critique their own and other women's bodies? Yes. Did I think this book portrayed this reality in some kind of nuanced or insightful way? Nope. There's literally a scene where Mazna has lost a lot of weight because someone she loves has just been *MURDERED* and when her sister comes in to take care of her this is what we get:
"'You've lost weight.' (There is a trace of wistfulness in her tone. Her own body has expanded with age, like a layer cake. Though Nawal knows it's wrong--her poor little sister, who's always seemed to Nawal on the edge of disaster, chasing after lofty, unlikely ideas--she cannot help but admire Mazna's flat stomach, the perch of her collarbones as her sister dresses.)"
Like???? Can we not have a single moment of peace??? Do I really have to read that in the midst of the aftermath of a horrific MURDER ????
- I was expecting a lot from the writing since the author is a poet but I didn't feel like it gave me much. It was definitely a little weird sometimes, and not in a good way. For example: "'Mazna.' Her name sits like a pet in his mouth. It sounds like what you'd call a woman." Like, what does that even mean ??? make it make sense please
Anyway, I did not get along with this book in any way, shape, or form. There was not a single redeemable thing about it for me, and frankly there is nothing about it that can make up for how much I hated its characters. I'm going to take a breath, finish writing this review, and then try not to think about this book ever again....more
"How is a country born? And who brings it into the world?
In certain parts of Kabylia, there is a folk tradition some call 'the sleeping child.' It
"How is a country born? And who brings it into the world?
In certain parts of Kabylia, there is a folk tradition some call 'the sleeping child.' It explains how a woman can give birth even though her husband has been gone for years: according to tradition, having been fathered by the husband, the child then dozes off in the womb and does not emerge until much later.
Algeria is like that sleeping child: it was conceived long ago, so long ago that no one can agree on a date, and for years it slept, until the spring of 1962."
The Art of Losing is a multigenerational family saga done right.
What is immediately apparent about Zeniter's novel is just how extraordinarily well-written it is. Its writing is not flowery or ornate, but it is so refreshingly and psychologically perceptive. More than anything, I think it really speaks to the level of insight that Zeniter has when it comes to her characters and the way they view their respective worlds. That is to say, Zeniter's writing is striking because she is able to recognize and home in on what it is that's striking about her characters and their milieux: the ways in which these milieux inform each other, refracted and reflected over the generations. Beyond this, Zeniter just has a remarkable facility with figurative language; her language is economic yet poetic, direct yet evocative.
"This is the reason why - to Naïma and to me - this part of the story seems like a series of quaint photographs (the oil press, the donkey, the mountain ridge, the burnouses, the olive groves, the floodwaters, the white houses clinging like ticks to steep slopes dotted with rocks and cedar trees) punctuated by proverbs; like picture postcards of Algeria that the old man might have slipped, here and there, into his infrequent accounts, which his children then retold, changing a few words here and there, and which his grandchildren's imaginations later embroidered, extrapolated and redrew, so they could create a country and a history for their family."
More than the writing, I think the biggest strength of The Art of Losing is not just the way it presents three complex and interesting characters representing three different generations of a family, but also the way that it is able to interweave insights and experiences from those generations throughout the novel. We get three different sections in this novel, pertaining to these three different generations: there is Ali, who is the patriarch of his family in Algeria; then Hamid, who is Ali's eldest son, and who comes of age in France after spending his childhood in Algeria; and then Naïma, who is Hamid's daughter, and who was born and raised in France. Each of these characters is nuanced and compelling in their own right, and each presents different issues pertaining to their own particular social and political environments.
As a patriarch who bears responsibility for his immediate and extended family, Ali is under immense pressure, and this means that he has to make some very difficult decisions to protect his family during the Algerian war for independence. In his perspective, we learn about his relationship to and feelings towards the French colonialists in Algeria, as well as the ways in which his sense of self becomes threatened when his position as a patriarch becomes destabilized and ultimately undermined. At the forefront of this section is a portrayal of French colonialism in Algeria, of the violence of war, and of the difficulty of "picking a side" when neither side can ever guarantee you safety or prosperity or, indeed, anything at all.
"For his part, Ali believes History has already been written, and, as it advances, is simply unfurled and revealed. All the actions her performs are not opportunities for change, but for revelation. Mektoub: 'it is written.' He does not know quite where: in the clouds, perhaps, in the lines on his hand, in miniscule characters inside his body, perhaps in the eye of God."
Then we get Hamid's perspective, which I personally found the most interesting. Having been traumatized from his childhood experiences during the Algerian war, Hamid arrives in France with no knowledge of how to speak, read, or write the French language. Through him, we explore what it's like to bear two (seemingly contradictory) cultural identities--to be both Algerian and French--and to try to navigate these identities in his familial, social, academic, and romantic lives. We also become increasingly aware of the rift that grows between him and his family, the amount of pressure he is under as the eldest son for whom the family has sacrificed a lot, and from whom a lot is expected.
Finally, we have Naïma, a character who, though she "has roots" in Algeria, struggles to understand what that exactly means to her. Naïma wants to understand her heritage, but she is constantly shut out from it; it is not something her father, Hamid, wants to discuss. And so in her perspective we delve into how she comes to terms with this: how she must do her own research to learn more about Algeria, how she tries to reconcile fragmented and scattered accounts of her family with the history she is able to gather through various secondary sources. We also get a lot about how Naïma 's Algerian heritage relates to her identity, how the way her identity is perceived and the way she herself perceives it both force her to continually interrogate her place in French society.
"From this point there will be no more vignettes, no more brightly colored images that have faded over time to the sepia of nostalgia. From here on, they have been replaced by the twisted shards that have resurfaced in Hamid's memory, refashioned by years of silence and turbulent dreams, by snippets of information Ali has let slip only to contradict, when asked, what he has said, by snatches of stories that no one can have witnessed and which sound like images from war movies. And between these slivers - like caulk, like plaster oozing between the cracks, like the silver coins melted in the mountains to create settings for coral trinkets, some as large as a palm - there is Naïma's research, begun more than sixty years after they have left Algeria, which attempts to give some shape, some structure to something that has none, that perhaps never had."
Zeniter is so precise in the way that she unravels all these characters' experiences for us, and so what we get in the end is a novel that feels so richly populated by its characters' inner lives. It's a novel about the generations of a family, and it really feels like what Zeniter has portrayed here is a family, one whose members are interconnected in many ways yet broken apart in others; one with a history that feels substantial and real, with all the gaps and fragments and myths that constitute any family's cumulative and growing history. It's a very self-aware novel in this way: it calls attention to gaps in the story, to dramatic ironies, to knowledge that the characters are not privy to but that the narrator nevertheless knows and weaves into the story.
That being said, I think the reason why this novel didn't get a higher rating from me is that its writing relies more on narration and less on letting us see events unfold as they're happening. It wasn't so much a matter of telling rather than showing, but moreso that because we spend a lot of time learning about what happened through these characters' retrospective accounts, we don't get as many scenes that just feature characters talking to each other in the moment and, by extension, highlighting the dynamics they have with other characters.
Regardless, The Art of Losing was just an excellent novel. To me, it did what The Parisian failed to do: it combined the personal and the historical such that neither one undermined the other--and it did so in a way that really resonated with me. (If you enjoyed this novel, I also highly recommend Négar Djavadi's Disoriental, another novel that's very similar to this one except that it focuses on Iran instead of Algeria.) I honestly haven't heard many people talk about this book, so if you love multigenerational family sagas, I can't recommend this one enough....more
Luckenbooth was not a perfect book, but it was a very humane one--and for that I loved it.
To start, I think Luckenbooth is a novel that is, a3.5 stars
Luckenbooth was not a perfect book, but it was a very humane one--and for that I loved it.
To start, I think Luckenbooth is a novel that is, at its heart, about how fucked up the world can be. Not in a trite or hackneyed way, but in a way that simply calls attention to that reality. The story is split into three parts, each with three point-of-view characters, all of which are inevitably tied in one way or another to the titular, larger-than-life tenement that is No. 10 Luckenbooth. Beyond that one common thread, though, the characters that Fagan gives us here are distinct and varied: we have male and female characters, old and young characters, queer characters; there are demon girls and mediums and gangsters and poets. And despite their diverse backgrounds and experiences, what Fagan is really interested in is exploring the particular ways in which they are marginalized: by their class, or gender, or sexuality, or mental illness. To put it simply, then, Luckenbooth is a novel about power and how it manifests in the lives of those who fall outside it.
"There is the Edinburgh that is presented to tourists. Then the other one, which is considered to be the real Edinburgh, to the people who live here. There are the fancy hotels and shops and motorcars and trams and places of work, then are the slums, starvation, disease, addiction, prostitution, crime, little or no infrastructure, no plumbing, no clean water, no rights . . . if the council want to go and take their homes down, they do. This is all on streets just ten minutes' walk from the fancy city center. When will these things change? Everywhere? When? All fur coat and nae knickers. That's a phrase the postman told me. It embodies this city."
This is not to say, though, that Luckenbooth is a completely bleak or nihilistic novel, because it's decidedly not. I said I loved this book because it's humane, and what I mean by that is that it refuses to let its characters' marginalization overtake their humanity. Each and every point-of-view character in this novel is drawn so tenderly, and despite getting a relatively limited amount of time with them, you really get a feel for who these characters are--their thoughts, their feelings, their relationships, their heartbreaks. For me, this was one of the things that made this novel stand out: Fagan's ability to so deftly give each of her characters a distinct and authentic narrative voice. Every point of view in this book evokes its corresponding character, and that is no easy feat considering how many characters (nine) we meet over the course of this novel. That being said, there were definitely POVs that I enjoyed more than others: I think Part I was easily the strongest one of the three--I especially loved Jessie and Flora's chapters--and there were a few POVs that for me didn't quite fit in with the others, namely William's and Queen Bee's; the former I found too rambly, the latter out of place with the novel's larger narrative.
Characters aside, I'd also be remiss not to mention the role that Edinburgh as a city plays in this novel. Cliche as it is to say that "[insert city name here] is a character in the novel," it's true. Edinburgh really is one of the main characters of this story, and many of Luckenbooth's chapters conjure it up for us in vivid detail: the streets, the people, the atmosphere, the corruption.
"I have this feeling, Edinburgh will dispose of each of us once she has had her use - drank all the energy and talent and money and vitality and then she spits out the bones. Hungry city! Subsists on human souls."
So far, so good, but there are also some things that I didn't love about Luckenbooth. I think the point-of-view chapters got weaker after Part I, which was so well done that it inadvertently set a high standard for the novel's subsequent parts--a standard which, in my opinion, they just didn't live up to (though they certainly weren't bad). Another issue I had, which is more technical, was with the dialogue. Fagan includes very little speech tags ("he said," "she said") in her writing, which means that you have to really pay attention to the dialogue to keep track of who said what. The way Fagan sets up her dialogue on the page, though, made this really difficult to do. She tries to address this issue by making the characters constantly refer to each other in their speech: so, for example, Ivy and Morag will be talking and the dialogue will just be like "what are you doing, Ivy?" and then Ivy responds "Nothing, Morag," and then a few lines later we'll get "Ivy, why are you doing that?" and "No reason, Morag," etc. It doesn't seem like a big deal, but it's one of my pet peeves when characters do this, and it becomes very glaring once you notice it. People don't usually refer to each other by name like this during conversations, so it oftentimes made the dialogue feel stilted and jolted me out of the characters' conversations.
The issues I had were minor, though, and certainly didn't overtake my enjoyment of the novel. Luckenbooth is a compelling novel in its structure, characters, and themes, but more than that, it's a really sympathetic novel, one with a lot of heart. I will definitely be watching out for whatever Jenni Fagan releases next.
Thanks so much for Simon & Schuster for providing me with an e-ARC of this via Edelweiss!...more
Disoriental is such a confident novel. From page one you get a sense of the narrator, of the narrative tone, of the kind of story that you're3.5 stars
Disoriental is such a confident novel. From page one you get a sense of the narrator, of the narrative tone, of the kind of story that you're going to encounter. And there are so many threads in this story. It is at once an intergenerational family story, a political story, a historical story, a coming of age story. It's also a novel that's preoccupied with storytelling itself; its narrator is continually calling attention to her narration of this story: sometimes she cannot remember things, sometimes she will rely on a letter or other piece of writing to tell a part of the story for her. All of this is to say, Disoriental is an incredibly multilayered novel, and considering the sheer number of threads this novel has, what Djavadi has managed to accomplish here is impressive. The ending, in particular, was especially powerful to read.
Despite all the praise I've just given Disoriental, though, I couldn't give it more than a 3.5 stars because I didn't feel as attached to its characters as I would've liked to. Because the narrative is so steeped in the narrator's mind, you get more of an emphasis on her perception of other characters rather than a complete picture of what those characters are actually like. And this is fine, except that the narrator spends so much of the novel focusing on the events of her life that you don't get super attached to her as a person either. I also found the novel dragged a bit in places.
Regardless, I think Disoriental is a novel that so many people would love if they gave it a chance. It's definitely underhyped, and it definitely deserves more attention than it's gotten considering how great it really is. If you're looking to read more translated fiction, then this novel is an excellent place to start.
(Thank you so much to Europa Editions for sending me a review copy of this book!)...more
I'm finding that I can't say anything more strongly about this novel other than, I enjoyed it!
Bernardine Evaristo's skill at bringing different voicesI'm finding that I can't say anything more strongly about this novel other than, I enjoyed it!
Bernardine Evaristo's skill at bringing different voices to life is front and center in this novel, as it was in the delightful Mr Loverman. But I felt like this whole novel was just a collection of narrative voices rather than an actual narrative. There was nothing wrong with each perspective per se, but they just didn't coalesce into anything particularly compelling for me....more
An Unravelling is a novel that very much echoes its title. Its characters unravel, come apart--as do their families. But this unravelling is 3.5 stars
An Unravelling is a novel that very much echoes its title. Its characters unravel, come apart--as do their families. But this unravelling is itself echoed in Rahill's narrative form, the way she chooses to, little by little, unravel her characters to the reader, delving deeper into their histories and relationships. And Rahill's writing is beautiful--measured and particular, invested especially in details of characters' sensory awareness:
"All down those years she's been handling her time like portions she could measure out and weigh--but that's not the nature of the thing at all. It moves in gushes, washing ove rhere with its great crash and spill before she has a chance to draw breath and look at things and say goodbye to any of it."
Aside from her sharp but quiet writing, Rahill excels at inhabiting the voices of each of her characters--and "inhabit" is exactly the word to use, here. An Unravelling is a polyphonic novel, replete with idiosyncratic, intergenerational voices, and in Rahill's hands, those voices speak clearly and distinctively.
These aspects of the novel come together to form an exploration of various intersecting themes, namely motherhood and aging, all from female POVs. The women of An Unravelling are young and old, with and without children, financially secure and insecure. The POVs run the gamut from Molly, who is in her eighties and having to come to terms with the traumas of her past as well as to make decisions about the future; to Freya, who is a student and a single mom dependent on her family to keep her and her son afloat whilst also attending university; to Aoife, who is now in her sixties and struggling to accept the fact that she has aged; even to Megan, who is the two-year-old daughter of Cara, Freya's older sister and mother of three.
An Unravelling is, like Megan Hunter's The Harpy, a novel about how domestic spaces are all but safe and comforting. They are spaces that are subject to turmoil, whether small or monumental, spaces on the verge of being unsettled, or else already unsettled. Rahill's novel was perhaps a little too long for my liking, with too many unresolved plot threads, but still, it is a compelling read with fine characterization that is well worth your time.
Thanks so much to Independent Publishers Group for sending me a copy of this in exchange for an honest review!...more
"Like the wind swept certain moods and memories away with it, so one could be feeling rather black and then find oneself stood at the line of
3.5 stars
"Like the wind swept certain moods and memories away with it, so one could be feeling rather black and then find oneself stood at the line of foam left by the waves and wonder what the blackness had been about."
The Bass Rock is a novel about women and time: women across generations of a family, across time periods in history, across planes in a geographical setting, across narrative points of view. Its thematic concerns are concentrated in the titular Bass Rock: an island in the East of Scotland that continually draws the female characters of this novel, almost exerting its own force of gravity in the narrative.
At the forefront of this novel is a kind of psychogeography: not so much an exploration of how a place can affect its inhabitants (though that's certainly present), as the term is traditionally used, but moreso the way that a place can absorb its inhabitants' lives and histories. (I'm about to whip out some literary theory that I'm absolutely not well-equipped to handle but here we go.) In literary theory, there's a term, "chronotope," that's used to examine how narratives approach their settings in both spatial and temporal ways. And really, I think that's the perfect term to use for Wyld's novel; the significance of the Bass Rock as a setting is right there in the title.
The Bass Rock is the sun around which the narratives of this novel orbit. Critically, and in line with a chronotope, it's two-pronged, its significance rooted in both time and space. The Bass Rock, as a place, is the common denominator of the three perspectives that comprise this novel. The Bass Rock means different things to each of the three principal characters in their respective time periods. In the 1950s it is a kind of anchor for Ruth, a wife who feels psychologically and physically adrift in a new environment. In the 1700s it is an ominous presence, bearing witness to the violence inflicted on a girl accused of being a witch. And finally, in the present-day it is a kind of reminder of an unknown history for Viv, who is sent to prepare her grandmother's house by the Bass Rock to sell. All three perspectives of the novel prominently feature and take place by the Bass Rock. Regardless of what the Bass Rock comes to mean for these characters, it is always there.
But more than just its recurrence as a geographical setting, the Bass Rock also transcends historical time in this story. It is a silent witness to a gendered violence that remains constant regardless of the time period, whether in the 1950s, the 1700s, or the present day. In particular, Wyld examines the ways in which violence against women doesn't lessen over time so much as it gets diverted into different channels, mutates forms. Indeed, it is a violence which becomes natural in a very literal sense: the blood of women having been absorbed into the water surrounding the Bass Rock, its shores, the very soil from which new life grows.
Having said all that, this is not a bleak novel, necessarily, nor is it exclusively preoccupied with thematic concerns at the expense of its characters. To the contrary, despite the many points of view that she had to juggle in this narrative, Wyld treats them and their arcs with care and attention. Certainly there were certain perspectives given more time than others, but I never felt like any of them were underdeveloped. Considering, also, how much these perspectives intersected with and informed one another, it's quite impressive what Wyld has managed to pull off here.
The Bass Rock is an absolutely absorbing novel that deftly handles multiple perspectives and explores some complex, compelling themes. For those who enjoyed All the Birds, Singing, The Bass Rock is leaps and bounds better; for those who didn't (i.e. me), The Bass Rock might just change your mind about Evie Wyld.
(Thank you to Jonathan Cape for sending me an e-ARC of this in exchange for an honest review!)...more
i feel like i understood maybe 60% of this book at most, and that's a generous estimate
You know those books you read that feel like they were written i feel like i understood maybe 60% of this book at most, and that's a generous estimate
You know those books you read that feel like they were written so you can analyze them in an essay for English class? Yeah, The Topeka School is one of those books. Whether that's a good or bad thing is up to you.
I tend to vacillate between hating and being engaged by books like The Topeka School. On the one hand, I like to be intellectually challenged. I like a novel that evades my attempts to pin it down, that makes me work to understand it. On the other hand, I don't like pretentious novels, novels that are purposely difficult for no other reason than to be difficult. As if difficulty means quality. In the case of this particular novel, I fall somewhere in between.
The Topeka School is like a delicate piece of French pastry: it's multi-layered, but the moment you try to get a hold of any of those layers to try to understand them, they crumble in your hands. It's interesting enough to draw you to its story, but impenetrable enough to reject any of your attempts to get beyond its surface, to emotionally connect to it on any level.
I read this 280-page novel in 3 days and it absolutely exhausted me. When the book you're reading feels like it's just labyrinths within more labyrinths, the reading experience becomes taxing, and not in a rewarding way.
Reading The Topeka School felt a lot like reading Don DeLillo's White Noise, actually. It reminded me of that feeling you get when you're reading a book that is very explicitly Trying to Do Something. Which is kind of a ridiculous thing to say—all books are obviously trying to do something—but in this case it feels like the point of the book is to get that Thing done—comment on American masculinity, rhetoric and its relation to politics, etc.—rather than to actually tell a story.
To each their own I guess. I didn't hate this book, and I'm sure I would've gotten a lot more out of it had I read it for an English class, but I didn't so all I really feel about it right now is: it was fine....more
"It is easy to forget, but stories need not always have a purpose. We are quick to say that folktales have a moral or a lesson or a creed.
4-4.5 stars
"It is easy to forget, but stories need not always have a purpose. We are quick to say that folktales have a moral or a lesson or a creed. But most of the stories that have survived the ages are told for one purpose only, and that purpose is to say this: 'Being human is difficult. Here is some evidence.'"
Just absolutely exquisite storytelling. Drager has written a story about stories--in the moment of their telling and through time--and about the powerful bonds that tie siblings together. Her novel is sprawling and specific, widening and narrowing the scope of its story with beautiful fluidity. The biggest compliment I can give this book is, I would love to study it in class. Write essays about it. Talk about it with other people. It's incredibly layered and genuinely meaningful, simple in a way that makes it affect you all the more.
"In order to record a tale, something must always be lost. Some things must be left unsaid and disguised. The art of storytelling, his brother said, is all about where and how to leave the voids."
The Archive of Alternate Endings is by far the most surprising book of the year for me, not to mention a severely underrated one. I picked it up expecting nothing at all and finished it knowing it was a new favourite. I want to reread it already....more
The Most Fun We Ever Had grew on me like a rash: the more I read this book the more I grew firm in my opinion that not only did I dislike it, but thatThe Most Fun We Ever Had grew on me like a rash: the more I read this book the more I grew firm in my opinion that not only did I dislike it, but that I in fact actively hated it. Its bloated length—532 pages—is almost designed to make its every fault as glaring and grating as possible. (i started listening to its audiobook at 1.25x speed and finished it listening at 2.5x speed so make of that what you will lol)
Here's a very extensive list of some of the things about Lombardo's writing that deeply irritated me.
► The number of times Lombardo mentions how much Marilyn and David love each other. OHHH MYYY GOOODDD. we!!! get!!!! it!!!!! marilyn needs david like she needs air to breathe !!!! david worships the ground marilyn walks on !!! they have sex like 4097234 times a day and touch each other all the time and somehow communicate paragraphs' worth of information with a single look and wE GET IT YOU HAVE MADE YOUR POINT PLS STOP
► The number of times characters watch other characters having sex. There's at least 3 instances in this book where a character stumbles upon 2 other characters on their way to having, or actually having, sex. one of those times involves a 15-year-old character watching some guy giving his aunt oral sex and the other a teen girl watching her parents on their way to having sex on the sofa and that is, on both counts, very...uncomfortable, to say the least. and the scenes are described in detail too and I just...did we really need this kind of extremely weird voyeurism ?
► The language used in this book is just so bad; it felt as though the book was going out of its way to be shitty. Some choice examples: "We're in a weirdly speedy schedule tonight. Mom's in schizoid mode", ""Who's that horrible Judd Nelson boy who was sitting in the back row? He looks like a school shooter", "Her r*tarded eraser collection means a lot to her". The list goes on and on. Obviously each of these examples is bad, but it's the writing's persistent and unrelenting lack of sensitivity that got to me, its contempt for just about everything and everyone.
► i wanna talk about how the book portrays one of the characters—Ryan, Liza's husband—who has depression. i don't have depression so definitely take my opinion with a grain of salt, but the rep was, in my view, Not Good. in fact, it was Bad, Really Bad. the moment Lombardo introduced him i knew it wasn't going to go down well. because all he is in this book is a huge burden to his wife. that's literally it. he's a pathetic "man-child" who sits at home all day and plays video games and thwarts his poor wife's every attempt to get him to do something productive. first of all, HE IS DEPRESSED. i think that would qualify as a pretty significant extenuating circumstance. but more than that, the way he's represented makes it seem as though it's his fault he's depressed. like if he'd just get up and make an effort, everything would be okay. like oh his poor wife is working sooOoO much and trying soOoO hard to be good for him and he's refusing to cooperate or do anything for her sake !!! isnt he such a huge burden !! if only he would just, like, do better !!(view spoiler)[and in the end the narrative conveniently disposes of him by having him discover his wife's infidelity and leaving her lol. nice. truly the cherry on top of this novel's disastrous mental illness rep. (hide spoiler)] it's just so reductive. don't give me a character who's depressed and then villainize him because he's depressed.
second of all, no one does literally anything to help him. it's quickly mentioned at one point in the novel that's he on Prozac, but that's about it. no one suggests therapy, or better medication, or new medication, or literally any help of any kind. does his wife think his depression will just disappear ?? that if he works hard enough he'll "beat it" or something ?? oh yeah, and his wife has a degree in PSYCHOLOGY—the irony could not be more painful.
Aside from the mess that I just outlined, I also didn't like any of the characters. Most of them were annoying more than anything else, but oh boy one of them, Wendy, might be the most annoying character I've read so far this year. I hated her with a burning passion. she was AWFUL 99.9999% of the time and no amount of tragic backstory can convince me that she wasn't.
Anyway, a family saga is only as good as its family, and when you don't give an iota of a shit about the family that said family saga hinges on, then that's not an especially good sign.......more
◘ I'm so starved for any kind of Arab representation in fiction, let alone ownvoices Mus[image]
1.5 stars
wow this just completely missed the mark huh
◘ I'm so starved for any kind of Arab representation in fiction, let alone ownvoices Muslim Arab representation, so I jumped at the chance to read this when the audiobook popped up on Scribd. And oh boy was I disappointed.
◘ This book's biggest weakness is without a doubt its lack of nuance. I don't want to be the person that's like oh the oppression you represented in your book isn't complicated enough. I'm sure women did and still do experience the kind of marginalization Rum depicts in this book: domestic abuse, a lack of choices, physical confinement, etc. And I also know the amount of pressure that gets put on works by authors of colour to be representative of their entire ethnic/racial groups. I don't want to hold Rum responsible for somehow failing to encapsulate the entirety of the Arab experience; no one book can do that. But all that being said, I still think her book severely lacked nuance—in its representation of all its characters, in its messages, in everything, really.
◘ More than nuance, I think this novel suffers from being EXTREMELY repetitive. By the time you get to the halfway point of the narrative, it feels like you're just reading the same scenes over and over again: Isra makes tea for her mother-in-law, her mother-in-law is disappointed that she's given birth to a girl, Deya's grandmother tells her she should consider her marriage options, Deya says she doesn't want to, Isra loves to read, ad infinitum. When you're reading the same scenes represented in the same simplistic, on-the-nose ways again and again and again, the reading experience starts to drag, quickly.
◘ All of this is not to say that I'm not happy that this book was written; I'm all for more stories about Arab experiences, especially ownvoices ones. I definitely wish there were more, but I'm glad that Arab authors are getting the chance to get books published. I didn't much like this novel in particular, but here's hoping that other good ones are written....more
3.5 stars (would've been 3 stars had it not been for those beautiful last chapters)
"The older, longer, sluggish Marithe had looked up at the stars
3.5 stars (would've been 3 stars had it not been for those beautiful last chapters)
"The older, longer, sluggish Marithe had looked up at the stars and asked her mother, who was sitting in the chair opposite, whether it would come back, this sense of being inside your life, not outside it.
Claudette had put down her book and thought for a moment. And then she had said something that made Marithe cry. She'd said: probably not, my darling girl, because what you're describing comes of growing up, but you get something else instead. You get wisdom, you get experience. Which could be seen as a compensation, could it not?
Marithe felt those tears pricking at her eyelids now. To never feel that again, that idea of yourself as one unified being, not two or three splintered selves who observed and commented on each other. To never be that person again."
just beautifully articulated.
I wanna begin by saying that O'Farrell is a talented writer. Sure, her writing occasionally veers towards the ostentatious, but I'd say on the whole it's considered and reflective of the characters she's representing. My issue with this book was not with its writing, but with its structure. To put it simply, This Must Be the Place felt more like a collection of short stories than one cohesive story. Normally I wouldn't have a problem with books being a collection of interconnected short stories—The Tsar of Love and Techno, for example, is one such a collection which I thought was expertly done. The thing with this novel, though, is that it didn't feel like O'Farrell set out to write a set of interconnected short stories. Instead, it felt like she wanted to use that short story format in service of a more traditional beginning-middle-end story. Ultimately, though, I don't think she accomplished that goal. What I got instead was just a bunch of disjointed snippets of characters' lives. It's all well and good to know a character's feelings during a particular past moment in their life, but at some point you're forced to ask yourself, why should I care about this? A thing happened to character X in the past, OK, but so what? I didn't feel like I needed to be shown such separate parts of characters' pasts to understand how they acted in the present. O'Farrell could've just integrated their pasts into their present narratives. Sure, it would've been more traditional, but then again the traditional isn't always bad—broadly speaking, it works for a reason. The word that keeps coming back to me when it comes to this novel is disjointed. Some chapters were well-written, sure, but others just felt blatantly and completely useless. I'd be so into the story then BAM I'd have to read from the POV of a character I couldn't care less about, thinking who the hell is this? can we get back to the main story pls?Just because you can write from a character's perspective, doesn't mean you should.
I might decide to try some of O'Farrell's other novels later, but for now I think I'm gonna try my hand at reading some other, non-O'Farrell, stuff....more
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