This novel took me forever to read even though every time I picked it up it delighted me more. I kept starting over, or sometimes not going all the waThis novel took me forever to read even though every time I picked it up it delighted me more. I kept starting over, or sometimes not going all the way back to the beginning but halfway-back, or three-quarters...I read the first chapter many times and kept coming back to it like a poem, and basically read the thing more like it was a dollhouse filled with tiny perfect facsimiles of a long-ago man and his history, and about pain, too, the idea of it, and the reality of it. There is a buffoon-y exaggeration in the story--the long backstory interlude of the titular character as a boy was one of my favorite tall tales in the novel but there are so many places where the book seems to be skating along on a level of verisimilitude and then skips several levels higher into the surreal. The storytelling is a magnificent braid of metafictional wanders plus historical fact plus actual linear story, of a man of his times, remarkable, long forgotten, now re-remembered. I loved it....more
Let it be known that I loved this novel. It kept making me happier and happier. Instead of the cranky nihilism I've come to expect from dystopian noveLet it be known that I loved this novel. It kept making me happier and happier. Instead of the cranky nihilism I've come to expect from dystopian novels, this novel instead evolves into a lovely fatalism. I loved that love wins, if in an extreme sort of way.
But what a pretzel of a book! At first it fooled me into thinking it was some kind of futuristic police procedural, and then a thriller, and then a story of conspiracy about the evil state…and then? Well. The novel just transforms itself into something wonderful and new. Something that filled me with joy.
Golden State not only plays with what is true/what is reality, but also, more fundamentally, what makes life worth living. In the end it becomes a paean to the simplest joys of life. The joy, for instance, of finally realizing that you're in charge of your own life story. The joy of family, no matter how broken your family is. The joy of stupid fun. The joy of wasting things. The joy of keeping secrets. The joy of pretending.
So right about here in my review, to be honest, I'm a little nervous about why no other reviews are talking about the aspects of Golden State that I found so profound and so meaningful. But the novel is also one of the best fake-out novels I've ever read, so much so that reviewers at Kirkus and The Washington Post and NPR seem to have been faked out completely by the novel's subversion of expectations. The WaPo reviewer is particularly grumpy that the last third of the novel, because rather than following the norms of a genre-dystopian-police-procedural, it evolves instead into a moving exploration of what makes life worth living; of what makes us human. Sorry to disappoint you, WaPo reviewer. This novel went in a different direction from your expectation.
As you read it though you may discover yourself getting similarly cranky when the book doesn't conform to your expectation--for instance what the heck are these interstitial, poorly-written, san-serif chapters doing there?--but my advice is to just let go of every expectation. See where the novel leads you....more
Second Read, 2018: When I read a book written in first person, it often feels as if I'm building a relationship2024: I read it again, I loved it more.
Second Read, 2018: When I read a book written in first person, it often feels as if I'm building a relationship with the narrator in my head. I'm gathering impressions based on what the narrator is telling me from the first page on. These impressions, this relationship between narrator and reader, affects my experience of the book. Do I like her? Do I trust her? Could she be my friend? Is she genuine? And so on.
This way of reading is all the more apparent on a re-read. The first time I read Annihilation I thought "The Biologist" was yielding, caring, and a great observer of life. I was very much affected by an early scene where she describes her childhood practice of sitting by a neglected swimming pool, and observing the coming wildlife as it invaded this formerly civilized space.
Reading Annihilation a second time, I thought The Biologist was cold, robotic, sinister. I was impressed by the way she coldly watches a colleague die, choosing to interrogate a dying woman for information rather than try to give her any aid or comfort.
I loved the book just as much. It's just that it was almost like reading a different book. This is one of the reasons I love to re-read.
First Review, 2014:
Annihilation feels like someone put an H.P. Lovecraft story into a blender with Charles Darwin's "Voyage of the Beagle." Wow. As I read I kept thinking "I have never read anything like this before, and it's amazing." The strange thing, though, is that I had this same feeling--that I was reading something entirely unique--with a different book, and less than three weeks ago: THREATS by Amelia Gray. I felt very smart when I realized that Gray and Vandermeer share the same editor, Sean McDonald at FSG. I'm eager to read the other two books in Vandermeer's trilogy and also to explore this editor's other authors.
The protagonist and every other person in this novel, except in flashbacks, are women. There is really not a thematic or a plot-related reason that I can discern for this choice, but it did unhook this novel spectacularly and marvelously from typical sci-fi tropes. It was really refreshing to read a novel where women characters were a completely neutral thing, rather than women characters being used as plot devices in a gendered/sexist way (e.g. "women are the characters who need to be rescued by men") , OR women characters being used to support some kind of underlying feminist theme ("women are good at shooting arrows, too"). In this novel they are neutral, they are people. I really loved that....more
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