Lark Benobi's Reviews > Annihilation

2024: 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.