fizzy
“It was a light that shone over our faces, our wounds and scars. It was a light so brilliant and white it could have been beamed from heaven, and Brian and I could have been angels, basking in it. But it wasn't, and we weren't.”
“I open the window with infinite caution and fall like a newborn baby out into the starry night of the world.”
pros:
- the first story was captivating, especially more towards the beginning when agnes and zoe's relationship began to evolve into something sinister
- interesting themes of religious martyrdom, queer loneliness, codependency
- pretty solid foundations for each story's plot, just ended up getting muddled along the way
- i empathized with agnes' character a lot and her desperate search for meaning and affection in the depths of the internet, a place that was far from safe but at least was safe from the glaring judgment of her family and the crushing rationality of the outside world
- gross stuff
cons:
- unclear character motivations and pretty diluted personalities, which was especially prevalent at times in dialogue between characters
- a somewhat repetitive/drab/predictable writing style and story structure
- so many logistic plot holes
- continuous emphasis on women wishing desperately to become pregnant to the point where it almost feels integral to their characterization, which isn't necessarily a con but did feel a bit strange
- the first story has amazing potential to be a full length novel if agnes and zoe's characters were fleshed out more and their relationship was made more complex, but at certain points their dynamic felt superficial and largely undeveloped
“A tooth skipped out of his mouth and landed in a little shard of light coming through the doorway, the last of the sun between the trees. He watched the light play on his glistening tooth. He'd seen a lot of blood today. That was all right.”
Lapvona's characters felt less to me like human beings and more like miniatures acting in a stop-motion dark comedy, just dancing around and killing and dying for the heck of it. this may be because without exception, everyone in Lapvona is painfully miserable and/or evil, causing the characters to feel somewhat one-note and end up bleeding together in my mind.
the grossness for the sake of being gross didn't particularly bother me. though it did feel almost excessive at times, i think this is actually pretty integral to Moshfegh's individual writing style and meshes with the themes her work usually revolves around. the casual depravity of the characters was more disturbing to me. i think the bluntness with which abuse, poverty, exploitation, and death were approached in this novel expressed that trauma doesn't care whether you survive it or not, and it certainly doesn't care to be palatable.
though this novel was more ambitious in many ways than Eileen (the only other work of Moshfegh that i've read in its entirety), i have to say i prefer the simplicity and realism of Eileen and its exploration of feminine obsession over the more absurd and grotesque but ultimately meaningless medieval setting of Lapvona.
trigger warnings:
- incest
- rape
- homicide
- cannibalism
- abortion and infanticide
- starvation/disordered eating
- extreme poverty
- death/gore
- pedophilia/CSA
- animal cruelty
- child abuse/domestic violence
“There was no past, no future, no words, nothing—just the light and the yellow and the scent of dry leaves in the sun.”
“Tomorrow, there would be no stones, no spiders. No losing her red goggles on the other side of the yellow rope.”
“The ice retreats, the ground beneath him red and ochre as if an enormous mammal had been opened at his feet.”
There were a few quotes that resonated, but in comparison to Night Sky with Exit Wounds, this book ultimately fell a little flatter for me than expected. I understand that the highly stylized formatting of Vuong's poetry adds meaning to his work, but in this case, it almost felt like a roadblock to accessing the pure, palpable feelings that normally underly his prose. Some of the lines also felt too on-the-nose and almost contrived, but at the same time I can respect Vuong's honesty to his experience and his artistic instinct in this sense.
“Sophia is enveloped by the herd of everyone she loves and there is a waterfall of ice cream and everyone has a spoonful for her to try, a hundred colors, as sweet as cold kisses.”
some of the prose here is very pretty in its simplicity, yet it also got a bit pretentious for me at times with its metaphors and clichéd phrasing. i also did not particularly enjoy the “twist” of incorporating the Garden of Eden into the story, it didn't really fit and was an unsatisfying resolution to me.
i enjoyed some plotpoints and how they were written (the finger-bone, the heron and the window, the play written about Sophia) but ultimately although they successfully evoked a foreboding sort of atmosphere, they didn't really end up clicking together for me.
“‘I think it's a waste of time to try to achieve perfection, because if you look at all the versions of the world everywhere, overlaid one over the other, then that is perfection. It's nice to keep in mind that if something doesn't work out for me in this life, it does in another.'”
pros
- really interesting and unique premise
- attention grabbing despite the insufferable characters
- very unsettling and suspenseful when the supernatural stuff first begins
- my favorite tropes of rude/odd/offputting women and a somewhat weird plot slowly devolving into complete insanity
cons
- characters sort of disjointed, abstract, and unrealistic (despite it being purposeful)
- little to no rationale or motivation behind any of the characters actions, and the most integral of their feelings/values didn't feel convincing or supported by any of their choices (are they even obsessed w jen?)
- explicit inspiration taken from The Fly but not as striking or meaningful
- i know the writing is meant to be very stylized and somewhat detached/clinical but this detracted from the warm prose and groundedness that i usually look for in books, no matter how disturbing the subject matter (ex. earthlings)
- killed off my favorite characters (alicia and jake) to further a plot thats outcome didn't even feel conclusive or satisfying
“The Woman in the Purple Skirt might fly into a rage, and then grab me and drag me off the bus. But I didn't care. That would allow me to tell her who I was, and to apologize to her, and beg her forgiveness. And then we could become friends.”
“My favourite dreams are the ones in which I'm forgiven.”
i found the writing style to be pretty corny and overdone, and i kept cringing at the dialogue. like, i often hate when a book is told from the POV of the protagonist speaking directly to the reader (e.g. “well... you can proooobably guess what happened next
“Sometimes, at the end of everything, the only option you have is to make it worse.”
Pros: ?
Cons:
- extreme transphobe turns out to be a trans man
- insufferably racist protagonist, written by a white woman
- graphic r*pe as a plot device
- feminism 101 meets leftism 101
- shock value for the sake of it
- plot & writing style were nonsensical, misdirected, and boring
- not scary or creepy in any way
“The hunger was always there, beating fists against the tight seal I had fastened around it, but I pushed it down. It hurt too much to be big. Too big to fit in the clothes that smelled of Linda and the streets. Too big to hide. Too big to love.”
“I could see people all around me, but I almost felt like nobody could see me. I heard a train go by, rumbling down the tracks, drawing a thick line between the world and my experience. I was getting cold again.”
this book felt like an exploration of what being a woman is, but through the messy narrative of someone's life, rather than through sociological theories and scholarly language. i can understand why the somewhat disjointed and random nature of the plot is unappealing to some, and it did make the book more tedious to get through for me. but i do appreciate the complex progression in Natsuko's character as she realizes what being a woman means to her outside of conflicting societal expectations.
while reading, i was reminded of the themes present in “Convenience Store Woman” by Sayaka Murata. both novels delve into unconventional gender roles specifically in Japan as well as womanhood translating to the inescapable feeling of being watched and microanalyzed while also remaining unseen at your core, seemingly alienated even from other women.
“‘Will I be able to go home someday?'
Piyyut said something, but I didn't hear what it was.”
i picked up this book thinking that the idea of a dystopia driven by herd mentality and industrialized animal cruelty being extended to humans was pretty intriguing, but it didn't end up doing too much for me. this book was disturbing at times but sort of in the way where it's not saying much by being disturbing, it just is. also, the writing style was fine, but it didn't stand out or grab my attention by any means.
despite him having a tragic backstory or whatever, i felt almost nothing for the protagonist. and don't get me wrong, i love an evil protagonist when done well, but Marcos' characterization felt pretty cold and detached. maybe you could argue that's the point, but it just ended up boring me.
i more enjoyed seeing his descent into increasingly erratic behavior near the end of the book because his character became more hinged on absurdism than detached conformity, which i think is a more realistic and human reaction to the world he lives in.
all in all, the book was gross enough to entertain me enough to keep reading and it has some thought-provoking themes, but i think the author could've delved into these concepts in a much more meaningful way by putting the focus on character development rather than on plot and world-building (which honestly wasn't even that developed on a larger scale, either).
“Do I have to smash a glass over the head of every single man I come into contact with, just so I leave a fucking mark?”
Pros
- very entertaining; i couldn't stop reading despite disliking the writing style, which is rare for me
- grippingly disturbing
- Will and Eddie were interesting and complex characters
Cons
- messy plot and overdone “plot twist”
- shallow prose and cringy internet jargon
- many unnecessary/underdeveloped characters
- hated all the characters except Eddie and sort of Flo, which i know is the point, but it made the reading experience unenjoyable at times
I expected so much more after reading and loving Coyote Doggirl! The art is great as always, but the humor fell flat for me. Very predictable quirky-millennial shock-value type of stuff. Page after page of clumsy sex jokes and toilet humor gets old and predictable after a while. A couple of the more subtle page spreads were really cool, though.
“ I'm thirsty, it's warm. Deserts of dust. Jungles. Dandelions on the wall. I've never touched a firearm. “
how was this 128 pages?? it honestly felt like so much longer because the pacing was off and the characters felt like cardboard caricatures with no true motivations underlying their actions. i kept waiting for plot that never happened, and while there were some memorable lines, in my opinion the prose was definitely not enough to make up for the overused plot and overall lack of direction.
this book also reads like the author has never met a woman. the way everyone reacts after Marie is SAed feels very strange and dismissive, and not in a way that adds any meaning to the story. Simon's r-pe scene also felt pretty unnecessary, and both assaults were essentially explained away by the perpetrator's traumas and personal weaknesses rather than being treated as the actual violations that they were. Alice's character also annoyed me a lot, like oooh the mysterious pale quiet girl who hangs out by lakes and has a dark secret that nobody in the town knows, oooooh... -_-
“I wasn't ready for work. I wasn't ready for the world. I was hoping for a natural disaster, but it was a beautiful day. I forced myself out of bed and went to work.”
The strange formatting of the dialogue and the nondirectional meandering of the plot made this book difficult to get through, but these idiosyncrasies definitely added to the book's surreal, hazy atmosphere. I really felt the absurdity, confusion, and futility of industrialism that the characters embodied.
I was intrigued by the animal plotline but wish it would've been fleshed out a bit more, although I can appreciate why certain plotpoints were left unexplained. The reveal that Furufue had been working at The Factory for fifteen years was really hard-hitting and almost eerie, especially since it was brought up so casually and the subject was dropped as if this fact was as inconsequential as the rest of the characters' lives.
Really cool idea and some of the pages are awesome but the white liberal cisnormative shit was kind of irritating. Also I didn't care about the plot or characters at all.
“The lake is beautiful. It's something from a fairytale nightmare. It's the embodiment of everything mean and awful and wrong, contained and glittering.”
when men break girls and women for the purpose of art, they're mysterious and misunderstood creatives. when women create art, they have to break themselves.
I don't usually read graphic novels done in black and white because of my attention span but the art in this one was amazing! I really loved the character designs, especially in Worlds. It's cool that the two main characters were POC and also that some of their less palatable, ugly moments were depicted. Overall I enjoyed the concepts but I would've liked them to be explored a little more deeply, maybe by making the book a bit longer or even a sequel, especially regarding the stuff introduced towards the end (the plot twist felt rushed, for example). But this book definitely impacted me while I was reading it and made me feel for the characters.