Kelly
“If you are heartbroken right now, then I feel for you deeply,” Evelyn says. “That I have the utmost respect for. That's the sort of thing that can split a person in two. But I wasn't heartbroken when Don left me. I simply felt like my marriage had failed. And those are very different things.”
I knew nothing of this book going in, and I think I assumed it was chick lit-ish from the cover because internalized misogyny is real idk.
But wow, it is a stunner. I wept for maybe the last 20%.
It was an interesting story, but toward the middle of the book, the author changed the narrative voice by switching it from solely the protagonist's to the protagonist's plus like 10 other people's. It seemed like a really cheap way to expose the thoughts and motivations of the other characters in the story – the author just spelled it out, basically. I also thought the writing was a little subpar compared to that of Donahue's later novel, Room.
“For every miracle like me, there are a hundred like my mirror image; a thousand rotting away in jails or abandoned on the streets for the sin of being mentally ill; a million told that it's all in their heads. As if our brains aren't inside those heads, as if that warrants dismissal, not further investigation. As if there could be any other response but humility in the face of the devastating enigma that is the brain.”
Each book, each poem, each story is against the trauma of description, those ways of reading and listening that make vampires out of people, possessed by an insatiable hunger for a racialized simplicity that makes us into objects of study to be fed through the poorly oiled machines of analysis.
I can't really rate this because it's mixed. I have a high tolerance for – even a love for – discursiveness, opaqueness, and density. . . but parts of these felt like a literary theory dissertation making claims about ontologies and futurities and that's not for me. (Not everything is made precisely for me and my enjoyment, shockingly.) As a general rule, the less tethered to his personal life and experiences his writing became, the less I enjoyed it. And I really didn't get his argument that the aesthetic function of fiction is to “to whisper, to hide critique” – he really didn't elaborate on that beyond to write vaguely and poetically about it. Idk, that one bugged me.
Again, the closer to his lived life it was, the more I liked it. The last essay in particular, “To Hang Our Grief Up To Dry,” is absolutely chills-inducingly beautiful.
The opioid crisis is, among other things, a parable about the awesome capability of private industry to subvert public institutions.
Flashes of The Secret History: this book is populated by improbably erudite children who drink ludicrously — also, murder! It doesn't rise to the spellbinding beauty of Tartt's, but it's fun and funny and worth a read.
The stakes of this book are so off! There is so little world building and there is a shallowness to the two characters' romance that can't be overcome by the flowery writing. I really wanted them to focus on the cool time travel history stuff, and why the two warring sides are actually different (as opposed to indistinct warring factions whose battles always just cancel each other out).
Immediate re-read candidate. Her essay on UVA is one of the best pieces on sexual violence that I've ever read.
“A reminder to remember: just because the sharpness of the sadness has faded does not mean that it was not, once, terrible. It means only that time and space, creatures of infinite girth and tenderness, have stepped between the two of you, and they are keeping you safe as they were once unable to.”
Sometimes you just need to inject sweet, fluffy, liberal crack riiiiiiiight into your brain stem.
Good way to pass time
I would give this a two for quality and depth of characters but a four for being a good quarantine read.
Could have benefited from editing down some length, but a funny and well-written collection of essays. The last piece on his daughter — oof, so beautiful.
“If you're poor and black, America acts like you emerge from the womb twenty-seven years old, with four kids, five predicate felonies, and a lit Newport already between your lips. White people get to be babies. And they get to still be babies when they're adults. Poor black people are born Avon Barksdale.”
It was dark but there was a full moon, which shone directly onto me, providing a luminous, otherworldly glow, apparently. “I name you, my dearest, treasured new daughter, Doris Scagglethorpe,” he said, his voice throaty with emotion. “Doris Scagglethorpe: behold the only thing greater than yourself.”
A part of me was a little worried that a satirical narrative of slavery that found its commentary simply in inverting the races of the slave-holding and the enslaved would be facile. But I also love Bernadine Evaristo's work, so I went ahead, and I'm glad I did, because I found it a sharp, at times searing, literary device. There is some darkly funny stuff going on here, from the title itself to the designation of “Europa” as the Gray Continent. Beyond that, this novel contains some of the most harrowing and devastating depictions of slavery I have ever read, particularly the transport scenes. Recommend
I knew from Girl, Woman, Other that Bernadine Evaristo is a master of tone and perspective. This book just reinforces that. The most charming and frustrating narrator I've read this year!
I skimmed a bunch of the psych/evolution stuff since I've read it before many many many times so my rating is for the helpfulness of his ideas on setting goals vs. establishing processes, etc. Gonna implement some ideas from this book. Really a 3.5 but whatever.
What a delight.
For posterity — in writing about how passive voice can be used judiciously (see what I did there), Dreyer concludes with this perfect paragraph:
“‘A car rammed into counter-protesters during a violent white nationalist rally,' for example, is a sentence that may legitimately be criticized for neglecting to point out that someone was at the wheel of said car; in this case, though, the avoidance of explicit agency is a moral failure, not a grammatical one.”
I never ever ever ever would have finished this book if it weren't for book club, because I hated (hated!) (HATED!) Part 1 of the book. Part 2 rocked and actually actively made up for Part 1. This is literally exactly the type of book that a lot of normal people hate but that wins literary awards and gets glowing reviews calling it audacious and spellbinding, etc., but don't let that stop you from giving it a shot.
I despair over Goodreads' blunt rating system. I want to give this a 3.8/5; it feels like an crucial distinction to me.
I benefitted from having read some reviews of the book prior to reading, which in effect warned me that the mystery of this novel was much less compelling than those of previous French books, and I think that appropriately adjusted my expectations. But I also knew that Tana French is a writer whose works I would appreciate having read regardless of how compelling I found the plot lines, because they are secondary to her writing style and her characterizations and her deep understanding of human nature. (Off the top of my head, Jane Austen, Ian McEwan, Roxane Gay, and Donna Tartt fall in this category. The Tartt-French comparison feels particularly apt to me. Secret History vs. The Likeness, anyone?)
Mystery aside, I think this book is at its best when it illustrates the discomfiting fact that random events can so thoroughly shape a life, and how privilege and circumstance of birth can impede a narrator's ability to understand half of what's going on around him at any given time.
If you want your heart ripped out by merciless, perfect prose, look no further than this book. As the San Francisco Chronicle described it: “violent, excruciating beauty.”
Male fantasies, male fantasies, is everything run by male fantasies? Up on a pedestal or down on your knees, it's all a male fantasy: that you're strong enough to take what they dish out, or else too weak to do anything about it. Even pretending you aren't catering to male fantasies is a male fantasy: pretending you're unseen, pretending you have a life of your own, that you can wash your feet and comb your hair unconscious of the ever-present watcher peering through the keyhole, peering through the keyhole in your own head, if nowhere else. You are a woman with a man inside watching a woman. You are your own voyeur.
Atwood rocks and I will read anything she does. This one didn't quite do it for me but it doesn't mean it's without stretches of beautiful writing and amazing insights into humankind (especially women).