Assembly

Assembly cuts like a knife: sharp, deep, painful. It reads more like a manifesto than a novel, anticlimactic, and anti colonial, upping the ante of its meaning at every turn. Very remarkable.

3.5⭐️

Really liked the language/imagery Natasha Brown used, and all the topics she tackles in so few pages (ans in a new way). Really interesting and would be good for discussion.

The stream of consciousness/ narrator commentary style did lose my interest a bit but I'm not a huge fan of that style (bit like the Rachel Cusk I've read). Literary fiction doesn't always work for me, but a reread/discussion with friends would probably bump my rating up as it is an interesting debut.

I would recommend people read it, and I would probably come back to it in the future, but I don't think reading it with Kindle formatting quite worked (or while on holiday, in smaller chunks!). 

Natasha Brown's prose is characterised by sharp witticism that humbles you on a personal scale but also on a wider one - leading to stark realisations about race and class.

ms.brown ate with this one. i'm obsessed. OBSESSED

Hace mucho no leía algo tan corto y a la vez tan pero tan bueno. Assembly es un slap in the face. Es también un retrato de época, que no se agota -ni por asomo- en la cuestión racial.

Desde su lugar de mujer inglesa afrodescendiente, la protagonista (cualquier similitud con Brown ¿es pura coincidencia?) cuestiona el lugar que le toca ocupar en la sociedad británica. Al hacerlo, acaba por controvertir buena parte de los principios de la sociedad moderna contemporánea y sus vicios: el éxito como un fin en sí mismo; la misoginia; el racismo; la desigualdad de oportunidades. Con muchos guiños de época y con un estilo de envidiable síntesis, es inevitable que los planteos de la protagonista no le hablen -en mayor o menor medida- al lector.

Miren sino:

Dread. Every day is an opportunity to fuck up. Every decision, every meeting, every report. There's no success, only the temporary aversion of failure. Dread. From the buzz and jingle of my alarm until I finally get back to sleep. Dread.

I'm not a huge fan of stories told in vignettes, where you have to weave the threads of plot yourself but this is a novella so it didn't last long. The first half was very good, then it stumbled around in a series of thoughts about multiple things before resuming with the plot, which was left unresolved. I think, with the right editing, this would have made an extraordinary short story but instead it is an inconsistent and unsatisfying novella.

I was sent a free copy of this book for review so thank you to Hachette Press.

so short!! but packs in quite a punch.

so short!! but packs in quite a punch.