Nobody Is Ever Missing, A Novel

Oof. I read this a year or so ago and I still think very sadly of that time. There are a few beautiful turns of phrase and visuals, but mostly I was bored as shit

“and I knew I was not a woman but a series of movements, not a life, but a shake.”

I know I created a very detailed reading planner for the month of July. And I'm supposed to be reading 15 books this month. But then, Reddit sent me a recommendation for books about feeling good about being on your own, and I had to open it up. And I found this book. And instead of reading The Great Gatsby or Fahrenheit 451, I opened this one. And somehow, it reminds me of Proust. These long sentences when she is in her head and at the end comes back to the source of her first thought. I highlighted quite a few sentences already. There is something in her writing that rings so true, so close to me. Also, it's about a woman, Elyria, who decides to leave New York and her husband and move to New Zealand, without telling him first. And it's supposed to be a little bit like the antagonist to Eat, Pray, Love, like her depression is going to get worse, things are going to get harder, and I don't know, I'll see.
Update: I am writing this update a few days after finishing this book. Somehow, it was the perfect book at this time of my life. Upon finishing it, I decided I was responsible for my own happiness and started working on my coding assessment, to jump start my career. And I worked tirelessly for the next 3 days. Now, it is Saturday and the project has been submitted. I read Of Mice and Men in the meantime. But I wanted to come back to this review to give my final thoughts on it, my rating, and copy all the quotes that I highlighted from this book. It was a sad story. But the way her mind works feels so much like my mind. It was somehow captivating. It felt like reading Proust, with those long and intricate sentences where, at the end, they finally come back to the core of the idea. I don't know how to explain this book. Going to New Zealand and coming back home worst than you were before. Worst is subjective, but worst it is in this case. It's about the impossibility of let go of the mourning of her dead sister, it's about the husband who strangles her in his sleep, regularly, it's about the feeling of being off from your own life, it's about the incapacity to understand your own feelings, only when they materialize themselves in the tone of your voice, it's about wandering and never being lost with yourself, but being lost at the same time. I don't know. I guess it's about what I don't want to happen. This lente deterioration, this descente into the darkness of one's own mind, and the incapacity to truly connect and express oneself anymore.
◆ Chapter 11
▪ As the years went on I sometimes could have sworn that the existence of my husband and the whole complicated mess of him in my life was everything that was wrong with being alive and if I only extracted myself from him everything might go back to making sense the way it had when we had been new to each other
▪ redemption—because that's the thing: people can't really redeem people and I don't know what redeems people, what keeps people good, what keeps people in the sense-making part of being a human instead of the senseless, the unwell, the wildebeests that everyone has
▪ Isn't everyone on the planet or at least everyone on the planet called me stuck between the two impulses of wanting to walk away like it never happened and wanting to be a good person in love, loving, being loved, making sense, just fine?
▪ because to be people is to be breakable, to know that your breaking is coming
▪ and to love someone is to know that one day you'll have to watch them break unless you do first and to love someone means you will certainly lose that love to something slow like boredom or festering hate or something fast like a car wreck or a freak accident or flesh-eating bacteria
▪ and I thought about what I was thinking about and I worried that I was slipping away from making sense, but I gripped hard on that sense and said, Oh, nothing, just how I love you, and I twisted my toes under the sheets and told myself to be a woman who lives normally, being loved and loving—and I could be her—couldn't I? Couldn't I?
◆ Chapter 13
▪ As I fell asleep that night on a floor it didn't matter what I feared or imagined my husband knowing or saying he knew because there was so much in me that he could never know and he would never know enough about me, and I wasn't really certain of that, but See if I care, I whispered, to nobody, to my husband, to my own self, see if my self cares, self, see if it cares.
◆ Chapter 14
▪ I was being pushed by currents, by unseen things, memories and imaginations and fears swirled together—this was one of those things you figure out years later
▪ I did leave, and it seems the wildebeest was what was wrong with me, but I wasn't entirely sure of what was wrong with the wildebeest
◆ Chapter 15
▪ I went outside after my beer and looked down into the ocean and saw a stingray flapping in the water, a jagged C torn into his body and ribbons of blood running out, same color as mine, as anything's, and I knew that stingray had been chewed by something because that is all the ocean is—a big hole full of things chewing each other—and it's odd that people go to the beach and stare at the waving water and feel relaxed because what they are looking at is just the blue curtain over a wild violence, lives eating lives, the unstoppable chew, and I wondered if any of those vacationing people feel all the blood rushing under the surface, and I wondered if the fleshy, dying underside of the ocean is what they're really after as they stare—that ferocious pulse under all things placid
◆ Chapter 18
▪ and I think that's the thing about fiction, that you live in it totally for a little while but you must forget it, sometimes totally forget it, in order to go about the rest of your life
◆ Chapter 21
▪ branches—no, time is a thing that is always almost a thing that is never here and never gone and never yours and never anyone's and we're all trying to get a hand clutched tight around time and no one ever will, so can't we call a truce, now, Time? I am not asking, I am just saying—I'm calling a truce with time. Truce
▪ because I'd be fine if I could keep staying here, still and goal-less and husbandless and pastless and peopleless, because when I was here I was both here and not here—I was a person made of things that were fine, no wildebeests, just tomato plants and pumpkin vines and mulch made of seaweed and dirt, a pure piece of earth
▪ and all I could think was how there would be more weeds tomorrow and wouldn't it be easier for the world if everything just stayed still, just stopped growing altogether? Maybe it would, but we won't do that, we won't stop, plants don't, people don't, we keep showing up and living and trying to do something and dying and what was it that all these vines and leaves were struggling toward year after century after eternity?
◆ Chapter 26
▪ I wanted to tell Jaye about the inaudible noise but there was no good way to explain it without shedding too much light on the inaudible noise, overexposing it, bleaching it white and lifeless
▪ that I needed to get it together, to get a life together, to get myself together, to get myself. I hadn't gotten myself in a while and I maybe wasn't going to get myself, it seemed, because my self had been, somehow, ungotten or forgotten or not getting it, whatever it was, or is, or had been, or would be that I didn't get
◆ Chapter 29
▪ I'm not a person who needs people, but I am the kind of person who needs to be near people who don't need me
◆ Chapter 30
▪ shift—when love or kindness or inaudible noises turn into boredom or disappointment or minor chords
◆ Chapter 31
▪ babies, those pre-people people and all their warm, slimy wanting and their embarrassingly exaggerated needs, their screaming red-faced hunger and their bloody-murder nap-needing, and how those needs are just the same as ours, only magnified and reflected back at us
▪ I am asking you, I know, to suffer, to stand very still and feel as little as possible
◆ Chapter 32
▪ You can choose how you feel or you can let your feelings choose you
▪ I would never, no matter what I did, be missing to myself
▪ There was just something real in my head—a rescue boat in a sea where there was no one left to save
◆ Chapter 33
▪ I walked toward the ocean, my brain somehow calm and empty, sick of itself, taking a sick day
◆ Chapter 35
▪ Everyone wants to be needed so badly that if we were to withhold ourselves from that person who needs us so, we would leave them so empty of their need they'd become completely irrelevant to the world, unable to go on in a normal, functional, just-fine, forward-moving fashion, and the short of it was this: my husband was a mess, and even though I knew I was also a mess, I also knew he was messier, at least in some ways, and I realized I no longer had any interest in taking responsibility for him, the crumple and grunt of him, my husband, this life I had wedded and welded myself to
▪ I had a general feeling of needing to leave, of needing to be the first to go, of needing to barricade myself from living life the way everyone else seemed to be living it, the way that seemed obvious, intuitive, clear and easy, and easy and clear to everyone who was not me, to everyone who was on the other side of this place called I
▪ Moment, stay
◆ Chapter 37
▪ I didn't want to love anything. I was not a person but just some evidence of myself
◆ Chapter 38
▪ and I wanted to just be on the way somewhere, I wanted to be on the way forever without ever getting there because that was what I really wanted, maybe, to go and go and keep leaving and leave and leave and go and leave and be going and never arrive
◆ Chapter 40
▪ and I can't seem to stop seeing everything quivering all the time
▪ No one is anything more than a slow event
▪ and I knew I was not a woman but a series of movements, not a life, but a shake”

I wasn't feeling the love through much of Nobody Is Ever Missing. I thought the premise of Catherine Lacey's debut novel sounded enthralling, but the story was anything but. Without telling her family, our protagonist, Elyria, journeys half way around the world and wanders New Zealand. The potential for character development and crafting a beautiful setting was certainly there, but much of the novel takes place in flashbacks of Elyria's past. I was disappointed, trudging slowly through the novel's landscape.

At some point, in the last half, the novel clicked for me. I still thought it was slow and certainly not what I wanted from it, but the beauty of the language and the grittiness of Elyria's journey settled in. I may have not been enraptured with Elyria's trek itself, but I was with her character: her strength and weakness, her drive and her lack of direction, her passion and her callousness—she became very real. The language used to take the reader through Elyria's various mental states is vivid, breathtaking, and original. At times, the metaphors overreach, but these moments are few, especially in the novel's concluding chapters where the ride becomes more fast paced and psychological.

Given my initial reaction, I'm quite surprised I enjoyed this one as much as I did. Certainly, it is not the captivating, plot-driven novel many readers are seeking, but in the end, Nobody Is Ever Missing is a well told story of one woman's crisis of mind. Through not quite as lyrical as some poetic prose, I'd say this one will resonate more with readers of poetry than with hardcore fans of story.

I have limited patience for books like this. We follow the main character into madness and, at least, she goes somewhere interesting and meets interesting people (even if she is unable to react to them). This one finished just about the time I was starting to not care about her anymore. What is win here is the writing, sometimes a line or a paragraph was so beautifully written I found myself rereading it. But, again it's me, that can only maintain my interest for so long. I require an actual plot, with movement.
I admit I was suckered in by the cover. I'm glad I read it, not sure it will stick with me....and I couldn't tell you what the actual point of the story is. I so wanted there to be something to the repetition of the warning of blokes chopping women hitchhikers up in New Zealand. In fact, I think I hung in there because I thought for sure she had actually been murdered early on in the book and it was her ghost we were wandering with now.