this is like if ottessa moshfegh wrote a brandon taylor book.
and also shakespeare is somehow involved, i guess. i (like many people who dare to call tthis is like if ottessa moshfegh wrote a brandon taylor book.
and also shakespeare is somehow involved, i guess. i (like many people who dare to call themselves bookworms) have not read any of shakespeare's history monarch-y plays, so much of the henriad retelling was lost on me even though i very bravely read the wikipedia.
like moshfegh (more so than melissa broder), it delights in being crass and gross-out without being cheerful about it. i thought it was very good, if a little shallow in places, which is a critique i have of moshfegh and not at all of taylor.
if anything with taylor it's the opposite. please stop being so deep about everything. i'm haunted by a description of an underenjoyed potluck submission i read 3 years ago.
anyway.
my only other real thought about this is that no one on earth could possibly eat as much lamb as these people do. is that how you have to be rich in britain? maybe i'm ok with being a middle class american after all.
anyway again.
bottom line: i read this 2 months ago but it still stands out for me. even if a lot of that is lamb.
------------------- tbr review
if brandon taylor calls it "one of the finest novels I’ve ever read," i'm reading it
(3.5 / thanks to the publisher for the e-arc)...more
i'll never be able to see the words milk and honey without thinking of instagram poetry. thanks rupi kaur.
but i liked this about the same as i would ii'll never be able to see the words milk and honey without thinking of instagram poetry. thanks rupi kaur.
but i liked this about the same as i would if it were in that genre, so. fair enough.
this is just not my type of book (no more pandemicish dystopian, please, i'm too fragile) nor of writing style.
more frankly, this is overwritten, with words used for how they sound rather than what they mean. "hulkings," as a synonym for hills. "humping" instead of rising. "eloquent" for an image of a graffitied d*ck. i didn't like it when cormac mccarthy did it, and he did it a lot better.
beyond that, between piles of adjectives, this landed heavily on cliches: "it wasn't until i hung up that i realized he'd never asked my name." no way! really?
add to these its gimmicks: "my employer" unwieldily used as many as four times a paragraph, as what was a fun style choice in early pages loses its sheen by the halfway point. if only there were a short, one or two syllable thing that we could call a specific person in order to reference them.
there are haystacks of em dashes every time another language is used, in an italy surrounded by expats as our monolingual protagonist.
there's italicized dialogue instead of the proletariat quotation mark.
in other words...a lot of unearned style here.
and ultimately my interest in the idea of an illicit, hyper-gifted chef cooking in secret in a dystopian world without food died when met with an untalented line cook. that, and a nonsense plot hinging on the justification-less idea that she'd be portraying a woman of another nationality at least decades her senior.
not to mention that goofy ending.
anyway. this book doesn't know what it wants: for us to condemn its cast of wealthy, even as they do more than the politicians it can't bring itself to frame as the good guys; to extol the virtues of our protagonist, deliberately ignorant to the selfishness and ego and greed that rival anyone's; to approve of fine cuisine or skewer it, same with capitalism and global travel and age- and power-gap relationships and money and philanthropy and and and.
it's mealy mouthed in every way you can imagine, and it leaves a sour taste.
the only thing better than the biography of an eccentric groundbreaking woman artist is one that's made up.
unfortunately that's not what this was abouthe only thing better than the biography of an eccentric groundbreaking woman artist is one that's made up.
unfortunately that's not what this was about.
i love lucy dacus and i hate to disagree with her, especially since we read this book at the same time which is thrilling, but we couldn't have had more disparate experiences.
this book was strange. it had a lot of interesting things to say, and a lot of interesting ways of saying things, but these two didn't always match up. some of its most compelling points are made in throwaway lines connecting middling paragraphs, and some of its strongest structural choices are wasted on the alternative history subplot it insists on destroying itself within.
in other words, this is likely good, but it's far from uniform.
the most bizarre moments of this book are twofold: its attribution of boring faux-biography to some of the 20th century's coolest nonfictional minds (oh hi, renata adler and chris kraus! you again, kurt cobain and david bowie!) and the fact that this is not so much biography of an artist and ex wife as it is relation of a history in which the southern united states seceded from the north in 1945 for the reason of "religion."
never mind that surely we would not be treated to this history if this were actually a biography of a woman. never mind that this makes no sense. never mind that world war ii still happened in this universe and we would thereby have to ignore the sense of american unity and patriotism that pervaded following this victory. never mind that also in the 1940s, the north was so progressive as to approve of socialism and of same-sex marriage and of a variety of other liberal causes, even though it elected a neofascist shortly after (who ran against ronald reagan, the green party candidate?).
i could never lose myself in these characters or in this story, because my suspension of disbelief was constantly being f*cked with by an alternate history so silly it resurrected my fading memories of apush syllabi.
i don't know. this book is so weird.
i badly wanted it to be my problem rather than the book's, but then there's the writing. i can deal with overwrought language if it’s precise. sentences that contain bits like “she glimpsed in my direction” and “dark black” are just too much for me to look past.
bottom line: the definition of an unpleasant surprise....more
this is an untraditional, timeline-twisting book in which a company has accidentally invented time travel and is committing inter-time violence accordthis is an untraditional, timeline-twisting book in which a company has accidentally invented time travel and is committing inter-time violence accordingly...
and somehow the most unrealistic part was its depiction of human emotion.
the thing they never tell you about sexism is that it's boring. that's the worst part of misogyny: just the most boring female characters you've ever read.
ok, maybe not the worst part. but it's not in my personal favorites.
i am personally of the opinion that if you are going to tell me something relatively insane, such as time travel is real and being hoarded for evil by corporations (with some parts of that being less insane than others), you need to ground me in the narrative. maybe give me some lovable characters. maybe give me some real-feeling feelings. dare i say give me a dose of reality via human relationships, or human life, or human thought patterns.
this book skipped all of that, and the result was dramatic and annoying.
bottom line: logically i know i read this as a book. but in my heart, this is one of those budgetless interchangeable shows you scroll past on a lesser streaming platform and know no human has ever watched or talked about.
i was willing to lose a minor part of the body in exchange for this book. a pinkie toe, or an appendix. something like that.
i didn't have to do that, i was willing to lose a minor part of the body in exchange for this book. a pinkie toe, or an appendix. something like that.
i didn't have to do that, ultimately, but it would have been worth it.
i could read this author's books about crazy weird damaged people healing and being happy exclusively for the rest of my life and be content.
this was heady and intense and very truly bizarre, and at many points i felt anxious reading it, and it really reminded me why i hate true crime (which is honestly a pro), but all of those ended up being good things. i connected to this story and this protagonist, and this book is very strange and very real and very dark and very fun all at once. while being somewhat less so than the book by this author that i truly love.
i saw this book half off in a barnes & noble and still maintained my book buying ban, and like any self-respecting bookworm i expected my medal of brai saw this book half off in a barnes & noble and still maintained my book buying ban, and like any self-respecting bookworm i expected my medal of bravery to promptly arrive by pony express.
AND THEN, THREE DAYS LATER, A REAL-WORLD MIRACLE OCCURRED.
i went to my parents' house where i discovered the publisher had shipped me a copy of this.
the universe is in love with me.
and in truth, this was very nice, in a very lit fic-y way. i love people and i love life even though i think both are sad and aggravating and complicated, and this does too. i like books like that.
i think this showed its debut-ness in some ways: the characters actually talk too much about too much, and rather repetitively in a very convenient way, and plot events happen similarly. there's a mundane neatness that is hard to explain, but for the deus ex machina of first novels. but i liked it anyway.
bottom line: can't wait for more from this author!
had me at "a haunting masterpiece, sure to be an instant classic"!
and it is haunting, in a lot of ways! well written, draws from the inferno and spirihad me at "a haunting masterpiece, sure to be an instant classic"!
and it is haunting, in a lot of ways! well written, draws from the inferno and spiritual sources, filled with the kind of english class-esque lengthy descriptions you can draw a bajillion themes or motif sor symbols out of.
so in that way, yes, haunting. what is not haunting, or particularly memorable, or effective: this as a novel. our narrative and our characters leave Something To Be Desired, namely believability or entertainment value or the kind of feeling of being drawn in as a reader.
but 1 out of 2 ain't bad.
bottom line: not the best jesmyn ward book, but still a jesmyn ward book....more
had me at queer literary vampires, lost me at everything else.
i think that what this book needed to work for me was a stunning writing style.
without had me at queer literary vampires, lost me at everything else.
i think that what this book needed to work for me was a stunning writing style.
without it, it felt kind of adolescent and silly, ungrounded. none of these characters felt real — the only thing that felt real was the city of buenos aires.
if you're reading a book about a 16th century vampire lady falling in instalove with a 21st century single mother ready to leave her son to live in a mausoleum, i at least need to feel like something is believable. even if that's the writing being nice.
instead this just felt overwrought and goofy.
bottom line: brb fleeing to the nearest graveyard home.
Loading...
