Some people are going to love this book. There are many brief scenes of exquisite and particular wonder, and the characters are deeply lovable. For inSome people are going to love this book. There are many brief scenes of exquisite and particular wonder, and the characters are deeply lovable. For instance there is a scene of a woman hand-making felt from wool, a scene that is full of physicality, and with the joy of making things by hand, and it's one of my favorite scenes I've read this year. There are many lovely windows like this into the lives of these characters.
Where the novel fails for me is in its absolute and relentless dependence on far-fetched coincidence to drive the story. Fiction is strangely immune to an "it could happen in real life" argument. Even though by definition a made-up thing, good fiction actually has a higher standard for consistency, and for cause-and-effect, than real life has. For coincidence to work in fiction, the coincidental event needs to happen once, preferably at the beginning of the story. Even then the author is left with a big challenge to make a fictional story work when it depends on coincidence.
Ahava here seems determined to be the exception to the good-fiction rule and to make coincidence-upon-coincidence work as a plot device. It didn't work for me....more
Some books leave me speechless at the end. I mean this quite literally. I’m not making a metaphorical “there are no words” comment about the quality oSome books leave me speechless at the end. I mean this quite literally. I’m not making a metaphorical “there are no words” comment about the quality of what I have just read. I am instead trying to report a physical phenomenon, a feeling in my throat and lungs that comes only rarely, just after a last sentence is read, and a book is closed, when I’m left with a dazzling void of complicated feeling that renders me mute. After a while the words come back, and my feelings about the book begin to shape themselves into language.
So here is this novel, Oneiron*. In it seven dead women find themselves together in a placeless place, a white void with only the clothes on their backs. At some point they notice they aren’t breathing. Not long after, they realize they are dead. They share their stories. They help one another. They bear witness to the one another’s final moments.These seven women are remarkable only in the way that every human being is remarkable. The stories of their final moments before death are haphazard and sometimes violent and always meaningless. They have nothing in common, not even a common language. But even so these women make themselves into a caring community, in this strange afterlife, where nothing is ever explained, either to these seven characters, or to the reader. As in real life, the characters, and through them the reader, need to take it on faith that their experiences have purpose.
Oneiron is one of those books that stunned me into silence at the end, and when words did come back, they were from I. Corinthians:
Love is patient, love is kind. It does not envy, it does not boast, it is not proud. It does not dishonor others, it is not self-seeking, it is not easily angered, it keeps no record of wrongs. Love does not delight in evil but rejoices with the truth. It always protects, always trusts, always hopes, always perseveres.
Oneiron is not a religious book. God has no place in the afterlife Lindstedt creates. I’m not a religious person. Yet somehow this novel embraces a life philosophy that reminded me of Paul’s teaching. The novel suggests that caring for others–even in the flawed ways these strangers reach out and care for one another after death–is the most vital motivating impulse that gives meaning to our lives.
For a novel in which everyone is dead, this is a remarkably life-affirming novel.
This novel is an excoriating look at the way privileged people can excuse their self-congratulatory and selfish behaviors, both to themselves and to oThis novel is an excoriating look at the way privileged people can excuse their self-congratulatory and selfish behaviors, both to themselves and to others, by convincing themselves that their choices are motivated by selflessness.
The characters in this novel excel at finding a social cause that aligns with their own best interests. They are good at thinking they are good, even when they are behaving selfishly and stupidly. As I read I couldn't help but examine my own beliefs and actions in a more critical light and to reflect on how many of my beliefs align with the way I want to live anyway, and require no real sacrifice or commitment on my part. Good fiction can allow for this kind of self-examination. I enjoyed the unrelenting clarity in this story and the many examples of how people can justify their self-absorption by claiming the high moral ground.
Things I could have done without: I didn't like the portentous title. Also, much of the novel requires a leap of faith that all those intellectual arguments interrupting the action (there are long sections of both interior monologue and of unconvincingly intellectual dialog between characters) are worth the pages devoted to them.
The biggest disappointment to me was that the ending which left cliffhangers hanging for way too long while the characters think about their choices and the backstory is filled in and the characters expound on their choices with one another. By this time in the novel it really was too much thinking and not enough feeling for me. What could have been touching or reflective or epiphany-like in these ending pages felt stilted and stuffed with digression instead.
It felt like Sinisalo began with an idea rather than a story. Possibly my enjoyment of this novel was inhibited by the truly weird, one-of-a-kind, nevIt felt like Sinisalo began with an idea rather than a story. Possibly my enjoyment of this novel was inhibited by the truly weird, one-of-a-kind, never-at-all-careful novel Troll: A Love Story by the same author. In contrast The Core of the Sun felt like The Handmaid's Tale lite to me. The peripatetic writing style--a combination of the personal reflections of two characters, epistolary entries to a probably-dead sister, and examples of propaganda from this dystopian society--gave the story a detached air for me where the characters never quite gelled and I never quite cared about them. The society depicted here felt a little vague and bland and lacking in vivid detail. The core relationship of the story was strangely sterile. The idea of chile peppers as an outlawed, addictive drug is interesting but it didn't tie for me into any larger theme. ...more
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