Reviews tagging 'Vomit'

The Four Humors by Mina Seçkin

3 reviews

inkylabyrinth's review against another edition

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emotional informative reflective slow-paced
  • Plot- or character-driven? Character
  • Strong character development? No
  • Loveable characters? It's complicated
  • Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

2.5

My head has ached since May, more or less the same amount of time I’ve been in Istanbul. My brain is an earthquake or an ocean. Whichever I am more likely to survive.

Twenty year old Sibel travels from Brooklyn to Istanbul for the summer, where she's supposed to be studying for the MCAT and grieving for the sudden death of her father, but instead becomes obsessed with using ancient medicinal philosophy to cure her chronic headaches.

I loved the beginnings of this, where Sibel and her American Golden-Retriever-energy boyfriend Cooper wander the markets of Istanbul, or when Sibel hides out in her ailing grandmother's stuffy apartment watching Russian soap operas.

And some of the prose I just loved and had to stop to admire: "Silly, I thought, that I could take his heart into my chest cavity and let his beat in place of mine.", but things really fizzled out for me around the halfway mark.

It becomes less about Sibel and her headaches and grief and more about long hidden family secrets slowly becoming unraveled. Which sounds interesting, but emphasis on slowly. There was a lot of information on Turkish history and politics, which again was interesting, but felt far removed from the story.

You might enjoy this if you're a fan of The Idiot or My Year of Rest and Relaxation and have a bit more patience than me.

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jkatey's review against another edition

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emotional mysterious reflective sad slow-paced
  • Plot- or character-driven? Character
  • Strong character development? It's complicated
  • Loveable characters? Yes
  • Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

3.0

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reneesquared's review against another edition

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dark reflective sad medium-paced
  • Plot- or character-driven? Character
  • Strong character development? It's complicated
  • Loveable characters? It's complicated
  • Diverse cast of characters? N/A
  • Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

4.0

When I first began reading, I saw the lack of quotation marks and couldn't help but sigh thinking I'd been roped into another Sally Rooney-esque book. What I found instead was a much more compelling reason for the lack of quotation marks. The giving of stories, what tragedies to divulge, the complicated nature of love and obsession and how we remember our lives in light of grief. 

I will admit that this story was hard for me to get through in the beginning. I wasn't compelled by the relationship between the main character and her boyfriend and while I empathized -while knowing I shouldn't- with the main character, it felt very bleh.

Once I hit the narrator's grandmother exploring and explaining her life, the story really began to to take shape and made it impossible for me to put down. And then the story made me want to prolong the inevitable end just so I could spend more time with this family. Very much mimicking the feelings of our main character once she begins to unravel her family's fraught and strained history.

I've come to recognise that the beginning of the book was really warming us up to the discoveries we are revealed by the end. This book (along with my last) have truly made me reconsider my perspective on generational stories and I think this genre will quickly characterise the rest of my reading year. 

This story weaves politics, grief, obsession, devotion and love altogether in such a way that I want to read it all over again, just to connect the dots that I may have missed upon first reading.
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