bibliotequeish's review against another edition
2.0
This book was not for me.
I found the writing style to be such a turnoff.
It felt forced, almost sloppy, but sloppy in an intentional artistic way.
(do people still use the term "try-hard" ? Because that is [unfortunately] how I would describe this book.)
The story itself was good, which is why I'm giving this two stars instead of one.
But I felt like the story got lost amid the over punctuated writing.
I found the writing style to be such a turnoff.
It felt forced, almost sloppy, but sloppy in an intentional artistic way.
(do people still use the term "try-hard" ? Because that is [unfortunately] how I would describe this book.)
The story itself was good, which is why I'm giving this two stars instead of one.
But I felt like the story got lost amid the over punctuated writing.
jcschildbach's review against another edition
5.0
The writing in this book is absolutely beautiful, frequently poetic in describing the mundane. The story plays with time and place as the narrator attempts to piece together enough information to make it possible for her to understand her father. A number of devices run through the story, most notably a town that's underwater due to a river being dammed up, and a wooden boat that was decades in the making, as well as a strange and cobbled-together house that was the narrator's childhood home. Skibsrud's writing about her father's Vietnam experience is also rather effective--essentially impressions based on what her father told her, fixed on particular items or occurrences such as boots taken from a dead enemy, or the items her father found in the duffle bags of dead American soldiers as part of his job there. Skibsrud does not try to construct a complete, point by point explanation of everything, but presents her father much the way anybody experiences anybody else--through available contact points and those images and events that stick in one's memory.
* An addendum: After writing my own review, and having noticed before I wrote it a fairly low overall rating for the book, I began reading through the reviews of others. I was rather puzzled by the puzzlement of so many readers at the structure, language, and meaning of the book. Perhaps it is because I read fairly slowly, taking in the rythm of the written word almost no matter what I'm reading; or possibly because I'm a fan of all that high-fallutin, post-World War I literature, but I never tripped over the oft-noted commas and dashes that seemed to cause so many readers so many problems. I fell into the language and it felt comfortable to me.
I understand the difficulty of some in terms of "hype" versus achievement, but I wasn't reading this book with the same weighty expectations of those who apparently started off wanting to deem the novel unworthy--or those who thought it would transform their lives. Many seemed to deliberately misunderstand things that were apparent to me. For instance, despite the complicated structure of the book, Skibsrud never made it difficult to place the characters in a particular location or time. And how did anyone read this book without understanding the gender of the main character--even if said character was never assigned a name? How could someone so misinterpret the work as to think the violence of the Vietnam War was the crux of the book?
I admit I approached the book with my own reservations. For instance, I was wary of how the author might bring the Vietnam War to life (which only occurs in fairly brief episodes), but Skibsrud handles it largely as a person hearing things second-hand and in impressions--yet still makes it vivid. And the testimony near the end of the book is not meant to shock the reader, or make the reader wonder at the dread of war, or provide the final answer to all that has come before. It instead furthers the mystery of the narrator's father and only hints at what he has buried emotionally inside of him: an entire human life stricken from the official record.
Is the material on the Vietnam War strikingly new and different? Perhaps not. But at its heart, the book is not about the Vietnam War--but rather the personal impact of the Vietnam War on multiple generations through the character of Napoleon and his lost friend. And in that sense, Skibsrud brings something unique to the table. The story is not about war, but about emotional distance brought on by trauma, betrayal, and the confusion that both begets and grows out of betrayal. The characters are not betraying one another in the sense of sticking it to each other for personal gain, but rather fail one another because they don't know how else to act. And those are the betrayals that most of us live with.
Napoleon tries to make sense of what has happened and what he has done (or to drive it all from his memory); and those around him try to make sense of Napoleon and all the ripples he creates--most fairly small and ordinary, but much more like the impacts that the families of veterans really feel than the more explosive impacts that are common to Hollywood movies--or else simply abandon any effort to understand Napoleon, either letting him be as he is, or seeing him in terms of the inconvenience he has been to them.
The narrator takes on the effort to understand Napoleon in order to distance herself from her own problems, to block them out, only to run into the reality that she is adopting Napoleon's strategies for self-preservation, which are only likely to perpetuate the emotional distance and detachment that informs her world.
* An addendum: After writing my own review, and having noticed before I wrote it a fairly low overall rating for the book, I began reading through the reviews of others. I was rather puzzled by the puzzlement of so many readers at the structure, language, and meaning of the book. Perhaps it is because I read fairly slowly, taking in the rythm of the written word almost no matter what I'm reading; or possibly because I'm a fan of all that high-fallutin, post-World War I literature, but I never tripped over the oft-noted commas and dashes that seemed to cause so many readers so many problems. I fell into the language and it felt comfortable to me.
I understand the difficulty of some in terms of "hype" versus achievement, but I wasn't reading this book with the same weighty expectations of those who apparently started off wanting to deem the novel unworthy--or those who thought it would transform their lives. Many seemed to deliberately misunderstand things that were apparent to me. For instance, despite the complicated structure of the book, Skibsrud never made it difficult to place the characters in a particular location or time. And how did anyone read this book without understanding the gender of the main character--even if said character was never assigned a name? How could someone so misinterpret the work as to think the violence of the Vietnam War was the crux of the book?
I admit I approached the book with my own reservations. For instance, I was wary of how the author might bring the Vietnam War to life (which only occurs in fairly brief episodes), but Skibsrud handles it largely as a person hearing things second-hand and in impressions--yet still makes it vivid. And the testimony near the end of the book is not meant to shock the reader, or make the reader wonder at the dread of war, or provide the final answer to all that has come before. It instead furthers the mystery of the narrator's father and only hints at what he has buried emotionally inside of him: an entire human life stricken from the official record.
Is the material on the Vietnam War strikingly new and different? Perhaps not. But at its heart, the book is not about the Vietnam War--but rather the personal impact of the Vietnam War on multiple generations through the character of Napoleon and his lost friend. And in that sense, Skibsrud brings something unique to the table. The story is not about war, but about emotional distance brought on by trauma, betrayal, and the confusion that both begets and grows out of betrayal. The characters are not betraying one another in the sense of sticking it to each other for personal gain, but rather fail one another because they don't know how else to act. And those are the betrayals that most of us live with.
Napoleon tries to make sense of what has happened and what he has done (or to drive it all from his memory); and those around him try to make sense of Napoleon and all the ripples he creates--most fairly small and ordinary, but much more like the impacts that the families of veterans really feel than the more explosive impacts that are common to Hollywood movies--or else simply abandon any effort to understand Napoleon, either letting him be as he is, or seeing him in terms of the inconvenience he has been to them.
The narrator takes on the effort to understand Napoleon in order to distance herself from her own problems, to block them out, only to run into the reality that she is adopting Napoleon's strategies for self-preservation, which are only likely to perpetuate the emotional distance and detachment that informs her world.
thatclaregirl's review against another edition
3.0
I am silly, I thought the narrator was a bloke for the first chapter. I thought it was okay, pretty easy to read, although it got a little disconnected at parts. I read it in about 2 days which says something I guess.
dessa's review against another edition
4.0
Lots to chew on here. For years I’ve heard this book described as literary fiction at its densest — but what I found was actually conversational, casually philosophical. Memory versus history, and how we must form the present out of both.
megan_prairierose's review against another edition
3.0
Sometimes brilliant, sometimes confusing....but overall a story of how post traumatic stress disorder of one person can poison an entire family. How many soldiers returned from war and had PTSD that was undiagnosed, or if it was diagnosed what were the remedies? A lesson for all of us.
singout's review against another edition
challenging
dark
emotional
reflective
sad
slow-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? Character
- Strong character development? No
- Loveable characters? It's complicated
- Diverse cast of characters? No
- Flaws of characters a main focus? No
4.0
Complex book that moves back-and-forth in time with a narrator who is never named telling the past and present story of her father, a Vietnam war, veteran, and the man that they live with, who is the father of her dad’s deceased war buddy. Slow, but deeply moving, filled with passages about what is lost, forgotten, and impossible to understand in their present rural home, as well as in their history.
melissafulton's review against another edition
challenging
slow-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? Character
3.0
spoonerreads's review against another edition
3.0
This book was like reading a diary of a person who just put random thoughts down. I did enjoy the part about Vietnam, this seemed to be the real story.