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jodar's review against another edition
challenging
dark
emotional
reflective
sad
slow-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? Character
- Strong character development? Yes
- Loveable characters? No
- Diverse cast of characters? No
- Flaws of characters a main focus? It's complicated
5.0
This novel is wonderfully written, often poetic, dreamlike and immersive. At the same time it is dark, depressing and searing in the brutal and honest reminiscences of an unattractive personality.
In first-person narrative the MC, now in old age, looks back over his life and relationships, both the recent past and 50 years ago in childhood. The MC views his life and relationships as a struggle from his disadvantaged, violent background (“from the start I was bent on bettering myself” [p. 111]) towards a joy and success he has failed to achieve fully.
In first-person narrative the MC, now in old age, looks back over his life and relationships, both the recent past and 50 years ago in childhood. The MC views his life and relationships as a struggle from his disadvantaged, violent background (“from the start I was bent on bettering myself” [p. 111]) towards a joy and success he has failed to achieve fully.
Now in old age and as a recent widower, he wonders whether
Perhaps all of life is no more than a long preparation for the leaving of it. (p. 55)
Although religious symbolism impinges on the MC’s life at various times, he doesn’t hold any overarching faith to give him meaning. The world itself is pitiless:
I marvelled, not for the first time, at the cruel complacency of ordinary things. But no, not cruel, not complacent, only indifferent, as how could they be otherwise? Henceforth I would have to address things as they are, not as I might imaging them, for this was a new version of reality. (pp. 13–14)
and
Given the world that he created, it would be an impiety against God to believe in him. (p. 100)
A startling event at the beach at the end of the story, briefly and literally uplifting, he realises is not figuratively miraculous:
And indeed nothing had happened, a momentous nothing, just another of the great world’s shrugs of indifference. (p. 142)
The MC sees life only from his own perspective, his relationships as a child and as an adult are a means for him to achieve happiness, success and meaning for himself while he can.
I was never one to suffer slights easily, and always made sure to get my own back, even on loved ones, or on loved ones especially. (p. 90)
… what I found in Anna [his wife] from the first was a way of fulfilling the fantasy of myself. (p. 117)
His wife he felt unmasked his true nature:
She trained her camera on a fresh-faced hopeful but the pictures she produced were the mug-shots of a raddled old confidence trickster. Exposed, yes, that is the word, too.
It was her special gift, the disenchanted, disenchanting, eye. (pp. 94–95)
and even in death his wife was being selfish towards him: [obscenity]
You cunt, you fucking cunt, how could you go and leave me like this, floundering in my own foulness, with no one to save me from myself. How could you. (p. 106)
whereas her herself he didn’t truly know as a person in her own right:
I have come to realise how little I knew her, I mean how shallowly I knew her, how ineptly. (p. 116)
The novel allows us to immerse ourselves into what it means to be a morally little person, opportunistic, selfish and grasping, someone who is lost in a huge, unenchanted world that in the end is devoid of deep meaning at both the human and the cosmic level.
Content Warnings
Graphic: Child death, Death, and Grief
Moderate: Cancer, Misogyny, Toxic relationship, and Classism
Minor: Vomit and Alcohol