Reviews tagging 'Suicide'

In balia di una sorte avversa by B. S. Johnson

3 reviews

meerkarl's review against another edition

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challenging dark emotional reflective sad medium-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

3.75

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pedantichumbug's review against another edition

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emotional reflective sad medium-paced
  • Plot- or character-driven? Character
  • Strong character development? No
  • Loveable characters? No
  • Diverse cast of characters? No

5.0

This book has been on my TBR for years but the copies are so rare and unaffordable that when I located it in a library, I jumped in right away. To be honest, I didn't expect to be this emotionally moved by an experimental, postmodernist work from the 60's, even though I knew that it dealt with a close friend's death. Because formally inventive works from the era usually tend to feel very programmatic in the sense that they are more concerned about their style and tools, which end up being their mere message. The Unfortunates is a great example where form and content are truly meshed and given equal footing despite the initial impression of it as simply another structural gimmick.

The narrative centers around disintegration (decay of material world, crumbling of self, deterioration of human body, shattering of meaning/language) and tackles the question of memory through that overarching theme. And then the themes of disintegration and remembering/forgetting are embodied in the book’s fragmented material form in a sense.

As the reader, it wasn’t particularly a challenge to jump from one bit to the next in spite of the random sequencing. It was just that what I sometimes experienced as flashbacks would perhaps be experienced as flashforwards by some readers, which is exactly how human memory works when you think about it. The narrator’s brain also travels in time, trying to remember and build connections. Influenced by the present state of things, memories quite often transform in the process of calling back, take on new meanings, or get interspersed with flights of imagination:

“I sentimentalize again, the past is always to be sentimentalized, inevitably, everything about him I see now in the light of what happened later, his slow disintegration, his death. The waves of the past batter at the sea defences of my sandy sanity, need to be safely pictured, still, romanticized, prettified.”

". . . or yet again, do I impose this in the knowledge of what happened later? A constant, ha, distorting process, what is true, about the past, about Wendy, about Tony?"

The writing is full of long ruminations like these, running on without full stops. The excessive use of commas work well, I think, with the stream of consciousness the author is trying to project.

The whole process of mourning and sense-making ultimately throws the narrator into an existential crisis that culminates in suicidal ideation in the last section (only the first and last ones are marked in the box, to give the book a sense of beginning and conclusion somewhat) amidst all types of other subjects that make up the most fragmented chapter of the book. Given that B.S. Johnson took his own life at the age of 40 and all of his work were heavily autobiographical, finishing the book in that way was real hard-hitting.
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hydeandseek's review against another edition

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challenging dark sad tense slow-paced
  • Plot- or character-driven? Character
  • Strong character development? It's complicated
  • Loveable characters? It's complicated
  • Diverse cast of characters? No
  • Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

4.0

Such an experimental depiction of grief. A good read if you’re curious about how form affects the reading experience.
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