lizardluvr's review against another edition
challenging
dark
emotional
reflective
sad
tense
medium-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? Character
- Loveable characters? Yes
- Diverse cast of characters? Yes
- Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes
5.0
mguinnip's review against another edition
3.5
Ok actually 3.5 maybe 4? I don’t know if I have a concrete rating. I read this for a philosophy class. It has beautiful phrases and a lot of heartbreaking, evocative syntax and movement. The overall structure and anti- made it a little hard to get into for me personally, but after ruminating I really appreciate this piece. It is a lot of everything and nothing working together and the space leaves a lot to consider. Extremely provoking, definitely recommend but it also definitely frustrated me. Don’t know if I can get on board with this as a “novel” but the poetics of it made its form more digestible. I think that is very much the point though, which is why I appreciate it.
brittaini's review against another edition
3.0
I don't really know what to say or think about this one, so I'm coping out with a neutral 3-star rating. I might revisit it someday--I do own it forever, because no libraries had copies.
mrsthrift's review against another edition
3.0
So meta.
Outlines the thing to discuss without really discussing The Thing. Telling the thing through context?
Stream of consciousness at times; other times, like staging notes for performance art.
It's telling that she thanks people like Kate Zambreno.
Her blog is Was Jack Kerouac a Punjabi?
Outlines the thing to discuss without really discussing The Thing. Telling the thing through context?
Stream of consciousness at times; other times, like staging notes for performance art.
It's telling that she thanks people like Kate Zambreno.
Her blog is Was Jack Kerouac a Punjabi?
nomadreader's review against another edition
4.0
ummm...interesting, intense, thought provoking and somewhat baffling
mhall's review against another edition
3.0
A novel that will never be written about Ban lying down on the ground in her suburban London neighborhood as a race riot approaches, 1979. Descriptions of performance art about the image of Ban. Ivy and asphalt. The image of brown girls lying at the bottom of the world. I don't quite get it - I sort of got something out of it?
EDIT: Thanks to the East Baton Rouge Parish Library for the interlibrary loan! There was a 2014 edition of this book which was eligible for my library's ILL service.
EDIT: Thanks to the East Baton Rouge Parish Library for the interlibrary loan! There was a 2014 edition of this book which was eligible for my library's ILL service.
caseythecanadianlesbrarian's review against another edition
4.0
A totally genre-bending "failed novel," this is a fascinating book that I think I would have to read at least two more times to understand. But perhaps that's not the point.
Also, some really gorgeous writing. It reminded me of Dionne Brand and Gertrude Stein.
Also, some really gorgeous writing. It reminded me of Dionne Brand and Gertrude Stein.
shallihavemydwarf's review against another edition
5.0
Ban en banlieue is a novel-shaped hole in the wall. In Kapil's own words, it is: "a list of the errors I made as a poet engaging in a novel-shaped space."
Kapil's prose poem about a novel that never came to be sketches out the empty space around the book. It is "literature not made from literature" but from all the truth, experience, hardship, tears, and intersections that sometimes compose what we think of as a book.
The book that does emerge– Schrodinger's novel, both destroyed and somehow remaining– deals in racial/sexual violence, and the remaining white space chronicled here suits Kapil's themes more than any portrait that could have filled it.
This is a book that asks what a novel is by sketching out what it isn't. It traffics in truth and pain and wonders how close a novel can be before it bleeds too much. It is closer to performance art than it is to a book, but I am glad that I can hold it and certainly reread.
Kapil's prose poem about a novel that never came to be sketches out the empty space around the book. It is "literature not made from literature" but from all the truth, experience, hardship, tears, and intersections that sometimes compose what we think of as a book.
The book that does emerge– Schrodinger's novel, both destroyed and somehow remaining– deals in racial/sexual violence, and the remaining white space chronicled here suits Kapil's themes more than any portrait that could have filled it.
This is a book that asks what a novel is by sketching out what it isn't. It traffics in truth and pain and wonders how close a novel can be before it bleeds too much. It is closer to performance art than it is to a book, but I am glad that I can hold it and certainly reread.
leerazer's review against another edition
3.0
It's not a novel, it's a polemical challenge to the art form of the novel. It says the novel may be fine for you (white, male, etc.) but it doesn't work for me (female, immigrant, non-white, etc.), at least as I try to tell this story. Actually the text itself is much more modest than that, that's just me enlarging the meaning: the author, Kapil, tells us that she tried to write a historical novel about a girl named Ban, born to immigrants, who was murdered in a white nationalist riot in 1979 England, but failed. Thinking also of the much reported 2012 account of a gang rape and murder in New Delhi, she produced instead this introspective poetical work about her failure. "In a literature, what would happen to the girl?", the actual text asks. "I want a literature not made from literature."
I wanted to write a novel but instead I wrote this. [Hold up charcoal in fist.] I wrote the organ sweets - the bread-rich parts of the body before it's opened then devoured. I wrote the middle of the body to its end... I bring the charcoal to my mouth. I hesitate. I smash it down. I want to end the talk covered with black dust, the life food or emblem of Ban herself. Let's see what unfolds. Let's see if it's possible. To be done.If the reader tries to read this as a novel, the reader will surely fail. The reader may fail in any event, because the text is so very introspective and rather difficult to access, so unfriendly to the casual reader, that it is easy to be baffled about what is even going on here. For me, one's main hope lies in seeing it as a poetical whole, and being left with indelible images in the mind: a brown body lying in the street, smoke and soot and ash (surely metaphors for violence, particularly racial and gender violence) circling in the air, maybe even text embodied and manipulated in an author's hands.
Ban is a portal, a vortex, a curl: a mixture of clockwise and anti-clockwise movements in the sky above the street. I study the vapor as it rises, accumulates then starts to move. How a brisk wind organizes the soot or casings and bits of bark into whorls.No mistake, this book is a challenge. At first I was confounded, then excited. Your mileage may vary.
madisonwren_'s review against another edition
5.0
Read this in two mornings. It hit me in all the places poetry usually does, but in ways I never expected. Reads like a poetic memoir, but one of many. Too many. Each page felt important.