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A review by inoirita
The Dust Never Settles by Karina Lickorish Quinn
4.0
A beautiful ode to Peru immersed in maddening elements of magical realism, The Dust Never Settles by Karina Lickorish Quinn is a magnificent debut emanating imagination at its finest. The story is surreal and the characters are anything but ordinary. The narrative constantly jumps from the dead and the living, the past and the present, the reality and the imagination creating a whirlwind of startling journeys.
Anaïs was half English and half Peruvian. Although she was moulded in Peru throughout her childhood years, since the last few years she has been staying in England with her English partner. It was required for her to sign off the papers of the strange yellow mansion that she used to call her childhood home in order to allow modern residential construction and hence she set on a journey to Peru.
Our second narrator is Santa Julia, who once upon a time was a maid in the yellow house. But it was in her destiny to have met an unfortunate death in the house only to be resurrected as a saint. Santa Julia was for the common people and through her eyes the reader constantly time travels through hundreds of years, from the immigrants and the slaves, the unfortunate souls that she had witnessed were suffering. She is constantly busy in providing a hand to those in need, a cornucopia for the people.
Anaïs and Julia makes living and death more complex to us. The overwhelming paranoia that life in earth offers amidst all its impediments to Anaïs and strange comfort in little hopes after death that Julia experiences are so contrasting, it felt like I was reading two completely different books at the same time. But after the last chapter, it all came together.
Comprising of themes of personal identity and culture manifested in the form of an exceptional literary fiction, The Dust Never Settles is a hugely satisfying read.
Anaïs was half English and half Peruvian. Although she was moulded in Peru throughout her childhood years, since the last few years she has been staying in England with her English partner. It was required for her to sign off the papers of the strange yellow mansion that she used to call her childhood home in order to allow modern residential construction and hence she set on a journey to Peru.
Our second narrator is Santa Julia, who once upon a time was a maid in the yellow house. But it was in her destiny to have met an unfortunate death in the house only to be resurrected as a saint. Santa Julia was for the common people and through her eyes the reader constantly time travels through hundreds of years, from the immigrants and the slaves, the unfortunate souls that she had witnessed were suffering. She is constantly busy in providing a hand to those in need, a cornucopia for the people.
Anaïs and Julia makes living and death more complex to us. The overwhelming paranoia that life in earth offers amidst all its impediments to Anaïs and strange comfort in little hopes after death that Julia experiences are so contrasting, it felt like I was reading two completely different books at the same time. But after the last chapter, it all came together.
Comprising of themes of personal identity and culture manifested in the form of an exceptional literary fiction, The Dust Never Settles is a hugely satisfying read.