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A review by frankiedoodle
Disorientation by Elaine Hsieh Chou
dark
funny
tense
slow-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? Character
- Strong character development? Yes
- Loveable characters? No
- Diverse cast of characters? Yes
- Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes
3.0
I picked up this book because I loved Yellowface by RF Kuang and Disorientation was suggested to me as a similar book. It was strikingly similar (both in subject matter and writing style), but I'm not sure that having that comparison at the front of my mind as I read set Disorientation up for success. While both books use satire and absurdism to deliver a message about anti-Asian racism and the model minority myth, I found Yellowface to be slightly more subtle and fun to read. It's always a tall, somewhat unfair task for a book to be immediately and directly competing with one of your favorites, so feel free to take this review with a grain of salt.
This book had a lot to say about identity, academia, and the way that White Supremacy subconsciously infiltrates all of our senses of self, but I didn't feel super trusted as a reader to pick up on that message. Most of this book's more thoughtful points get delivered through lectures and op-ed style blocks of text (sometimes literally coming in the form of op-ed articles written by one of the academic characters), and it made the pacing drag quite a bit. I appreciated and even learned a lot from the points this book had to make, I just wished that maybe we had gotten the chance to find our way to those points through the plot, been shown more and told less.
Every single character in this book fits neatly and completely into a trope. I couldn't decide whether I liked that or not, honestly. I think it was an intentional choice...Disorientation reads as parody, it exists in a world where, by the end, everyone has dropped any inhibition or pretense. Everyone is always at every turn saying the quiet part out loud. On the other hand, existing in the head of an unreliable narrator who's doing outrageous things gets a little less enjoyable when NOBODY in this literary universe is any more reliable or any less outrageous. I guess I was just expecting a little more grounding and had to work to suspend my disbelief as I caught up with what kind of book this was going to be.
Ingrid's visceral journey to find herself and her voice was evocative and fulfilling, and I think will likely hold a lot of validation for AAPI individuals or those in academia. It might have been a little bit on the nose about it all, but overall I found it a very ambitious and creative undertaking and I enjoyed it.
This book had a lot to say about identity, academia, and the way that White Supremacy subconsciously infiltrates all of our senses of self, but I didn't feel super trusted as a reader to pick up on that message. Most of this book's more thoughtful points get delivered through lectures and op-ed style blocks of text (sometimes literally coming in the form of op-ed articles written by one of the academic characters), and it made the pacing drag quite a bit. I appreciated and even learned a lot from the points this book had to make, I just wished that maybe we had gotten the chance to find our way to those points through the plot, been shown more and told less.
Every single character in this book fits neatly and completely into a trope. I couldn't decide whether I liked that or not, honestly. I think it was an intentional choice...Disorientation reads as parody, it exists in a world where, by the end, everyone has dropped any inhibition or pretense. Everyone is always at every turn saying the quiet part out loud. On the other hand, existing in the head of an unreliable narrator who's doing outrageous things gets a little less enjoyable when NOBODY in this literary universe is any more reliable or any less outrageous. I guess I was just expecting a little more grounding and had to work to suspend my disbelief as I caught up with what kind of book this was going to be.
Ingrid's visceral journey to find herself and her voice was evocative and fulfilling, and I think will likely hold a lot of validation for AAPI individuals or those in academia. It might have been a little bit on the nose about it all, but overall I found it a very ambitious and creative undertaking and I enjoyed it.
Content Warnings
Graphic: Emotional abuse, Racism, Cultural appropriation, and Colonisation
Moderate: Addiction
Minor: Sexual assault