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diameters's reviews
9 reviews
The Book of Goose by Yiyun Li
i like reading about girlhood even though it makes me sad and very happy to never have had/been a fabienne
Bobcat and Other Stories by Rebecca Lee
found out it was not diaspora lit on page 200 out of 250. good if a little too academia-centered. fialta stands out
Second Place by Rachel Cusk
w g sebald award for books i had to force myself to finish. took two weeks for sub-200 pages.
gonna put the journal entry off for this one as long as possible. deeply uncharming and i hated everyone.
four stars.
gonna put the journal entry off for this one as long as possible. deeply uncharming and i hated everyone.
four stars.
The Underground Railroad by Colson Whitehead
medium-paced
read this in almost one go, which hasn't happened lately, so let's start with that. quite frankly i'm not quite sure how to feel about this book yet, besides acknowledging the serious amount of misery that takes place within the book. i like whitehead's writing style, as sometimes tangential and philosophical as it gets. in fact, i think the underground railroad is one of the rare cases where i find the writing style to be the highlight of the book—the bluntness and the jarring zoom-ins on human emotion work in tandem, both numbing and horrifying in turn. his style is definitely literary, playing with language in ways that sometimes pays off and sometimes doesn't, but i'm inclined to give it credit—even at times where it feels unnecessary—due to the facility with which whitehead paints a scene.
the underground railroad is stylized like a slow-burn literary novel, but its first twenty pages are misleading. there is a reason this book got the public's attention and was a celebrity favorite—it presents a series of tragedies and triumphs and tragedies again in a recognizable, patternable fashion, almost soap opera-esque in its rise and fall. there is an intense sense of up-down up-down in the narrative, which though tear-jerking and dramatic, eventually began to make important plot points feel like predictable losses. i was actually surprised that sam had survived cora's bloody path to freedom, considering just how many others had died very similar deaths. that said, royal hurt. i had no real idea of him as a character beyond "good man who buys cora a book" but there's something about him that feels modeled after paul d—that healing trope of love after loss after loss after loss in a solemn, kind-handed man—and that is something i can't give up so easily. i feel for cora less because i care for her but because she has never stopped suffering, in a brutalizing parade of death and hiding that leaves all in her wake suffering.
the plot of the underground railroad jumps and skips and hops back, sometimes giving context where i didn't want or need it, but i don't find it as jarring as it could be. most of the time jumps make little sense to me, as we are simply introduced to the preceding events immediately after the stage is set, but in that i suppose there is a little sense of reader disorientation, that we are given the present and then the past to fill in the details in between. that is a generous read; in another, it is simply a gimmick. however, i think the placement of mabel's flashback was heartwrenching. genuinely heartbreaking to read.
there are episodes that feel entirely unbelievable to me—the usage of a real train has little real meaning except to insert a little acid into whitehead's take on the slave narrative, a clever mechanism that is underserved by the rest of the plot. there's a good throwaway comment—a sign of the biting sarcasm that threatens to spill over at times in the novel, but is always put away when the narrative goes back to taking itself entirely seriously, back to book club style. i have more thoughts but im tired. ok
the underground railroad is stylized like a slow-burn literary novel, but its first twenty pages are misleading. there is a reason this book got the public's attention and was a celebrity favorite—it presents a series of tragedies and triumphs and tragedies again in a recognizable, patternable fashion, almost soap opera-esque in its rise and fall. there is an intense sense of up-down up-down in the narrative, which though tear-jerking and dramatic, eventually began to make important plot points feel like predictable losses. i was actually surprised that sam had survived cora's bloody path to freedom, considering just how many others had died very similar deaths. that said, royal hurt. i had no real idea of him as a character beyond "good man who buys cora a book" but there's something about him that feels modeled after paul d—that healing trope of love after loss after loss after loss in a solemn, kind-handed man—and that is something i can't give up so easily. i feel for cora less because i care for her but because she has never stopped suffering, in a brutalizing parade of death and hiding that leaves all in her wake suffering.
the plot of the underground railroad jumps and skips and hops back, sometimes giving context where i didn't want or need it, but i don't find it as jarring as it could be. most of the time jumps make little sense to me, as we are simply introduced to the preceding events immediately after the stage is set, but in that i suppose there is a little sense of reader disorientation, that we are given the present and then the past to fill in the details in between. that is a generous read; in another, it is simply a gimmick. however, i think the placement of mabel's flashback was heartwrenching. genuinely heartbreaking to read.
there are episodes that feel entirely unbelievable to me—the usage of a real train has little real meaning except to insert a little acid into whitehead's take on the slave narrative, a clever mechanism that is underserved by the rest of the plot. there's a good throwaway comment—a sign of the biting sarcasm that threatens to spill over at times in the novel, but is always put away when the narrative goes back to taking itself entirely seriously, back to book club style. i have more thoughts but im tired. ok
Seventeen Syllables and Other Stories by Hisaye Yamamoto
challenging
mysterious
reflective
sad
slow-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? Character
- Strong character development? It's complicated
- Loveable characters? It's complicated
- Diverse cast of characters? Yes
- Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes
namesake "seventeen syllables" was deeply compelling. love the literary tone. feels very much like a "literary" novel if that makes any sense. clear connections to sui sin far, but with a more modern style. the amount of detail in the descriptions and in the build up of the emotional conflicts made me pause and think about if i have ever written a character half as compelling as the three lines that yamamoto gave to rosie's father.
after reading each story i usually had a brief moment (3-8 seconds) of just genuine confusion and/or misery. felt like reading killing and dying. felt like reading a literary short story.
after reading each story i usually had a brief moment (3-8 seconds) of just genuine confusion and/or misery. felt like reading killing and dying. felt like reading a literary short story.
The Sympathizer by Viet Thanh Nguyen
challenging
dark
reflective
sad
medium-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? A mix
- Strong character development? It's complicated
- Loveable characters? No
- Diverse cast of characters? Yes
- Flaws of characters a main focus? It's complicated
spoilers
i don't know where to begin with this book. i read it piecewise, the same way i did toni morrison's beloved, and how apt a comparison i think that is, as morrison herself is brought up as a direct reference in the tail-end essays written by nguyen. this novel is brutal and unforgiving and full of quiet pity for those who did not deserve their fate, and even some of those who did. the sympathizer is about war the way that the bible is about the nails in the hands of christ. it aches with a terrible human misery, in both the parts i could sympathize with and the parts i could empathize with.
by pairing the mundane with the horrific, nguyen develops a war through the life of just our unnamed narrator, and nurses it to life with a bitter yet reminiscent, hindsight-driven gaze. most of the book, the beautiful part of it at least, is told as a first-person confession and is lyrical in tone, tinged with nostalgia and appreciation and indulgence. the narrator is in turn wry, self-pitying, self-aware, and blind, and the novel spans his life in irregular jumps, hyper-fixating on brief periods of his experiences and then passing months by in the room of a paragraph, the way that memory operates. he remembers the important parts, and he replays those over and over again until they shine with unearned detail, like the third eye of a man his best friend shot dead, or the spittle flecking the chin of a communist agent with a thin sliver of paper hiding in her mouth.
what is confessed is brutal, and i am deeply convinced with the way that nguyen sets up consequences in his writing, both plot-wise and narratively. no death is meaningless, unless you argue that all deaths are meaningless, which is a sentiment our captain himself struggles with. the greatest weight is given to the deaths that the captain himself features in: the crapulent major and sonny become key fixtures in the narrative's development, becoming omnipresent in their death and in the captain's crushing guilt. i have never read anything more devastating than sonny's beloved speech about ms. mori to our narrator minutes before he was shot, eight or nine times. at first, i found it unbelievable and unreasonably timed (seconds before his death, he just so happened to change his entire life philosophy, and also felt the need to share with a mild acquaintance? isn't this pixar levels of tear-jerking?) but the more i thought about it, the more i realized that through the lens of someone's memory, the things he said would be distilled into the most impactful and painful for the captain to remember. through his guilt, our narrator represents sonny as the lover, the dreamer, as a man who came around for sofia and found someone he wanted to spend the rest of his life with, and no doubt guilt colored the way that the captain wrote about his final, fatal interaction with sonny. the things that would haunt him (sonny himself, for that matter) are the things that hurt the most, and him writing down only the most brutal things, one sentence of condemnation after another, may not have been the most accurate representation of sonny's words, but they are the most accurate representation of how a tortured man would remember his own reprehensible actions.
from a writing perspective, though, turning sonny and the crapulent major into ghosts was a fascinating choice, turning them in central characters posthumously. they coincide with the slow degradation of the captain's mind, but are dealt little attention at first. nguyen emphasizes over and over the acceptance of ghosts in vietnamese culture, and treats the reader as understanding of such, bringing in ghosts offhandedly as a natural step. i don't believe their existence quite crosses the novel into magical realism or fantasy/horror at all, because they're a direct, heavy-handed symbol of guilt, almost a christmas carol-like in their style of haunting, but the way the narrator is at resigned peace with them is new. he doesn't fear them the way western protagonists react to ghosts, but instead feels sorrow and personal culpability for them. the idea that they too are stuck with him and not choosing to haunt him in particular is damningly painful: sonny quietly laments that the captain whom he hates most is the one that he appears to, while sofia mori whom he loves most is unreachable.
other deaths leave their marks on the characters as well. early on, duc and linh's death transform the newly-introduced bon from the self-assured, trained soldier into a vindictive alcoholic, but there is an equal argument that it was not their deaths that changed him, but that this side of him was actively being repressed when he was with them. his character unfolds more even though we learn of him more through the aftermath of who he was than who he is now, creating a sense of dissonance when bon as a cold-blooded assassin is only retroactively introduced, long after the image of bon the shattered, grieving man is cemented.
i do wish the backstory of man, bon, and our captain was constructed more solidly, because although the scene of them drinking and the story of their childhood fight are vivid and established well, the friendship is a central tenant of the beginning and one that is incredibly tested at the end and in my opinion, deserved a little more attention to its foundation in order to more credibly sell its fallout. man in particular i believed needed just a bit more fleshing out, especially as i found myself struggling to fit a motivation to the madness that resulted at the end. i guessed the plot twist very early on, not because it was obvious but because it felt inevitable when a character as exalted as man was vanished from the narrative. i felt that the interactions between man and our captain during his torture were a little more performative than the rest of the novel had felt, and i think that could be traced back to the fact that while bon and the captain's friendship was solidified in vietnam, man and the captain's friendship was mostly centered around the revolution and not each other.
in that vein, the entire ending was. jarring. horrifying. almost shock-value based, at some points. a endless slew of misery, stretching on for chapters and only broken up by various shifts in perspectives. first person to third to first person plural, omniescent, although i think the last shift was effective, turning the two halves of the captain's mind and body into the diaspora of the vietnamese people, refugees and soldiers alive, echoing the one sentiment that could be feasibly shared between both the vc and the regime. \
i don't know where else to put this, because i didn't outline this horrifically long ramble but: the way that nguyen depicts how everyone can be bought and sold with their own price, whether it be through actual monetary bribery or through flattery, in the moments where our narrator analyzes a man's motivations and plays to his deepest desires through speech or lies or any of the other non-violent tools claude teaches him during interrogation class.
as much as this novel is about the vietnamese, as nguyen himself describes, it is far more clearly a vietnamese-american novel. the eloquence and lucidity with which the sympathizer deals with the experience of assimilating or even existing in a country like america as an asian refugee or immigrant or even citizen strikes a chord with me, unsurprisingly. nguyen addresses america with the critical eye of a neutral third party, the way the captain would be, unscrupulously pointing out its promises and wonders and lies and hypocrisies, its thick tongue and wandering eyes, its hunger for foreign countries and its inability to love anyone but itself. characters like the academic officer, the auteur, the congressman, and richard hedd display the degrees to which the enlightened white man considers and appreciates the so-called "oriental"—a clumsy racist convinced of his benefaction and moral superiority, with the excuse/pardon of "my wife is an oriental"; an artist who uses asians as tools and plot-points, as savages frothing at the mouth or innocents in desperate need of a white savior, creating political propanda and feeding stereotypes in one fell, action-packed swoop; a shrewd businessman aiming to gain future votes of a minority group who have need their own political puppets, who says one line in vietnamese and "wins the hearts of new saigon"; and finally, the intellectual whose opinion, the captain realizes, will always be held above his one simply on account of the fact that richard hedd is an immigrant, yes, but an english immigrant. the indoctrination of the american dream is a deep theme of this book, and what has stuck with me was the comparison of it to the lottery. there is no guarantee of happiness, but there is the guarantee of an opportunity to receive happiness. coming to america is akin to buying a ticket, and as the captain puts it, millions of the vietnamese would kill for a ticket.
again, because this isn't an academic paper, i have no idea how to transition into a new topic, but i think the depiction of women in this novel is worth a discussion. i'm not yet sure how to feel about the way nguyen relegates them to mostly sex symbols and victims: madame and ms. mori and lana have their own thoughts and motivations, yes, but their primary use is to teach the narrator a lesson through their bodies and surface experiences. linh and his mother are both self-sacrificing mother figures who don't really move the narrative forward in any meaningful way. one argument for this is that the narrator himself is a misogynist, but leaving it otherwise unaddressed in the first place makes that feel like a j.k. rowling retcon, or an attempt to save his ass. as much as i enjoyed the indulgent language of the book, leaving three-five chapters describing the way he fucked lana and then "learned" and was rejected by the general for daring to have sex with a woman is nauseating at best. i know i spent so long philosophizing on the way that nguyen was able to capture the most miserable parts of the vietnamese war, but the graphic rape scene and following torture/confession elements were neither realistic nor narratively necessary; they felt gratuitous and dark for the sake of being a "war novel".
in general, i enjoyed the war novel parts far, far less than i enjoyed the more human aspects of the book. i think nguyen has a genuine voice in developing the pain of the asian-american experience, the inherent, unchangeable alienation and white fascination. the analysis of the human character and american culture was invaluable and beautifully done, i think. philosophy features heavy in the rhetoric of the novel, and chapters at a time felt like lessons in moral discussions. not a bad thing at all, but they clearly outshone the more action-heavy, traditional parts of the story. the conversation at the table with richard hedd is one of the highlights of the novel in my opinion, as was the outlandish but poignant experience with the Auteur, and the subsequent failure of the narrator to make a difference. nguyen makes the immigrant experience feel suffocating, the way it often does for immigrants, without whitewashing the "potential opportunities!" for a western audience. in its own way, though, this at time can feel like pity porn. i've yet to truly come up with an opinion on it, but at times it resonates and at other times it tugs so hard at my heartstrings that i get kinda sick of it.
overall, though. brutal. brutal, terrible, unreasonable, excessive, fantastic. i need to think about this one some more, and that's a sign that it was worth reading.
i don't know where to begin with this book. i read it piecewise, the same way i did toni morrison's beloved, and how apt a comparison i think that is, as morrison herself is brought up as a direct reference in the tail-end essays written by nguyen. this novel is brutal and unforgiving and full of quiet pity for those who did not deserve their fate, and even some of those who did. the sympathizer is about war the way that the bible is about the nails in the hands of christ. it aches with a terrible human misery, in both the parts i could sympathize with and the parts i could empathize with.
by pairing the mundane with the horrific, nguyen develops a war through the life of just our unnamed narrator, and nurses it to life with a bitter yet reminiscent, hindsight-driven gaze. most of the book, the beautiful part of it at least, is told as a first-person confession and is lyrical in tone, tinged with nostalgia and appreciation and indulgence. the narrator is in turn wry, self-pitying, self-aware, and blind, and the novel spans his life in irregular jumps, hyper-fixating on brief periods of his experiences and then passing months by in the room of a paragraph, the way that memory operates. he remembers the important parts, and he replays those over and over again until they shine with unearned detail, like the third eye of a man his best friend shot dead, or the spittle flecking the chin of a communist agent with a thin sliver of paper hiding in her mouth.
what is confessed is brutal, and i am deeply convinced with the way that nguyen sets up consequences in his writing, both plot-wise and narratively. no death is meaningless, unless you argue that all deaths are meaningless, which is a sentiment our captain himself struggles with. the greatest weight is given to the deaths that the captain himself features in: the crapulent major and sonny become key fixtures in the narrative's development, becoming omnipresent in their death and in the captain's crushing guilt. i have never read anything more devastating than sonny's beloved speech about ms. mori to our narrator minutes before he was shot, eight or nine times. at first, i found it unbelievable and unreasonably timed (seconds before his death, he just so happened to change his entire life philosophy, and also felt the need to share with a mild acquaintance? isn't this pixar levels of tear-jerking?) but the more i thought about it, the more i realized that through the lens of someone's memory, the things he said would be distilled into the most impactful and painful for the captain to remember. through his guilt, our narrator represents sonny as the lover, the dreamer, as a man who came around for sofia and found someone he wanted to spend the rest of his life with, and no doubt guilt colored the way that the captain wrote about his final, fatal interaction with sonny. the things that would haunt him (sonny himself, for that matter) are the things that hurt the most, and him writing down only the most brutal things, one sentence of condemnation after another, may not have been the most accurate representation of sonny's words, but they are the most accurate representation of how a tortured man would remember his own reprehensible actions.
from a writing perspective, though, turning sonny and the crapulent major into ghosts was a fascinating choice, turning them in central characters posthumously. they coincide with the slow degradation of the captain's mind, but are dealt little attention at first. nguyen emphasizes over and over the acceptance of ghosts in vietnamese culture, and treats the reader as understanding of such, bringing in ghosts offhandedly as a natural step. i don't believe their existence quite crosses the novel into magical realism or fantasy/horror at all, because they're a direct, heavy-handed symbol of guilt, almost a christmas carol-like in their style of haunting, but the way the narrator is at resigned peace with them is new. he doesn't fear them the way western protagonists react to ghosts, but instead feels sorrow and personal culpability for them. the idea that they too are stuck with him and not choosing to haunt him in particular is damningly painful: sonny quietly laments that the captain whom he hates most is the one that he appears to, while sofia mori whom he loves most is unreachable.
other deaths leave their marks on the characters as well. early on, duc and linh's death transform the newly-introduced bon from the self-assured, trained soldier into a vindictive alcoholic, but there is an equal argument that it was not their deaths that changed him, but that this side of him was actively being repressed when he was with them. his character unfolds more even though we learn of him more through the aftermath of who he was than who he is now, creating a sense of dissonance when bon as a cold-blooded assassin is only retroactively introduced, long after the image of bon the shattered, grieving man is cemented.
i do wish the backstory of man, bon, and our captain was constructed more solidly, because although the scene of them drinking and the story of their childhood fight are vivid and established well, the friendship is a central tenant of the beginning and one that is incredibly tested at the end and in my opinion, deserved a little more attention to its foundation in order to more credibly sell its fallout. man in particular i believed needed just a bit more fleshing out, especially as i found myself struggling to fit a motivation to the madness that resulted at the end. i guessed the plot twist very early on, not because it was obvious but because it felt inevitable when a character as exalted as man was vanished from the narrative. i felt that the interactions between man and our captain during his torture were a little more performative than the rest of the novel had felt, and i think that could be traced back to the fact that while bon and the captain's friendship was solidified in vietnam, man and the captain's friendship was mostly centered around the revolution and not each other.
in that vein, the entire ending was. jarring. horrifying. almost shock-value based, at some points. a endless slew of misery, stretching on for chapters and only broken up by various shifts in perspectives. first person to third to first person plural, omniescent, although i think the last shift was effective, turning the two halves of the captain's mind and body into the diaspora of the vietnamese people, refugees and soldiers alive, echoing the one sentiment that could be feasibly shared between both the vc and the regime. \
i don't know where else to put this, because i didn't outline this horrifically long ramble but: the way that nguyen depicts how everyone can be bought and sold with their own price, whether it be through actual monetary bribery or through flattery, in the moments where our narrator analyzes a man's motivations and plays to his deepest desires through speech or lies or any of the other non-violent tools claude teaches him during interrogation class.
as much as this novel is about the vietnamese, as nguyen himself describes, it is far more clearly a vietnamese-american novel. the eloquence and lucidity with which the sympathizer deals with the experience of assimilating or even existing in a country like america as an asian refugee or immigrant or even citizen strikes a chord with me, unsurprisingly. nguyen addresses america with the critical eye of a neutral third party, the way the captain would be, unscrupulously pointing out its promises and wonders and lies and hypocrisies, its thick tongue and wandering eyes, its hunger for foreign countries and its inability to love anyone but itself. characters like the academic officer, the auteur, the congressman, and richard hedd display the degrees to which the enlightened white man considers and appreciates the so-called "oriental"—a clumsy racist convinced of his benefaction and moral superiority, with the excuse/pardon of "my wife is an oriental"; an artist who uses asians as tools and plot-points, as savages frothing at the mouth or innocents in desperate need of a white savior, creating political propanda and feeding stereotypes in one fell, action-packed swoop; a shrewd businessman aiming to gain future votes of a minority group who have need their own political puppets, who says one line in vietnamese and "wins the hearts of new saigon"; and finally, the intellectual whose opinion, the captain realizes, will always be held above his one simply on account of the fact that richard hedd is an immigrant, yes, but an english immigrant. the indoctrination of the american dream is a deep theme of this book, and what has stuck with me was the comparison of it to the lottery. there is no guarantee of happiness, but there is the guarantee of an opportunity to receive happiness. coming to america is akin to buying a ticket, and as the captain puts it, millions of the vietnamese would kill for a ticket.
again, because this isn't an academic paper, i have no idea how to transition into a new topic, but i think the depiction of women in this novel is worth a discussion. i'm not yet sure how to feel about the way nguyen relegates them to mostly sex symbols and victims: madame and ms. mori and lana have their own thoughts and motivations, yes, but their primary use is to teach the narrator a lesson through their bodies and surface experiences. linh and his mother are both self-sacrificing mother figures who don't really move the narrative forward in any meaningful way. one argument for this is that the narrator himself is a misogynist, but leaving it otherwise unaddressed in the first place makes that feel like a j.k. rowling retcon, or an attempt to save his ass. as much as i enjoyed the indulgent language of the book, leaving three-five chapters describing the way he fucked lana and then "learned" and was rejected by the general for daring to have sex with a woman is nauseating at best. i know i spent so long philosophizing on the way that nguyen was able to capture the most miserable parts of the vietnamese war, but the graphic rape scene and following torture/confession elements were neither realistic nor narratively necessary; they felt gratuitous and dark for the sake of being a "war novel".
in general, i enjoyed the war novel parts far, far less than i enjoyed the more human aspects of the book. i think nguyen has a genuine voice in developing the pain of the asian-american experience, the inherent, unchangeable alienation and white fascination. the analysis of the human character and american culture was invaluable and beautifully done, i think. philosophy features heavy in the rhetoric of the novel, and chapters at a time felt like lessons in moral discussions. not a bad thing at all, but they clearly outshone the more action-heavy, traditional parts of the story. the conversation at the table with richard hedd is one of the highlights of the novel in my opinion, as was the outlandish but poignant experience with the Auteur, and the subsequent failure of the narrator to make a difference. nguyen makes the immigrant experience feel suffocating, the way it often does for immigrants, without whitewashing the "potential opportunities!" for a western audience. in its own way, though, this at time can feel like pity porn. i've yet to truly come up with an opinion on it, but at times it resonates and at other times it tugs so hard at my heartstrings that i get kinda sick of it.
overall, though. brutal. brutal, terrible, unreasonable, excessive, fantastic. i need to think about this one some more, and that's a sign that it was worth reading.
Content Warnings
Graphic: Gore, Gun violence, Rape, Sexism, Sexual violence, and Torture
Moderate: Body horror
Minor: Addiction and Alcoholism
Earthlings by Sayaka Murata
tw: pedophilia, incest, cannibalism, murder, idk what else, god
is murata okay? like genuinely okay? i’ve read some fucked up japanese lit before (looking at you, murakami) but wow this was culturally and tonally shocking in ways that i thought i was already immune to. SPOILERS (although i’m not sure i could recommend this in good conscience) there’s pedophilia+rape/assault and while natsuki’s ringing ear and loss of taste show some level of trauma, the casual INCEST WITH YUU AS SEXUAL RECLAMATION (?! INCEST AS RECLAMATION/REJECTION OF SOCIETAL NORMS IN GENERAL) did not really sell me!!!!!
it’s not just that the shock value stuff was bizarre; i think the writing itself was kinda weird. natsuki’s childish, im-built-different tone works when she’s a kid, but her family’s one-dimensional evilness made them almost cartoonish in nature and very difficult for me to take seriously. later on, natsuki gets a bit less grating but it feels almost as if murata is trying to set up character growth every other page—and yet natsuki never goes anywhere, really. i don’t consider cannibalism or her weird immediate acceptance and then rejection of sexual desire as reasonable growth. piyyut the stuffed hedgehog dying and going grey was heavy-handed symbolism, but at least it made a definitive statement on natsuki’s emotional condition.
in addition to that: god i’m not sure if it’s the translation, but some parts of it just felt really. cheesy? the part where she murders her pedo teacher is REALLY weird and baby-phrased, to a point where it feels unreasonable even for a kid. the naming of “The Wicked Witch” as her teacher by piyyut the go-to imaginary friend and then natsuki’s inability to realize that she killed The Wicked Witch AND her teacher (and that they were the same person) lmfao... describing the blood as red paint bc no 12 yr old kid would know what blood is.... kise’s 0% reaction to her sister killing a man except to save the evidence for THIRTY years later for a one off experience just so they could eat the bodies ??
. i will comment that i think kise’s dedication to being a normal wife in the factory made sense due to the somewhat glossed-over bullying she experienced in her youth, but then the. cheating thing? that she blamed natsuki for, and thus arranged for her death by way of ancient garden scythe with pedo blood on it?
overall, i think i somewhat understand and can somewhat appreciate what murata was trying to do. this book delights in taboo—main parts of the story revolve around societal rejection and insuitability—while condemning certain traits that the author finds problematic in current society (lack of response to sexual violence, especially amongst kids, and the lack of bodily autonomy that women in particular feel due to the pressure to give birth) . but i really wouldn’t say that i enjoyed this book much or really at all, because goddamn it i was so frustrated and repulsed by the way these subjects were being handled (or the lack thereof). thanks murata, it’s been real, at least the cover’s cute.
is murata okay? like genuinely okay? i’ve read some fucked up japanese lit before (looking at you, murakami) but wow this was culturally and tonally shocking in ways that i thought i was already immune to. SPOILERS (although i’m not sure i could recommend this in good conscience) there’s pedophilia+rape/assault and while natsuki’s ringing ear and loss of taste show some level of trauma, the casual INCEST WITH YUU AS SEXUAL RECLAMATION (?! INCEST AS RECLAMATION/REJECTION OF SOCIETAL NORMS IN GENERAL) did not really sell me!!!!!
it’s not just that the shock value stuff was bizarre; i think the writing itself was kinda weird. natsuki’s childish, im-built-different tone works when she’s a kid, but her family’s one-dimensional evilness made them almost cartoonish in nature and very difficult for me to take seriously. later on, natsuki gets a bit less grating but it feels almost as if murata is trying to set up character growth every other page—and yet natsuki never goes anywhere, really. i don’t consider cannibalism or her weird immediate acceptance and then rejection of sexual desire as reasonable growth. piyyut the stuffed hedgehog dying and going grey was heavy-handed symbolism, but at least it made a definitive statement on natsuki’s emotional condition.
in addition to that: god i’m not sure if it’s the translation, but some parts of it just felt really. cheesy? the part where she murders her pedo teacher is REALLY weird and baby-phrased, to a point where it feels unreasonable even for a kid. the naming of “The Wicked Witch” as her teacher by piyyut the go-to imaginary friend and then natsuki’s inability to realize that she killed The Wicked Witch AND her teacher (and that they were the same person) lmfao... describing the blood as red paint bc no 12 yr old kid would know what blood is.... kise’s 0% reaction to her sister killing a man except to save the evidence for THIRTY years later for a one off experience just so they could eat the bodies ??
. i will comment that i think kise’s dedication to being a normal wife in the factory made sense due to the somewhat glossed-over bullying she experienced in her youth, but then the. cheating thing? that she blamed natsuki for, and thus arranged for her death by way of ancient garden scythe with pedo blood on it?
overall, i think i somewhat understand and can somewhat appreciate what murata was trying to do. this book delights in taboo—main parts of the story revolve around societal rejection and insuitability—while condemning certain traits that the author finds problematic in current society (lack of response to sexual violence, especially amongst kids, and the lack of bodily autonomy that women in particular feel due to the pressure to give birth) . but i really wouldn’t say that i enjoyed this book much or really at all, because goddamn it i was so frustrated and repulsed by the way these subjects were being handled (or the lack thereof). thanks murata, it’s been real, at least the cover’s cute.
Content Warnings
Graphic: Gore, Incest, Pedophilia, Rape, Violence, Cannibalism, and Murder
The Dutch House by Ann Patchett
post-read thoughts
- not sure why i cried SO hard after finishing the book, but i did. this entire book should have been absolutely boring, about two rich kids getting kicked out of their house and then going on to live their privileged lives. i found the way patchett leaves the emotions sometimes unsaid very convincing. i don't know WHY i understood elna's departure, but i did. her hatred and disbelief of the house all felt true, the same way maeve's willingness to stay at her job despite once wanting so much more and the siblings' attachment to sitting in the driveway and norma's infinite guilt all felt true. there is so much bittersweet misery in this book, especially from the way you watch maeve grow up and never become what she might've, because thinking about a woman in context of her girlhood is always a little bit heartbreaking.
- by comparison, our main character danny is bland at best, because this book belongs to maeve and mr. conroy and, for a little bit, andrea. which is why i think that part i is much, much stronger than ii and particularly iii, which actually derailed so much at times that it would sometimes lose me. danny is so detached from celeste that their entire relationship, meant to come off as a "settling down" for both of them, instead portrays danny as a shallow, unsympathetic, unfeeling capital M-man at times.
- the other reason i struggled with the ending were the frustrating "twists" that took place over and over again, with hardly twenty pages in between. wrapping up by returning fluffy, INTRODUCING ELNA, and infantilizing andrea feels too heavy-handed for a novel who spent its first three hundred pages building up this little skyscraper of cards. elna should not have returned, nor andrea: this novel and its titular building are all about the insidious little bits of history that sometimes stay with you, and how people move on from them. having them tie up like that, and then fast-forwarding through their reunion (elna choosing to take care of andrea was cruel) to maeve's inexplicable death felt pace-wise, very off.
- another plot point i was more split on is the exact mirroring of the dutch house with danny buying the brownstone for celeste, and only finally realizing at their divorce that he'd never considered whether she'd like it or not. this parallel was rather shockingly on the nose, but the more i think about it, the less i hate it. the characterization of danny up to this point has been frustratingly sparse, which allows for him to do something just as callous—in fact, the EXACT SAME THING—that his father did to lose his mother. but danny never recognizes it as a parallel. it's heavily implied but i wish he'd just said it. if he'd just have a moment for himself, which he hasn't really this entire book. he's almost nick carroway-esque in the way we get to know him through his interactions with other people, and how detached he comes off at times. the latter half of the book reads as if an outside viewer has taken up residence in danny's head.
- the whole novel has quite a zoomed-out look on the life of danny and maeve, spanning from danny's fluffy story (four) to maeve's death (fifties). inevitably, the way things change makes me hurt a little bit. it is simply that kind of hollowness, but none of the scenes after their father's death seem to have the same kind of liveliness to them, though it's something you only notice maybe midway through part ii, even into the early sections of part iii. and perhaps that's what patchett intended, that perhaps the line between childhood and adulthood is clearest only in hindsight.
- i want to talk more about how this house, like the one in hill house, haunts its characters. it's far less insidious but it's got its roots buried deepin the relationship between danny and maeve, which is overwhelmingly the ONLY convincing one in this book. but i'm tired of typing up this review lol.
- i really didn't mean to write so much for this book, but it touches on so many of the themes that i obsess over. i don't think it's a particular masterpiece, but i bawled my eyes out after finishing, despite not having cried at any particular scene in the novel. right now, i don't think i can recall another time where that happened. i couldn't (and can't!) explain what hit me so hard, but in that moment it was so meaningful. it really was.
specific quotes/topics
“mothers were the measure of safety, which meant that I was safer than maeve. after our mother left, maeve took up the job on my behalf but no one did the same for her.”
"the idiocy of what we took and what we left cannot be overstated. we packed up clothes and shoes I would outgrow in six months, and left behind the blanket at the foot of my bed my mother had pieced together out of her dresses."
“it sounded so nostalgic when he said it, the three of us, as if we had once been a unit instead of just a circumstance.”
“there are a few times in life when you leap up and the past that you'd been standing on falls away behind you, and the future you mean to land on is not yet in place, and for a moment you're suspended knowing nothing and no one, not even yourself.” fuck me i want this line
"they were disasters. they were mine."
"I always imagined the house would die without us. I don't know, I thought it would crumple up. Do houses ever die of grief?"
"our childhood was a fire. there had been four children in the house and only two of them had gotten out." ←— ****this one i have thoughts about. it's a beautiful line but. the scope of their tragedy is . not having a mother? having that house? something about loss something about scars something about danny being melodramatic
- there are more but all of sudden i've forgotten them all. will put them down if i ever remember them, because i don't want to lose them.