Reviews with content warning for Colonisation - Assembly

Brown has perfected the art of saying so much with so few words. This story is the internal monologue of our narrator, which arcs from petty personal annoyances to spanning the breadth of colonialism and systemic injustices. The break down of generational privilege, belonging, old and new money, lineage, expectations, and careers is beautifully woven through the narrative.

Assemblysis a book I think I will return to for a grounding from time to time throughout my life. A quick, punchy, witty and heavy read, I'd recommend it to absolutely anyone.

Content Warnings

crimsonlilies's review against another edition

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challenging reflective medium-paced

Plot- or character-driven? Character
Strong character development? It's complicated
Loveable characters? It's complicated
Diverse cast of characters? It's complicated
Flaws of characters a main focus? It's complicated

3.0

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lydiavsbooks's review against another edition

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challenging reflective medium-paced

Plot- or character-driven? Character
Diverse cast of characters? Yes

3.0

Great commentary on every day racism and constant microaggressions. A very important book, and I'm glad I read it but the disjointed narrative style didn't work overly well for me personally

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savvylit's review against another edition

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challenging dark sad fast-paced

Plot- or character-driven? Character
Diverse cast of characters? Yes

5.0

In just over 100 pages of fragmented prose, Natasha Brown dissects the racism inherent in everyday life in the UK. From endless microaggressions to very direct slurs, Brown examines the legacy of British imperialism and how it affects our narrator's every interaction. Assembly is a story about agency, detachment, identity, and generational oppression.

Overall, I loved Assembly. This novella was bleak, heart-wrenching, and thought-provoking. An excellent book - not to mention debut! - from Natasha Brown.

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jesshindes's review against another edition

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challenging emotional funny tense medium-paced

Plot- or character-driven? Character
Strong character development? It's complicated
Loveable characters? Yes
Diverse cast of characters? Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus? It's complicated

5.0

Natasha Brown's Assembly is short - a short novella - barely longer than short story length. It tells the story of a nameless narrator, who - like Brown - is a Black woman who went to Oxbridge and then into the City, following two days of her life at work and then her journey into the countryside to visit her white boyfriend's parents for a family party. So far, so simple; but Assembly packs an incredible punch into its 100 or so pages. It's a story about participating in systems that don't respect you; that require you to fit yourself into a different shape in order to achieve what the system tells you is success. It's about the hundreds of microaggressions that shape the narrator's experience in her high-powered job, and about the white men around her who perpetrate them sometimes deliberately, sometimes completely unawares. It's about what happens to the narrator internally as she puts her head down and lifts her hands up to climb the corporate ladder, and about her desperation - articulated in a shock decision - to escape.

Clearly, I don't have a lot of experience of the milieu that Brown describes. I've never worked a corporate job and I had a ton of privilege and confidence to support me through my Oxbridge experience. But one of the triumphs of this book is the efficiency with which she issues descriptions: I could see every single member of her cast, often after just one or two sentences (and a lot of this work is done very effectively through dialogue or free indirect speech). I felt like I understood the world she was showing me and I was grateful for her skill and her surgical precision in depicting it.

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bookishdov's review against another edition

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dark emotional informative mysterious reflective fast-paced

Plot- or character-driven? Character
Strong character development? It's complicated
Loveable characters? Yes
Diverse cast of characters? It's complicated
Flaws of characters a main focus? No

5.0

Content Warnings

just_one_more_paige's review against another edition

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challenging reflective medium-paced

Plot- or character-driven? Character
Strong character development? Yes
Loveable characters? It's complicated
Diverse cast of characters? Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus? No

5.0

This is another book, I've had a couple of these recently, that I got as an ALC from Libro.fm without really knowing anything about it or having seen any reviews of it. In fact, in the couple months that I have had it before getting around to listening to it, I still haven't seen many (if any) reviews of it, though it has been featured in a few TBR stacks. Anyways, I was really surprised to see that it was so short! And not just short but, after getting the book at the library as well (I like to have a physical copy on hand while listening, if possible, and was very glad to in this case especially, as there were so many passages that I wanted to transcribe), physically tiny, like Adichie's Dear Ijeawele or We Should All be Feminists. However, do not let the size/length fool you, this little book hits like a ton of bricks!

Assembly's unnamed narrator is a Black British woman, a millennial, a "model" citizen who followed the conflicting directions the world threw at her about achievement and being the best, but doing so in an unobtrusive way. As she travels to her boyfriend's family's country estate to prepare for a celebration his parents are hosting, she reflects on a recent job promotion, news about her health, and her life trajectory in general.

I'm just gonna start this review with a repeat statement: this tiny book hits like a ton of freaking bricks. It's one that could easily be read/listened to in a single sitting, but that you purposefully want to split into shorter readings because you need the time to process and digest. Because somehow, in these hundred pages, Brown manages to address, and scathingly call out, everything from racism to sexism to capitalism to nationalism to classism. And she does it in a way that is both intelligently (mildly subtly) integrated, yet absolutely unmistakable. In addition to that, the words themselves have a phenomenal cadence to them, a sort of urgent poetry, in which you can feel the deliberate precision of every word chosen. You can almost literally feel the intensity; it is genius writing.

As a millennial woman myself, though not Black or British (for full transparency for what I can relate to personally and what experiences are not my own), I have to say that I did identify with quite a few of the workplace/career/capitalist related commentaries. The way Brown speaks about the external expectations of reaching for an arbitrarily defined, supposedly universal “goal” to prove you’ve “succeeded” in the "proper” way - and the confines of those standard expectations - was deeply relatable. In fact, no literature I have ever read has so successfully and succinctly portrayed that most millennial of feelings. Similarly, Browns' existential questioning about purpose resonates. Taking it even further, she also speaks to race/class/sex issues surrounding “cultural capital," and the unattainable expectations on immigrants/racial minorities (and to some extent, though less applicable in her personal case, the poor). Her commentary on the never-ending requirements and owe-ing and assimilation as the only option for survival/advancement, despite incessant financial/societal payment already rendered, and the fact that nothing of the sort should be required to exist as a fully recognized human in the first place, is acerbic.

A final note, because I was undecided by the end: if you have read this, did you think her health situation (keeping it vague to avoid any potential for spoilers) was real or a metaphor? I felt like it was addressed a few times as real in the story, but also functioned as a gorgeous and horribly real metaphor, and I just couldn't decide. I mean there is nothing that says it can't be both, but really, I'd love to hear your thoughts!

Well, holy wow. This little book was sharply insightful in a way that comes across as satirical, but is too real to actually be satirical. It was mind-blowing in the profundity of its brevity. A pointed and cuttingly effective indictment. Overall, I really recommend this quick, and quite affecting, reading experience.

There were so many passages and quotes that jumped at me (which should come as no surprise, if you read the rest of the review). Enjoy this selection...and then go pick this one up for yourself:

“The familiar rhythms of our stacked lives have become a kind of closeness.”

“It was survival only in the sense that a meme survives. Generational persistence, without meaning or memory.”

“I’d traded in my life for a sliver of middle-class comfort.”

“I knew these were the things to want, the right things to reach for. But I felt sick of reaching, enduring. Of the ascent.”

“Dread. Every day is an opportunity to fuck up. Every decision, every meeting, every report. There's no success, only the temporary aversion of failure. Dread. [...] I repeat the day over, interrogate it for errors or missteps or - anything. Dread, dread, dread, dread. Anything at all could be the thing that fucks everything up. I know it. Dread. [...] I don’t remember when I didn't feel this.”

“But there’s always something else: the next demand, the next criticism. This endless complying, attaining, exceeding - why?”

“It’s disorientating, prevents you from forming an identity. Living in a place you're forever told to leave, without knowing, without knowledge. Without history.”

“But what it takes to get there isn't what you need once you’ve arrive.”

“Their culture becomes parody on my body.”

“You cannot cut through their perception of reality.”

“Be the best. Work harder, work smarter. Exceed every expectation. But also, be invisible, imperceptible. Don't make anyone uncomfortable. Don't inconvenience. Exist in the negative only, the space around. Do not insert yourself into the main narrative. Go unnoticed. Become the air.”

“It’s evident now, obvious in retrospect as the proof of root-two's irrationality, that these world superpowers are neither infallible, nor superior. They're nothing, not without a brutally enforced relativity. An organized, systematic brutality that their soft and sagging children can scarcely stomach - won't even acknowledge. Yet cling to as truth. There was never any absolute, no decree from God. Just vicious, random chance. And then, compounding.”

“How do we examine the legacy of colonization when the basic facts of its construction are disputed in the minds of its beneficiaries? [...] ...a deliberate exclusion and obfuscation within the country's national curriculum. Through this, more than records were destroyed. The erasure itself was erased.”

“Surviving makes me a participant in their narrative.” (Holy fucking shit what a line, what an insight, what a realization.)

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