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the_bitchy_booker's review against another edition
challenging
dark
reflective
tense
slow-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? Character
- Strong character development? No
- Loveable characters? No
- Diverse cast of characters? No
- Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes
4.0
This is a book about trauma, about the past breaking in on you, about how memory lives in your body and cannot be escaped, and about how loneliness sharpens who you are into a fine point that doesn't wear away with time in the way you expect that it should.
Samuel is a lighthouse keeper living alone on an island off the mainland of the country that was once his home. He bears within him the memory of fleeing the countryside as a child, removed by colonizers. The memory of his father crippled in the fight for independence. The memory of his own imprisonment after attending a rally against their dictator. Becoming an informant there under threat of torture, despised by everyone. The memory of being released from prison and finding his sister wants nothing to do with him, his infant son died long ago, the mother of his child a prostitute who abandoned him. A lifetime of poverty, of his own terrible actions, a tide of violence within him that he has never been able to fully restrain or release.
These memories break through his current reality: a stranger, the survivor of an illegal refugee boat, has washed up on his island. He is, by turns, deeply suspicious of and grateful to the stranger. Their overall wordless relationship is characterized by Samuel's own paranoia and the shape of his past.
<Spoiler>He finally murders the stranger by bludgeoning him to death with a rock
The endless ebb and flow of the ocean, wearing away the island, unceasing, is like the pattern of fear and violence that made up his life finally coming to fruition in the same way that the sea wears away the coastline into itself; the island life is hard, relentless, amplifying who he is and has always been. Finally he is returned to his isolation there, unchanged, unchanging as the sea which never could be restrained.
Samuel is a lighthouse keeper living alone on an island off the mainland of the country that was once his home. He bears within him the memory of fleeing the countryside as a child, removed by colonizers. The memory of his father crippled in the fight for independence. The memory of his own imprisonment after attending a rally against their dictator. Becoming an informant there under threat of torture, despised by everyone. The memory of being released from prison and finding his sister wants nothing to do with him, his infant son died long ago, the mother of his child a prostitute who abandoned him. A lifetime of poverty, of his own terrible actions, a tide of violence within him that he has never been able to fully restrain or release.
These memories break through his current reality: a stranger, the survivor of an illegal refugee boat, has washed up on his island. He is, by turns, deeply suspicious of and grateful to the stranger. Their overall wordless relationship is characterized by Samuel's own paranoia and the shape of his past.
<Spoiler>He finally murders the stranger by bludgeoning him to death with a rock
The endless ebb and flow of the ocean, wearing away the island, unceasing, is like the pattern of fear and violence that made up his life finally coming to fruition in the same way that the sea wears away the coastline into itself; the island life is hard, relentless, amplifying who he is and has always been. Finally he is returned to his isolation there, unchanged, unchanging as the sea which never could be restrained.
Content Warnings
Graphic: Murder
Moderate: Abandonment, Colonisation, and Torture
Minor: Rape
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