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c3liaiswhoiam's review
2.0
I would have greatly appreciated having content warnings for this book. I definitely think my fairly tough experience reading it stunted my enjoyment of it overall, and depending on how this sticks with me in the long hall, the rating may change. Who knows
emmafriendly's review
3.0
Once you get over the fact that the book was literally never finished and the constantly changing narratives, it’s a pretty good book.
robk's review
4.0
Wonderfully written; tragic, yet beautiful. I loved the way this book was put together, despite the fact that it is unfinished. Olsen seems to be drawing from poetical histories as well as socio-political influences in this rich narrative.
coffeeandink's review
lsen's best-known work, Silences, is about the pressures of class and gender that silence promising writers; she states outright that she wrote it out of personal experience. She began writing Yonnondio in the 30s, then abandoned it for decades. She finally put fragments together only of what she had originally written, feeling that so much time had passed that new writing would be more of a collaboration than a continuation. The novel follows a family through their attempts to drag themselves out of poverty, first as miners, then as farmers, then as new immigrants in Chicago. The depiction of life in a company town -- no choices, no money saved, no real safety regulation -- is particularly brutal, although the bits about domestic abuse, poverty in the city, and self-induced abortions aren't much better. The prose is full of modernist experimentation, omniscient becoming stream of consciousness, inside and outside intermingling.
Beautifully written and epically depressing.
Beautifully written and epically depressing.
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