Take a photo of a barcode or cover
3.25 AVERAGE
3.25 AVERAGE
The problem with this genre of novels that try so hard to be cutting edge is that they want to say so much that they just end up saying nothing at all. After sitting back and going over everything I just took in, the only main themes I could pull were the authors obsession with "kink" in the form of pedophilia, constantly referenced and exalted. This coupled along with the fact that this story doesn't really feel like a man obsessed with a woman at all, but rather the author's obsession with herself, or rather her personal relation to her own womanhood, made that all the more distressing for me. At first I rolled my eyes at its constant pretension and desire to shock and titillate as much as possible with the easiest route ever of sex crimes and bad sex and teen sex and blah blah blah. It even fell victim to what is apparently par for the course now of getting a graphically described rape out the way in the first third of the book, and of course the women in these books (in the case of this one a child) are unfazed by this. She welcomes it, laughs in its face, dares it to challenge her. She will proclaim it's not real/women secretly want it because she is a Cool Girl who Hates Herself and is Artsy. Unlike other women who only begrudgingly let themselves be put in the position of defilement, this ultramodern educated woman offers herself up happily. She intellectualizes it because she's different, duh! This is essentially the basis of the entire atmosphere of the book. Man becomes obsessed with the aesthetic of the chosen woman, therefore missing out on the actual her in favor of the idea she encapsulates. Tale as old as time. This makes me sad because this style of story cropping up over the years has made me really wish for a true from-the-heart vulnerably honest look at the relationships between love, obsession, and desire. The word love is thrown around often in this book but you never really feel it between people, everything is burdened by sex and visuals and being pleasingly dirty.
If anything this felt like a disturbing self-insert that could've just been long form tumblr posts over the course of a few months. "You are a woman with a man inside watching a woman. You are your own voyeur". Excessive in the first half, interesting in the middle, with a weird pitter out in some other direction for the end. I quite liked a few pieces here and there, when she was just observing/commenting on the state of existing as a woman, or just simply thinking out loud. Those struck me the most and I felt like it was then that I could truly see the artistic intention here. Oola is interesting when she is allowed to be a person outside of a "sexpot" or whatever other terms we're decorating her with in a given passage. I'm not mad at all I read this one but I wish there was just a little something more to it
If anything this felt like a disturbing self-insert that could've just been long form tumblr posts over the course of a few months. "You are a woman with a man inside watching a woman. You are your own voyeur". Excessive in the first half, interesting in the middle, with a weird pitter out in some other direction for the end. I quite liked a few pieces here and there, when she was just observing/commenting on the state of existing as a woman, or just simply thinking out loud. Those struck me the most and I felt like it was then that I could truly see the artistic intention here. Oola is interesting when she is allowed to be a person outside of a "sexpot" or whatever other terms we're decorating her with in a given passage. I'm not mad at all I read this one but I wish there was just a little something more to it
I'm noticing that the novels I've given 5 stars this year have trended toward the "you'll utterly love or hate this" end of the spectrum. I picked up Oola because it seemed creepy and intriguing. It was both of those things. It was also stunningly gorgeous prose. I must have said "I cannot believe Brittany Newell is only 21" about 800 times while reading this book. I was absolutely blown away by how strong her writing is. She's SO young, and this book is SO mature.
The plot is simple. Leif is a waspy house-sitter for his parents' rich friends. He meets and falls madly in love with Oola, who joins him as he bounces from city to city. They fall in love in a series of interludes which are sexy and slightly unnerving. Eventually, they settle down in a cabin in Big Sur, where Leif takes up a project to observe everything about Oola, ostensibly so that he can write a novel about her. But, like, EVERYTHING should be taken literally. You'll be hearing a lot about everything from her wardrobe to her toenails - all of it GORGEOUSLY penned by Newell. But once you're becoming fanatic about someone's toenails, you know things are taking a weird, crazy, dark-ass turn - and that's exactly what happens. I can't say any more or I'll spoil it, but at the end of the book, I wasn't ENTIRELY sure what had just happened and wanted to pick it up and re-read it immediately. To me, as a reader, it doesn't get much better than that!
The plot is simple. Leif is a waspy house-sitter for his parents' rich friends. He meets and falls madly in love with Oola, who joins him as he bounces from city to city. They fall in love in a series of interludes which are sexy and slightly unnerving. Eventually, they settle down in a cabin in Big Sur, where Leif takes up a project to observe everything about Oola, ostensibly so that he can write a novel about her. But, like, EVERYTHING should be taken literally. You'll be hearing a lot about everything from her wardrobe to her toenails - all of it GORGEOUSLY penned by Newell. But once you're becoming fanatic about someone's toenails, you know things are taking a weird, crazy, dark-ass turn - and that's exactly what happens. I can't say any more or I'll spoil it, but at the end of the book, I wasn't ENTIRELY sure what had just happened and wanted to pick it up and re-read it immediately. To me, as a reader, it doesn't get much better than that!
I'm really between an "It was ok" rating and a "liked it" rating, but I'll just round up.
This book was weird. I knew it was going to be - some of the reason I wanted to read it to begin with - and I really enjoy a good strange book. HOWEVER, there was absolutely no reason this book needed to be as long as it was. At best, it could have been a novella, or even a good, lengthy "title" short story in a small collection of stories. I think that style would've better served the author and showed the talent that gets a bit drowned out by the continuing repetition I felt towards the middle/end of the book.
On the whole, the idea of someone becoming almost maniacally obsessed with someone to the point that they blatantly watch, record, and ultimately mimic every move, is just ... crazy! Add to that, a woman who LETS someone be around them like that, and it becomes clear that there is more psychological strangeness at work than your run-of-the-mill relationship story. Oola is clearly a bit self-involved, yet she seems to feel conflicted about how much she's obsessed with herself. This battle plays out through Leif's observations of her, and their ensuing interactions that result from his obsession with her as this female-type-THING in his universe. It's a bit like Leif is an alien watching his human subject in a lab, only to absorb her essence and take on her form, but is still ultimately missing the essential thing that makes Oola Oola, so something is off.
I hate to say it, but I kind of think I would've liked it better if there had been some climactic moment or interaction, but the book runs pretty much on this course as a kind of Oola-observation-study, rather than giving that piece of a story that lends a hook or makes it more interesting (hence the preference for this in story form versus book form).
All that being said, there were still a couple of interesting passages to highlight:
(Page numbers come from the Kindle e-book format, fyi):
p. 1400 "Words cannot compare to my bounty of pistachio shells, by exhibit of hotel shampoo bottles from inconsequential weekend trips that she'd only used one squirt of. Words cannot compare to the bacchanal of our daily encounters when I came down the stairs around lunchtime and found her, still undressed, finishing her toes."
p. 1452 "I tapped on the glass of her privacy, a kid at a zoo. She stared back at me with yellowing animal eyes."
p. 1599 "The hotter the days got, July morphing into August, the more I got the feeling that someday soon I would get what was coming to me. The household appliances confirmed this suspicion; I was too happy, like a child in the hallucinatory last days of summer, trusting in his time-telling devices (the oven, the TV, the ice cream truck's ditty) to sustain the afternoon ad infinitum. I was too tickled by the piece of bread Oola had left in the toaster, no perforated by mice. I was too pleased when she spend the afternoon tanning, not just because it made my job as stalker easier, looking on from the shaded side of the porch, but also because it gave her freckles, tiny deviations from her confirmed shade of brown, as if I were in danger of running out of things to know about."
p. 1944 "She moved through life by melting things; her absence was marked not by a void or lack but by subtle change. Like now: The crowd broke up, but each listener carried a bit of her with them, the porch, her fear, the smell of smoke, reassembled into something different but whose origins were definitively Oolish."
This book was weird. I knew it was going to be - some of the reason I wanted to read it to begin with - and I really enjoy a good strange book. HOWEVER, there was absolutely no reason this book needed to be as long as it was. At best, it could have been a novella, or even a good, lengthy "title" short story in a small collection of stories. I think that style would've better served the author and showed the talent that gets a bit drowned out by the continuing repetition I felt towards the middle/end of the book.
On the whole, the idea of someone becoming almost maniacally obsessed with someone to the point that they blatantly watch, record, and ultimately mimic every move, is just ... crazy! Add to that, a woman who LETS someone be around them like that, and it becomes clear that there is more psychological strangeness at work than your run-of-the-mill relationship story. Oola is clearly a bit self-involved, yet she seems to feel conflicted about how much she's obsessed with herself. This battle plays out through Leif's observations of her, and their ensuing interactions that result from his obsession with her as this female-type-THING in his universe. It's a bit like Leif is an alien watching his human subject in a lab, only to absorb her essence and take on her form, but is still ultimately missing the essential thing that makes Oola Oola, so something is off.
I hate to say it, but I kind of think I would've liked it better if there had been some climactic moment or interaction, but the book runs pretty much on this course as a kind of Oola-observation-study, rather than giving that piece of a story that lends a hook or makes it more interesting (hence the preference for this in story form versus book form).
All that being said, there were still a couple of interesting passages to highlight:
(Page numbers come from the Kindle e-book format, fyi):
p. 1400 "Words cannot compare to my bounty of pistachio shells, by exhibit of hotel shampoo bottles from inconsequential weekend trips that she'd only used one squirt of. Words cannot compare to the bacchanal of our daily encounters when I came down the stairs around lunchtime and found her, still undressed, finishing her toes."
p. 1452 "I tapped on the glass of her privacy, a kid at a zoo. She stared back at me with yellowing animal eyes."
p. 1599 "The hotter the days got, July morphing into August, the more I got the feeling that someday soon I would get what was coming to me. The household appliances confirmed this suspicion; I was too happy, like a child in the hallucinatory last days of summer, trusting in his time-telling devices (the oven, the TV, the ice cream truck's ditty) to sustain the afternoon ad infinitum. I was too tickled by the piece of bread Oola had left in the toaster, no perforated by mice. I was too pleased when she spend the afternoon tanning, not just because it made my job as stalker easier, looking on from the shaded side of the porch, but also because it gave her freckles, tiny deviations from her confirmed shade of brown, as if I were in danger of running out of things to know about."
p. 1944 "She moved through life by melting things; her absence was marked not by a void or lack but by subtle change. Like now: The crowd broke up, but each listener carried a bit of her with them, the porch, her fear, the smell of smoke, reassembled into something different but whose origins were definitively Oolish."
Hope this book will receive some hype. Very interesting, beautifully written queer novel about a destructive relationship.
4*
4*
Stunning/brilliant use of language. More modern art than novel.
let this be a lesson for me about judging books on the yadda, yadda, yadda. I was told it was going to be a disturbing book. Comparable to Palahniuk's Haunted.
The thing is I did not find this novel very disturbing, at least not in the way I thought it would be. It's not simply the actions of the two leads that are disturbing it's the fact that you find yourself relating and sympathizing with them and their darkest behaviors. Where Haunted uses horror Oola uses love, and both are wonderfully disturbing. The pacing is slow and meticulous with only about 3 well placed scenes where I was horrified by the physical acts described but what truly upset me (and kept me reading!) was realizing I had developed such an attachment to both of the characters that even when I hated them, I loved them. That is why I will recomend this debut and look up anythong else Newell creates. Sometimes the path to our darkside is through love and this novel will take you there.
The thing is I did not find this novel very disturbing, at least not in the way I thought it would be. It's not simply the actions of the two leads that are disturbing it's the fact that you find yourself relating and sympathizing with them and their darkest behaviors. Where Haunted uses horror Oola uses love, and both are wonderfully disturbing. The pacing is slow and meticulous with only about 3 well placed scenes where I was horrified by the physical acts described but what truly upset me (and kept me reading!) was realizing I had developed such an attachment to both of the characters that even when I hated them, I loved them. That is why I will recomend this debut and look up anythong else Newell creates. Sometimes the path to our darkside is through love and this novel will take you there.
This is such a fucking incredible book. I have so many thoughts and feelings. I also really really really relate in so many ways to the protagonist (which is often disturbing) and I want to write about this book SO. BADLY.