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gbatts's review
challenging
emotional
funny
reflective
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
3.75
shoba's review
4.0
The novel reads like a monologue from an unnamed narrator, an artist, addressing her partner, Teun. The artist travels from London to Sydney upon the death of her father to take possession of their family home. She finds the house in disrepair due to her late father’s hoarding. She considers incorporating the contents of the house into an art exhibition similar to Song Dong’s seminal work Waste Not. A collaboration between Song Dong and his mother, Waste Not was an art installation displaying the over 10,000 everyday items that Song Dong ‘s mother collected and refused to part with following the death of her husband. The narrator relays her interest in this new project to Nathaniel Lord, her one-time mentor at art school.
“The leavings of dad but also of mum, and the rest of us too- the entirety of our lives in this house, as well as those of all of the earlier households and people whose collections we'd made ours from the generations earlier, and so the full textured spread of what I had once got away from as quickly as I could when my anorexia failed. This fearful feeling I have always had that it is either all or nothing with me. All or nothing.”
Once inside her family home, the artist becomes overwhelmed by the sheer amount of trash and the onslaught of memories from her childhood. She decides to abandon the Waste Not project and to throw her father’s belongs away. The narrator chooses instead to go back to her previous idea, the Wall of “Still Lives”, the project she had been working on for the last decade.
Much like her father, the artist describes her own tendencies to hoard as “…my own ‘problem’ with space and clutter, as I know you like to think of the way I'm unable to stop myself filling the rooms where we live…my inability to sort, to cull, to ‘prioritise’, as you call it, even with important things.”
The narrator connects her own hoarding behavior to the lack of progress in finishing her work. The Wall, her long-term project, had been delayed due continuous additions. She describes her artistic process to Teun as “…those pieces I have been making ‘obsessively’, as you put it- those tiny figures that I ‘keep placing’ in over-wide and cluttered spatial environments….”
The hoarding of physical objects was eventually overshadowed by the obsessive way the artist held onto memories of past arguments and disappointments, a process that escalates while back in Sydney. Her thoughts repeat and continues to scrutinize the petty jealousies of old art school friends, the motives of her past advisor, the actions of family members, and even Teun’s words. Overwhelmed, the narrator rushes back home to London.
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