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catdad77a45's review against another edition
3.0
Although readable, and easily knocked out in a day, this just left me feeling kind of 'meh'. The story just ambles along and I'm not quite sure what it was trying to say - or even if there WAS any point. And although some of Aridjis' prose was quite lovely, at almost no point was I convinced it was from the mind of a seventeen year old runaway.
tashadandelion's review against another edition
3.0
This is a pretty typical example of a 200-page work of lovingly-crafted prose that is for some inscrutable reason passed off as a novel in high literary circles. There is no real plot here, but plenty of interesting internal ruminations from an intellectual teen on walkabout with a ne'er-do-well pseudo-boyfriend she only recently met. I found it easy enough to read, but it's not my usual cup of tea. I respect the author's way with words, however, and thank her for making me go look up various interesting side topics, like Klaus Nomi, and Zipolite, Mexico, among other things.
featherbooks's review against another edition
4.0
Another one of those dreamy books with considerable navel-gazing that keeps my interest but I'm not sure why. The narrator is seventeen and runs away from home and family with a mysterious, unresponsive man to Zipolite, a Oaxacan beach town with cosmic properties in search of a missing circus troupe of Ukranian dwarfs. Abandoning her companion for the most part, she takes up with a mysterious, unresponsive merman whom she meets nightly for drinks and one-sided conversations. I think of books by Olivia Laing or Deborah Levy in [b:Hot Milk|26883528|Hot Milk|Deborah Levy|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1461535043l/26883528._SY75_.jpg|46932640] or Laura van den Berg [b:The Third Hotel|36348514|The Third Hotel|Laura van den Berg|https://i.gr-assets.com/images/S/compressed.photo.goodreads.com/books/1512550273l/36348514._SY75_.jpg|58029865]which I've read recently and wonder why I'm drawn to the Great Ennui of these writers.
hypops's review against another edition
2.0
This is a difficult book to parse. Because it only ever gives us the point of view of a naive, idealistic, privileged, impetuous, bookish, 17-year-old girl, it's almost impossible to get out of her head far enough to gain a critical perspective on her.
The narrator-protagonist is painfully and pathologically romantic. The book regularly disappears into prose that is dripping with solopsism. The tiniest little detail, gesture, or appearance that she witnesses is liable to send Luisa into wistful reveries about her intellectual obsessions--usually some classical or literary allusion. She disappears regularly into daydreams that ignore completely whatever danger might be staring her straight in the face. It's frustrating to watch as she avoids near miss after near miss only to fall ultimately off of a violent cliff that we all could predict was coming (but it is understated enough that some folks might miss it).
It was at that point that I realized I was reading an effing Henry James novel. And that's when it lost me.
Aridjis is in control of her craft, of the pacing, and of this character's deep and surprisingly beautiful digressions. It's like watching an expensive, exotic sports car get into an accident. You can't not watch. But did I enjoy or appreciate this novel? Maybe...? But probably not. And why is it set in the late '80s? Other than some trips down my generation's nostalgia lanes, I don't see why it needed to be set then.
The narrator-protagonist is painfully and pathologically romantic. The book regularly disappears into prose that is dripping with solopsism. The tiniest little detail, gesture, or appearance that she witnesses is liable to send Luisa into wistful reveries about her intellectual obsessions--usually some classical or literary allusion. She disappears regularly into daydreams that ignore completely whatever danger might be staring her straight in the face. It's frustrating to watch as she avoids near miss after near miss only to fall ultimately off of a violent cliff that we all could predict was coming (but it is understated enough that some folks might miss it).
It was at that point that I realized I was reading an effing Henry James novel. And that's when it lost me.
Aridjis is in control of her craft, of the pacing, and of this character's deep and surprisingly beautiful digressions. It's like watching an expensive, exotic sports car get into an accident. You can't not watch. But did I enjoy or appreciate this novel? Maybe...? But probably not. And why is it set in the late '80s? Other than some trips down my generation's nostalgia lanes, I don't see why it needed to be set then.
beckym6c0a3's review against another edition
3.0
I started out liking this - the writing was evocative and poetic. However, the lack of propulsion in the narrative eventually sapped my will to return to it, and I read the last third in a hurried effort to finish the book. Definitely not a book for people who enjoy a strong plot or character growth, but there are some beautiful passages.
stewarthome's review against another edition
5.0
The prose is beautiful & the narrative details Mexican goth subculture in the 1980s. The first part is set in Mexico City but the two teen protagonists run away to a beach town, which creates a wonderful tension between the geographical setting and the post-punk style favoured by our anti-heroes. The descriptions of music clubs are groovy, and our two goths have fabulous cinematic tastes - on a date they go to see a revival of Muñecos infernales (or Curse of the Doll People from 1961 as it's known to English audiences). The seventeen year-old narrator visits the flat in which William Burroughs accidentally killed his wife and has Lautréamont's Les Chants de Maldoror as her beach reading. Perfect!
literaryinfatuation's review against another edition
3.0
It is a quirky story, as told by Luisa, a 17 year old girl from Mexico City, who runs away from home with a boy he barely knows to look for two Ukrainian dwarfs who escaped the circus. The plot is slow and subtle, but her depiction of Mexico in the 1980s, peppered with local words, made me nostalgic for the Motherland. It is one of the few YAs I’ve read that really seem to capture the voice and feelings of a 17 year old from an upper middle class background. .
fictionalfrances's review against another edition
1.0
My review of this can be found here:
https://www.instagram.com/p/CDHRgC0BALg/?igshid=177nqvq3phbrl
ig: @fictional.frances
https://www.instagram.com/p/CDHRgC0BALg/?igshid=177nqvq3phbrl
ig: @fictional.frances
lavinia_reads's review against another edition
5.0
What a wonderful and fascinating novel!
On the surface the story is simple. A young woman, Luisa, runs away from her home in Mexico City with a young man and she goes to a coastal city in Oaxaca called Zipolite. She is not very interested in the young man; she is not looking for a love story. She is not looking for an adventure. She wouldn’t have made that trip in the first place, if she hadn’t been stabled across a newspaper article about twelve Ukrainian dwarves who apparently found their way to Oaxaca after feeing a Soviet circus.
Luisa wants to discover more about life and life’s mysterious ways. The things she knows about life are the things she learned in her father’s library and from the discussions with him around the dinner table; shipwrecks and sea monsters, the title of the book. Society, for her, has the form of a fish tank, “only less beautiful to watch,” with lost objects at the bottom of the sea, that you can discover only if you scratch to surface.
And so Luisa runs away to the beach town of Zipolite where she spends her days in isolation “aimlessly, purposefully, and in search of digressions,” only to discover that the motives that drove her there are no longer interesting. She constantly redrafts her fantasies, projecting them to new characters that fascinated her, only, at the end, to be disappointed. It was there, in the soothing monotony of the sea beach that it occurred to her the most voyages and in failure, “and from the start we had set out for the wrong island, bypassing our destination, or at least the destination we thought we are aiming for….”
An absolutely beautiful, poetic and mesmerizing book.
On the surface the story is simple. A young woman, Luisa, runs away from her home in Mexico City with a young man and she goes to a coastal city in Oaxaca called Zipolite. She is not very interested in the young man; she is not looking for a love story. She is not looking for an adventure. She wouldn’t have made that trip in the first place, if she hadn’t been stabled across a newspaper article about twelve Ukrainian dwarves who apparently found their way to Oaxaca after feeing a Soviet circus.
Luisa wants to discover more about life and life’s mysterious ways. The things she knows about life are the things she learned in her father’s library and from the discussions with him around the dinner table; shipwrecks and sea monsters, the title of the book. Society, for her, has the form of a fish tank, “only less beautiful to watch,” with lost objects at the bottom of the sea, that you can discover only if you scratch to surface.
And so Luisa runs away to the beach town of Zipolite where she spends her days in isolation “aimlessly, purposefully, and in search of digressions,” only to discover that the motives that drove her there are no longer interesting. She constantly redrafts her fantasies, projecting them to new characters that fascinated her, only, at the end, to be disappointed. It was there, in the soothing monotony of the sea beach that it occurred to her the most voyages and in failure, “and from the start we had set out for the wrong island, bypassing our destination, or at least the destination we thought we are aiming for….”
An absolutely beautiful, poetic and mesmerizing book.
joshknoll's review against another edition
reflective
medium-paced
- Strong character development? No
- Loveable characters? No
- Diverse cast of characters? No
- Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes
1.5