Reviews

Zazen by Vanessa Veselka

boysenberry22's review against another edition

dark medium-paced

• Plot- or character-driven? Character
• Strong character development? It's complicated
• Loveable characters? No
• Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

3.5

r0b3rta's review against another edition

4.0

Zazen, the word itself is a Buddhist term and in essence it is to sit in non-judgement/non-attachment during meditation. While reading the book I did become very attached to the characters and wanting to find out what would happen in the midst of bombs, sex parties, and lunches at the vegan diner. What happens in Della's world could easily happen here and some of it has..just not to the extreme.

gellyreads's review against another edition

challenging dark medium-paced

• Plot- or character-driven? A mix
• Strong character development? No
• Loveable characters? No
• Diverse cast of characters? No
• Flaws of characters a main focus? It's complicated

3.0

I think this is a book I'm going to have to re-read to understand. This feels like the ideas are great, but everything was so muddled that I struggled to follow everything that was going on.

breadandmushrooms's review against another edition

dark medium-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

2.75

tonycomputer's review against another edition

dark emotional funny tense medium-paced

• Plot- or character-driven? A mix

3.5

hazelbyers's review against another edition

adventurous dark medium-paced

• Plot- or character-driven? A mix
• Strong character development? No
• Loveable characters? No
• Diverse cast of characters? Yes
• Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

2.0

meghan111's review against another edition

4.0

Issued by a small press called Red Lemonade, this first novel by a Portland writer strikes right to the heart of an alternate near future, where the one war is still going but the second war hasn't quite started, and the bombs are a daily fear but also could just be mostly in your head. The main character Della is in her late 20s, working as a waitress at a vegan-ish diner where the customers debate which country they should move to - Bali, Costa Rica, Sri Lanka? But the time for getting out might have passed, and the overwhelming immense hopeless dread is kind of in her head more than anyplace else, as she thinks things like this:

“When the first box-mall-church went up in the blackberry field I wanted some kind of rampant mass stigmata with blackberry juice for blood. It didn’t happen. It’s not going to. They win; they just roll, pave and drive over everything that’s beautiful: babies, love and small birds."

Della is at loose ends, with an abandoned academic career in geology and a more recent failed career working with her brother as a community activist (their greatest success came when they slightly delayed the building of a Wal-Mart). She is surrounded by all the trappings of left-wing culture, described accurately and lovingly. A wicked, precise sense of humor permeates the novel, mostly in sharp dialogue and satire of the small details of the characters.

The writing is the greatest strength of this book, which meanders a little in plot. Della starts calling in fake bomb threats and eventually falls in with a group of would-be left-wing terrorists living on a farm, but along the way several people drop in and out and we never really get to know them.

briandice's review against another edition

5.0

What a stunning debut novel. I hope to give a full review soon - the last 30 pages are amazing, the final 100 words are some of the best to finish a novel I've read in a long time.

tsharris's review against another edition

4.0

This is a hard book to review, not least because it was a hard book to read. It's written from the perspective of Della, a recent Ph.D. in paleontology, who lives in an America not unlike our own but one that is shuddering to breakdown. She's an extremely unreliable narrator, and I can't help but wonder the extent to which the action of the novel occurs inside her head. That said, I really found a lot to like in this novel. Veselka skewers both the excesses of late capitalism and the futility of attempts to destroy it, and through the Zen undertones (the title means seated meditation in Japanese) and the discourses on the long history of the earth, she seems to be saying that ultimately nothing matters.

katdid's review against another edition

4.0

But I know what it means to crave what you're not. To want to sew up that rift because it's exhausting to hold it open. Sometimes you just need to be someone else, someone who doesn't care about anything at all. I know I do. I want emptiness but I can't have it.

This has been on my radar for a few years, but it was exactly what I did not need to be reading right now. So it is probably testament to how good it is that I (mostly) enjoyed it anyway. I felt like the protagonist Della and I were a lot alike, except my current obsession is more specifically with authenticity. I imagined the setting as Portland, and then - because certain details, like the fact that Della was a Professor (or called herself one?), put me in mind of this one guy I was recently dating - as New Orleans, which was probably inaccurate (I have no personal experience of New Orleans) but I liked thinking that Della's scene was there, because that scene was nonsense that masked all the very real shit going on underneath.