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aberdeenwaters's review against another edition
3.0
I was pretty close to giving this 4 stars, but my interest level was up and down throughout my time with it. There some slower, less interesting parts, but I really enjoyed many parts of the second half in particular. There's a lot going on in this one: meta-commentary on fiction, romance, pseudo-history, etc. Well researched and interesting, but perhaps I wanted a little more? Not sure what, though.
grayjay's review against another edition
5.0
This book unravels layer after layer as it heaps complexity on its characters. It is a gripping thriller about writers and fans, jealousy and lies, about a woman searching for her lost husband, about fame and defamation. It considers the delicate issue of separating beloved works of art from the problematic people who created them.
kreppen's review against another edition
emotional
mysterious
sad
slow-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? A mix
- Strong character development? Yes
- Loveable characters? Yes
- Diverse cast of characters? Yes
- Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes
5.0
sandygx260's review against another edition
4.0
This is one of those frustrating books which pivots between boredom and fascination. Huge swathes of telling not showing drag down the narrative in three distinct places, but somehow you keep reading because La Farge is talented enough to keep you intrigued. Many a time you need to suspend your disbelief in order to slog through a few frozen tundras of words. The amazing high points are worth the effort.
Another problem I have with the book is the main character Marina, who comes across as cold and harsh. Yes, her husband Charlie has cheated on her and lied, but she knows he's mentally unstable. Her attitude toward him leads me to believe she never loved him in a whole manner—more like she married him to shock and upset her parents. Yet by the book's end, if what I suspect is true, Marina has every right to despise her "dead" husband Charlie.
If you want a neat read that ties up its mysteries, then this book will annoy you. If you expect this to be a horror novel, you'll be disappointed. It is more about the horror of why people do what they do, how the mind works, levels of obsession, and, above all, the horror of hate, discrimination, and alienation.
Another problem I have with the book is the main character Marina, who comes across as cold and harsh. Yes, her husband Charlie has cheated on her and lied, but she knows he's mentally unstable. Her attitude toward him leads me to believe she never loved him in a whole manner—more like she married him to shock and upset her parents. Yet by the book's end, if what I suspect is true, Marina has every right to despise her "dead" husband Charlie.
If you want a neat read that ties up its mysteries, then this book will annoy you. If you expect this to be a horror novel, you'll be disappointed. It is more about the horror of why people do what they do, how the mind works, levels of obsession, and, above all, the horror of hate, discrimination, and alienation.
bookysue's review against another edition
4.0
Super weird in some ways. So well written. A great beach read.
thelonia's review against another edition
5.0
I gotta stop reading books whose last lines give me existential nightmares
millennial_dandy's review
4.0
From time to time a novel gets mismarketed to its own detriment. This is, of course, not the fault of the author nor a judgement on the work itself, just an unfortunate mistake (intentional or not) by the publisher.
'The Night Ocean' suffers horribly from its own blurb, which seems to imply that this is a mystery novel. It categorically isn't, though it shares a few of the trappings. Now, I don't envy the person who has to write up a blurb to describe what this novel in fact is, which is contemporary literary fiction that flirts with, but never quite commits to, magical realism.
This isn't hidden in the marketing per-say; the penguin edition explicitly compares 'The Night Ocean' to the work of Murakami, and mentions it's "about the way stories earn our trust, and betray it." All fair and accurate. But clearly something happened because so many of the negative reviews cite a feeling of betrayal at this novel not being what they thought they'd signed on for.
In any case, it's not a mystery novel, though it has a mystery as its central hub from which all the side plots sprout.
So what is it?
'The Night Ocean' is about a lot of things, but at its heart it's an examination of truth, and how truth interplays with fiction, particularly when we novalize real people and events. Does this help or hurt?
In a key scene towards the end of the novel, our POV character is helping to develop a library at a liberated Nazi concentration camp. He notes: "I was amused to see that while wiser books stayed on the shelves, the novels were almost always on loan [...] It made me think that what the world needed was not wisdom, but stories." (p.300)
To explore this question, La Farge chooses the figure of H.P.Lovecraft, a brillient choice to nicely complicate things. Lovecraft has long had a rabid cult following, but has also had his feet put to the fire (largely after his death) for his antisemitic views and for being racist. As La Farge points out in 'The Night Ocean,' this relegating of historical figures to either heroes or villains says more about us and what we want of them than it does about that person.
"Every age has the vampire it needs," as Nina Auerbach wrote.
And in the end, sometimes you just can't know everything; life is messy, and people will, in the end, always keep their own councel.
It's sort of lonely to think that it's not possible to know anyone else as completely as we know ourselves, and doubly so if we're talking about people we have never met, who lived and died decades before we were born, but this, La Farge seems to claim, is why we write stories: to help bridge that inherent chasm and reveal the universal human truths that transcend the lonliness of the single human soul.
Essentially: just because something may or may not have really happened, just because a character doesn't perfectly allign with their human self, does that make them any less real?
La Farge doesn't go so far as to offer an explicit answer, though he seems to lean more towards that answer being 'no.'
Though it's a well-reasoned argument, I don't think it's the entire story.
It seems rather apathetic to just throw up our hands as one of the characters in 'The Night Ocean' does and say: 'heck, I guess truth just isn't as important as a good yarn, so why even both bother distinguishing one from the other?'
Well, because sometimes it causes harm when we don't.
Whitewashing history (a form of mythologizing/ficitonalizing facts) can have real-world consequences. It matters that kids in the US were taught for years and years that Christopher Columbus was a hero and a 'good guy' because it was then harder for those kids to understand what colonialism is and how it hurt and continues to hurt thousands and thousands of people. The ripple effect from the events Columbus is a symbol of, impacts real people in the world right now.
The same could be said of the way Disney fictionalized the story of 'Pocahontas.'
But then, on the other hand, there are situations where a story seems so much better able to capture an event than 'just the facts,' textbook-style. Stories and characters help readers develop empathy and understanding even if they know the people they're reading about never 'really' existed or didn't exist in exactly the way they're presented in a novel.
It's a fine line, and though I'm not sure that I personally am willing to follow La Farge all the way to the logical conclusions of all of his hypotheticals, 'The Night Ocean' is a great springboard for the discussion of the responsibility of storytellers to 'tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth.'
There is also quite a good chunk of time spent critiquing the toxicity of fandom (both in the traditional sense, and also the development of political fandoms), in and out groups within those fandoms, and the ugliness of virtue-signalling dogpiles (both online and in the pre-internet era).
Note: because of the nature of the question this novel explores, a reader has to be willing to have several rugs pulled out from under them. I didn't find this redundant as La Farge has the writing chops to pull it off in a similar manner to 'If On a Winter's Night A Traveler', but not everyone is going to be willing to subject themselves to that multiple times if they feel like they 'got it' the first time.
Overall, I really, really enjoyed my time with 'The Night Ocean.' I liked the pacing, I enjoyed the voice, I enjoyed pondering the questions La Farge raised as they came up, I thought the subject matter was perfectly suited to those questions, and yes, I was interested to know how it would all turn out.
Indeed, the only reason I knocked off a star was because I didn't like the very last line, but would have given it 5 if he would have axed it.
Take from that what you will.
But certainly, if you are a 'reader' and you have even a passing interest in Lovecraft (who is defintely the focal point driving the plot), and a curiosity regarding that question of fictionalizing history, you'll definitely have something to say about this novel.
'The Night Ocean' suffers horribly from its own blurb, which seems to imply that this is a mystery novel. It categorically isn't, though it shares a few of the trappings. Now, I don't envy the person who has to write up a blurb to describe what this novel in fact is, which is contemporary literary fiction that flirts with, but never quite commits to, magical realism.
This isn't hidden in the marketing per-say; the penguin edition explicitly compares 'The Night Ocean' to the work of Murakami, and mentions it's "about the way stories earn our trust, and betray it." All fair and accurate. But clearly something happened because so many of the negative reviews cite a feeling of betrayal at this novel not being what they thought they'd signed on for.
In any case, it's not a mystery novel, though it has a mystery as its central hub from which all the side plots sprout.
So what is it?
'The Night Ocean' is about a lot of things, but at its heart it's an examination of truth, and how truth interplays with fiction, particularly when we novalize real people and events. Does this help or hurt?
In a key scene towards the end of the novel, our POV character is helping to develop a library at a liberated Nazi concentration camp. He notes: "I was amused to see that while wiser books stayed on the shelves, the novels were almost always on loan [...] It made me think that what the world needed was not wisdom, but stories." (p.300)
To explore this question, La Farge chooses the figure of H.P.Lovecraft, a brillient choice to nicely complicate things. Lovecraft has long had a rabid cult following, but has also had his feet put to the fire (largely after his death) for his antisemitic views and for being racist. As La Farge points out in 'The Night Ocean,' this relegating of historical figures to either heroes or villains says more about us and what we want of them than it does about that person.
"Every age has the vampire it needs," as Nina Auerbach wrote.
And in the end, sometimes you just can't know everything; life is messy, and people will, in the end, always keep their own councel.
It's sort of lonely to think that it's not possible to know anyone else as completely as we know ourselves, and doubly so if we're talking about people we have never met, who lived and died decades before we were born, but this, La Farge seems to claim, is why we write stories: to help bridge that inherent chasm and reveal the universal human truths that transcend the lonliness of the single human soul.
Essentially: just because something may or may not have really happened, just because a character doesn't perfectly allign with their human self, does that make them any less real?
La Farge doesn't go so far as to offer an explicit answer, though he seems to lean more towards that answer being 'no.'
Though it's a well-reasoned argument, I don't think it's the entire story.
It seems rather apathetic to just throw up our hands as one of the characters in 'The Night Ocean' does and say: 'heck, I guess truth just isn't as important as a good yarn, so why even both bother distinguishing one from the other?'
Well, because sometimes it causes harm when we don't.
Whitewashing history (a form of mythologizing/ficitonalizing facts) can have real-world consequences. It matters that kids in the US were taught for years and years that Christopher Columbus was a hero and a 'good guy' because it was then harder for those kids to understand what colonialism is and how it hurt and continues to hurt thousands and thousands of people. The ripple effect from the events Columbus is a symbol of, impacts real people in the world right now.
The same could be said of the way Disney fictionalized the story of 'Pocahontas.'
But then, on the other hand, there are situations where a story seems so much better able to capture an event than 'just the facts,' textbook-style. Stories and characters help readers develop empathy and understanding even if they know the people they're reading about never 'really' existed or didn't exist in exactly the way they're presented in a novel.
It's a fine line, and though I'm not sure that I personally am willing to follow La Farge all the way to the logical conclusions of all of his hypotheticals, 'The Night Ocean' is a great springboard for the discussion of the responsibility of storytellers to 'tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth.'
There is also quite a good chunk of time spent critiquing the toxicity of fandom (both in the traditional sense, and also the development of political fandoms), in and out groups within those fandoms, and the ugliness of virtue-signalling dogpiles (both online and in the pre-internet era).
Note: because of the nature of the question this novel explores, a reader has to be willing to have several rugs pulled out from under them. I didn't find this redundant as La Farge has the writing chops to pull it off in a similar manner to 'If On a Winter's Night A Traveler', but not everyone is going to be willing to subject themselves to that multiple times if they feel like they 'got it' the first time.
Overall, I really, really enjoyed my time with 'The Night Ocean.' I liked the pacing, I enjoyed the voice, I enjoyed pondering the questions La Farge raised as they came up, I thought the subject matter was perfectly suited to those questions, and yes, I was interested to know how it would all turn out.
Indeed, the only reason I knocked off a star was because I didn't like the very last line, but would have given it 5 if he would have axed it.
Take from that what you will.
But certainly, if you are a 'reader' and you have even a passing interest in Lovecraft (who is defintely the focal point driving the plot), and a curiosity regarding that question of fictionalizing history, you'll definitely have something to say about this novel.