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3.57 AVERAGE
3.57 AVERAGE
An unsettling and intriguing book which I wasn't able to really get into or grasp.
I was unsure about this book for the entire first third of it. I was even considering giving up altogether, which I don't do very often. While the language was breathtaking and the story kept looping and doubling back on itself like a poem, I just could not seem to get close to the narrator, Gretel. I always find it hard to read books that seem more like stylistic exercises than psychological explorations.
But then, all of a sudden, some of the pieces started to fit together. The fragmentation started to make sense.
And then the story took off in a major way, I got to know the characters, and I actually LOVED it.
Summarizing this book won't do it justice, because the structure and language play such a large role in the narrative. Put simply, though, the story is about Gretel, a 30-ish lexicographer, who has not spoken to her mother in over a decade and doesn't know where she is. When she returns to the places where she grew up, snippets of memories keep coming back to her. All of these seem to revolve around one occurrence in particular: the time a (very) young man called Marcus came to stay with them. Gradually, the search for her mother grows into a search for both of them, and into an uncovering of happened the month Marcus came to stay with them..and what preceded that.
Once again: this is not the full story, at all. It's not a straightforward narrative, and summing it up like this reduces it to a flatness that does not accurately depict the multidimensionality of the novel. And it's actually that very depth that makes it so good.
That, plus its originality.
Reading the above, you may jump to conclusions about what happened (I know I did). Yet, I can say with near-certainty that it is most likely NOT what you think. Once the story took off, it never went where I thought it would, and I loved that. Daisy Johnson crafted characters that are so different from the ones in most of the books I have read. And while Gretel remained a little elusive, Marcus, Sarah (Gretel's mother), and Fiona really came alive. I'll remember them for a long time.
In closing, here are some wonderful lines from the book:
"Nights were different. Nights were tangles of what-might-have-been, of awful possibility" (96).
"The water has a way of anything that was clear murky. You think I haven't seen things out there? When it's misty or on days so hot the air gets wavy I think I've seen things I left behind, never thought I'd see again" (165).
"He'd moved around her in narrowing circles of anxiety, waiting for her to tell him he had to go" (221).
"When Marcus woke in the night there was a wet heat. Brackish moisture around the corners of the boat, the smell of sprouting garlic rising from the walls. He could feel the last threads of the dream he'd been having tangling about his face" (228).
Beautiful. And while the story takes a bit of effort to get into, it's so worth it. Stick with it. It won't disappoint.
But then, all of a sudden, some of the pieces started to fit together. The fragmentation started to make sense.
And then the story took off in a major way, I got to know the characters, and I actually LOVED it.
Summarizing this book won't do it justice, because the structure and language play such a large role in the narrative. Put simply, though, the story is about Gretel, a 30-ish lexicographer, who has not spoken to her mother in over a decade and doesn't know where she is. When she returns to the places where she grew up, snippets of memories keep coming back to her. All of these seem to revolve around one occurrence in particular: the time a (very) young man called Marcus came to stay with them. Gradually, the search for her mother grows into a search for both of them, and into an uncovering of happened the month Marcus came to stay with them..and what preceded that.
Once again: this is not the full story, at all. It's not a straightforward narrative, and summing it up like this reduces it to a flatness that does not accurately depict the multidimensionality of the novel. And it's actually that very depth that makes it so good.
That, plus its originality.
Reading the above, you may jump to conclusions about what happened (I know I did). Yet, I can say with near-certainty that it is most likely NOT what you think. Once the story took off, it never went where I thought it would, and I loved that. Daisy Johnson crafted characters that are so different from the ones in most of the books I have read. And while Gretel remained a little elusive, Marcus, Sarah (Gretel's mother), and Fiona really came alive. I'll remember them for a long time.
In closing, here are some wonderful lines from the book:
"Nights were different. Nights were tangles of what-might-have-been, of awful possibility" (96).
"The water has a way of anything that was clear murky. You think I haven't seen things out there? When it's misty or on days so hot the air gets wavy I think I've seen things I left behind, never thought I'd see again" (165).
"He'd moved around her in narrowing circles of anxiety, waiting for her to tell him he had to go" (221).
"When Marcus woke in the night there was a wet heat. Brackish moisture around the corners of the boat, the smell of sprouting garlic rising from the walls. He could feel the last threads of the dream he'd been having tangling about his face" (228).
Beautiful. And while the story takes a bit of effort to get into, it's so worth it. Stick with it. It won't disappoint.
Daisy Johnson’s Man Booker-longlisted novel, Everything Under, is hard to discuss without giving things away. It is, essentially, not a retelling but a re-working of a Greek myth, and once you work out which myth, everything about the plot falls into place. That’s not to say it’s arid or formulaic—it’s the very opposite, wild and fertile and irreverent. Gretel is a lexicographer now, working on updating definitions of words for a dictionary (implicitly the OED, with its offices on Walton Street in Oxford). But she’s haunted by memories of her mother Sarah, whom she hasn’t seen since she was sixteen, and of the summer when a strange boy named Marcus came to stay with them, living in their houseboat on the river Isis. In the same summer, the river was plagued by rumours of a creature that was stealing children from houseboats, sheep from water meadows. Sarah and Gretel called it the Bonak. When Sarah reappears in Gretel’s life, she has to face what really happened back then. That brief summary reduces Everything Under to mere event, though, when the experience of reading it is actually mostly atmospheric. Johnson shifts back and forth between the present day (with Sarah, now suffering from dementia, living in Gretel’s house), the slightly earlier present (as Gretel searches for Sarah), the past as Gretel’s memory, and the past as seen through Marcus’s eyes. Johnson’s smart enough to trust her readers’ ability to follow these chronological jumps, so they’re not signposted, which gives the whole book an appropriate air of fluidity. And that’s very much an overarching theme: the unshowy but persistent strain of gender-bending in Everything Under works to reinforce that, and is worked against by a sense of rigidity that comes from the book’s adherence to the concept of fate and tragic irony. (This will make much more sense if you’ve read it and know which Greek story Johnson is working with.) It’s a beautiful, feral thing to read, by a highly skilled writer.
Originally published on my blog, Elle Thinks.
Originally published on my blog, Elle Thinks.
Land, language, and loins determine who we are and Johnson weaves myth through these three sources as few can. There is an eerie, magnetic quality to her writing that one would imagine coming from an older writer--one with more experience and wisdom, and yet one can only conclude from her prose that Johnson is an old soul in tune with the mysteries and pains of existence.
Boundaries, themes, and characters overlap and blur. That which we most fear always just below the surface as we run headfirst into whatever it is we're fleeing.
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WORDS I WISH WERE REAL FROM THIS BOOK
- egaratise: "disappear one's self, to step out of your past;" if you Google it, the first hit is currently to Paul Fulcher's excellent GR review of the book
- Bonak: a mythological river thief; a monstrous manifestation of our fears always stalking us, waiting to pull us under or take those we love
Boundaries, themes, and characters overlap and blur. That which we most fear always just below the surface as we run headfirst into whatever it is we're fleeing.
--------------------------------------------------
WORDS I WISH WERE REAL FROM THIS BOOK
- egaratise: "disappear one's self, to step out of your past;" if you Google it, the first hit is currently to Paul Fulcher's excellent GR review of the book
- Bonak: a mythological river thief; a monstrous manifestation of our fears always stalking us, waiting to pull us under or take those we love
Not my kinda story (swamp noir sadness) but amazing writing.
A fresh re-telling of an old story. Wonderfully clear and succinct writing.
A beautifully written book. Hints of mythology and fairy tales like Hansel and Gretal and Oedipus, but with its own completely unique story too. It explores the complex mother/daughter relationship, child abandonment, gender roles and uses language and memory in some really interesting ways. I can see why it’s shortlisted for the Man Booker. I can’t wait to read more from Johnson.
I could write on and on about retellings, folklore allusion, gender fluidity, or the edgy tone or the author’s voice - but, at the end of the day, I just didn’t like this one. I’m all for weird but this one is weird.
We read this for book club, and it made for a good discussion as no one liked it. The writing style was different and confusing— I struggled to keep up with who was whom. I almost put the book down, but the storyline got better for a time, and then back downward at the end — spoiler alert below to help answer a question:
Who was the Bonak?? We thought it was a figurative creature, but what did they kill at the end?
Who was the Bonak?? We thought it was a figurative creature, but what did they kill at the end?
dark
mysterious
medium-paced
Plot or Character Driven:
Character
Strong character development:
Yes
Diverse cast of characters:
Yes