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3.57 AVERAGE
3.57 AVERAGE
Took me about 50 pages to get into it; after that I couldn't put it down. Great, weird, grim stuff.
Needed to concentrate for this novel, so not a great choice for my bedtime audio. Some beautiful lyrical phrases. An interesting twisting tale where characters change and surprise.
Daisy Johnson’s EVERYTHING UNDER was my pick for the #popsugarreadingchallenge Prompt 12 “A book inspired by mythology, legend or folklore”. I decided not to air out the myth it’s meant to be retelling because it’s a key plot spoiler, but it also has elements of Hansel and Gretel scattered in. It was on the 2018 Booker Prize short list, and it is definitely ambitious and atmospheric, but overall didn’t really work for me. Three stars, enjoyable, but meh, kind of drawn out in the middle. ⭐️⭐️⭐️
well. i thought i was back in my magical realism era.
i have been having a lot of success lately with Experimental Literary Fiction About Mothers And Daughters, and since the synopsis implies that this book is literally exactly that, i thought we had a success on our hands.
also, look at that cover.
but spoiler alert, we did not! this book had 900 half-baked side plots, from stray dogs to greek retellings to lexicography to weird made up language words to Alzheimer's to OH MY GOD NO WAY PLEASE TELL ME THAT ISN'T WHAT THIS BOOK IS ABOUT, and then also just about no time spent on that.
this started off frustrating and ultimately became annoying! and over the course of my life, i have been an eldest sibling, a teacher's pet, an introvert, and a hater.
i don't do well with being annoyed.
bottom line: weird! and not in the way i'm a fan of.
i have been having a lot of success lately with Experimental Literary Fiction About Mothers And Daughters, and since the synopsis implies that this book is literally exactly that, i thought we had a success on our hands.
also, look at that cover.
but spoiler alert, we did not! this book had 900 half-baked side plots, from stray dogs to greek retellings to lexicography to weird made up language words to Alzheimer's to OH MY GOD NO WAY PLEASE TELL ME THAT ISN'T WHAT THIS BOOK IS ABOUT, and then also just about no time spent on that.
this started off frustrating and ultimately became annoying! and over the course of my life, i have been an eldest sibling, a teacher's pet, an introvert, and a hater.
i don't do well with being annoyed.
bottom line: weird! and not in the way i'm a fan of.
This book came to my attention because it appeared on the Man Booker Prize shortlist and because it is a re-imagining of the Oedipus myth. It has also received rave reviews. Unfortunately, mine will not be one of those.
For the first 13 years of her life, Gretel Whiting lived on a canal boat with her mother Sarah. Then they lived above a stable. When Gretel was 16, Sarah disappeared. Now 16 years later, they are reunited but Sarah is experiencing the early stages of dementia, so Gretel’s attempts to reconnect with her mother and learn her life story meet with limited success. Gretel is especially interested in learning more about Marcus, a young man who lived with them for a month when she was 13, and what happened to him.
Reading this book is like floating down a turbid river in a disabled boat with flotsam snagging the boat and demanding your attention before it breaks free and moves on to be replaced by more debris. The reader has no control over where the boat goes or what emerges from the water. Then because the current is fast, nothing remains long enough for the reader to fully grasp it. All one has is vague impressions. Gretel speaks of the story as “some lies, some fabrications . . . hearsay, guesswork.” I understand that the lack of clarity is intentional and central to the theme, but the constant ambiguity is just too much for my liking.
The Bonak is a perfect example of the novel’s ambiguity. It is an ever-present menace though Gretel understands that “it’s not even a real word. It doesn’t even exist” and is just an embodiment of “what we are afraid of.” Then, however, Sarah captures the scaly creature: “Its legs were short and strong, clawed; its mouth was long and toothy, its tail vanished into the murky water, its body was thick and rough until the belly, which was pale as churned cream.” It even serves as food: “The meat was gamey, a little like the fish we used to eat from the water.” So is it real of just a manifestation?
A major theme is that everything is fluid. For example, gender and memory are fluid. There are two transgender characters in the novel. Gretel becomes Margot becomes Marcus, but there is more than one Gretel! The unreliability of memories is not a new idea because “everything we remember is passed down, thought over, is never the way that it was in reality.” Gretel admits, “I couldn’t tell what I’d made up and what had really happened” and for Sarah, “memories flash like broken wine glasses in the dark and then are gone.” Time is also shown as fluid; the novel moves back and forth through time and Gretel emphasizes that “the past did not die just because we wanted it to. . . . The past was not a thread trailing behind us but an anchor.”
The novel also examines destiny and free will. Some characters speak of having a lack of choice, a determinism. And Gretel wants to scream at Sarah: “I want to shout that you chose to leave me, no one made you do it, you cannot lie down behind your badly made decisions and call them fate or determinism or god.” But then Gretel thinks that maybe “all of our choices are remnants of all the choices we made before. As if decisions were shards from the bombs of our previous actions.” And perhaps our personalities are determined by our environment: “we are determined by our landscape . . . our lives are decided by the hills and the rivers and the trees.”
All the rave reviews I’ve read inevitably refer to the lyrical style of the book as one of its outstanding elements. The style is indeed lyrical with much reliance on imagery. I did enjoy the playfulness with language. Sarah and Gretel invented a language of their own: “sheesh time meant . . . some time alone. A harpiedoodle was a small annoyance . . . Something comfortable or enjoyable, often soft or warm, was duvduv . . . effie meant the current was faster as in the water was effing along or effying along the banks; that sills was the noise the river made at night and grear the taste of it in the morning.” My issue is that lyrical writing is not in itself sufficient; more is needed to sustain the narrative.
I enjoy re-tellings of myths but I didn’t find this one worked. I found it difficult to believe that a teenager living at the end of the 20th century would unquestioningly believe a neighbour who tells her that she will kill her father and have sex with her mother. Then there’s the problem of the author’s being selective about what parts of the myth to incorporate. In addition, elements of the Hansel and Gretel fairy tale are added to muddy the waters.
This is obviously not the book for me. The constant ambiguity was by design but was just too much for me. To continue my river analogy, at times I felt as if I’d been thrown into the murky water and was drowning. Someone with more of a Type B personality might enjoy the novel, but it was a struggle for me.
Please check out my reader's blog (https://schatjesshelves.blogspot.com/) and follow me on Twitter (@DCYakabuski).
For the first 13 years of her life, Gretel Whiting lived on a canal boat with her mother Sarah. Then they lived above a stable. When Gretel was 16, Sarah disappeared. Now 16 years later, they are reunited but Sarah is experiencing the early stages of dementia, so Gretel’s attempts to reconnect with her mother and learn her life story meet with limited success. Gretel is especially interested in learning more about Marcus, a young man who lived with them for a month when she was 13, and what happened to him.
Reading this book is like floating down a turbid river in a disabled boat with flotsam snagging the boat and demanding your attention before it breaks free and moves on to be replaced by more debris. The reader has no control over where the boat goes or what emerges from the water. Then because the current is fast, nothing remains long enough for the reader to fully grasp it. All one has is vague impressions. Gretel speaks of the story as “some lies, some fabrications . . . hearsay, guesswork.” I understand that the lack of clarity is intentional and central to the theme, but the constant ambiguity is just too much for my liking.
The Bonak is a perfect example of the novel’s ambiguity. It is an ever-present menace though Gretel understands that “it’s not even a real word. It doesn’t even exist” and is just an embodiment of “what we are afraid of.” Then, however, Sarah captures the scaly creature: “Its legs were short and strong, clawed; its mouth was long and toothy, its tail vanished into the murky water, its body was thick and rough until the belly, which was pale as churned cream.” It even serves as food: “The meat was gamey, a little like the fish we used to eat from the water.” So is it real of just a manifestation?
A major theme is that everything is fluid. For example, gender and memory are fluid. There are two transgender characters in the novel. Gretel becomes Margot becomes Marcus, but there is more than one Gretel! The unreliability of memories is not a new idea because “everything we remember is passed down, thought over, is never the way that it was in reality.” Gretel admits, “I couldn’t tell what I’d made up and what had really happened” and for Sarah, “memories flash like broken wine glasses in the dark and then are gone.” Time is also shown as fluid; the novel moves back and forth through time and Gretel emphasizes that “the past did not die just because we wanted it to. . . . The past was not a thread trailing behind us but an anchor.”
The novel also examines destiny and free will. Some characters speak of having a lack of choice, a determinism. And Gretel wants to scream at Sarah: “I want to shout that you chose to leave me, no one made you do it, you cannot lie down behind your badly made decisions and call them fate or determinism or god.” But then Gretel thinks that maybe “all of our choices are remnants of all the choices we made before. As if decisions were shards from the bombs of our previous actions.” And perhaps our personalities are determined by our environment: “we are determined by our landscape . . . our lives are decided by the hills and the rivers and the trees.”
All the rave reviews I’ve read inevitably refer to the lyrical style of the book as one of its outstanding elements. The style is indeed lyrical with much reliance on imagery. I did enjoy the playfulness with language. Sarah and Gretel invented a language of their own: “sheesh time meant . . . some time alone. A harpiedoodle was a small annoyance . . . Something comfortable or enjoyable, often soft or warm, was duvduv . . . effie meant the current was faster as in the water was effing along or effying along the banks; that sills was the noise the river made at night and grear the taste of it in the morning.” My issue is that lyrical writing is not in itself sufficient; more is needed to sustain the narrative.
I enjoy re-tellings of myths but I didn’t find this one worked. I found it difficult to believe that a teenager living at the end of the 20th century would unquestioningly believe a neighbour who tells her that she will kill her father and have sex with her mother. Then there’s the problem of the author’s being selective about what parts of the myth to incorporate. In addition, elements of the Hansel and Gretel fairy tale are added to muddy the waters.
This is obviously not the book for me. The constant ambiguity was by design but was just too much for me. To continue my river analogy, at times I felt as if I’d been thrown into the murky water and was drowning. Someone with more of a Type B personality might enjoy the novel, but it was a struggle for me.
Please check out my reader's blog (https://schatjesshelves.blogspot.com/) and follow me on Twitter (@DCYakabuski).
I just couldn't get into this books. It just felt confusing. Unfortunately I did not finish
“The places we are born come back to us. They disguise themselves as words, memory loss, nightmares. They are the way we sometimes wake with a pressure on our chests that is animal-like or turn on a light and see someone we'd thought was long gone standing there looking at us.” - Everything Under, Daisy Johnson
An unexpected phone call leads Gretel to the mother who abandoned her when she was sixteen years old. Now a lexicographer, Gretel has buried the memories of her unusual childhood in her work of providing stable, numbered definitions of words. But the reappearance of her mother forces other pieces of her past to the surface: an isolated upbringing on a canal boat; the created words and language they shared; the strange, lonely boy whose entry in their lives brought unforeseen danger; and a creature in the water, always swimming upstream, always in pursuit. To understand herself, the only place Gretel can go is back.
The language of Johnson's retelling of Oedipus Rex is unstable, shifting, and murky, the boundaries between the real and the created intentionally blurred. The tragedy feels just as embedded in myth and prophecy as it does contemporary traumas. How can someone not know their child? Blindness, age, abandonment, disguise, psychosis, depression, Alzheimer's... the story felt mystical and possible all at once. Like Oedipus, Everything Under argues that we create our worst fears but the question of whether or not we are bound to fate remains unclear. In the murkiness of the language, I occasionally had difficulty following what was happening (or not happening) in a way that detracted from the story for me. And because a myth retelling prescribes certain plot points, I felt that elements of surprise and emotional connection were lost in the confusion of stumbling between obscured and known.
An unexpected phone call leads Gretel to the mother who abandoned her when she was sixteen years old. Now a lexicographer, Gretel has buried the memories of her unusual childhood in her work of providing stable, numbered definitions of words. But the reappearance of her mother forces other pieces of her past to the surface: an isolated upbringing on a canal boat; the created words and language they shared; the strange, lonely boy whose entry in their lives brought unforeseen danger; and a creature in the water, always swimming upstream, always in pursuit. To understand herself, the only place Gretel can go is back.
The language of Johnson's retelling of Oedipus Rex is unstable, shifting, and murky, the boundaries between the real and the created intentionally blurred. The tragedy feels just as embedded in myth and prophecy as it does contemporary traumas. How can someone not know their child? Blindness, age, abandonment, disguise, psychosis, depression, Alzheimer's... the story felt mystical and possible all at once. Like Oedipus, Everything Under argues that we create our worst fears but the question of whether or not we are bound to fate remains unclear. In the murkiness of the language, I occasionally had difficulty following what was happening (or not happening) in a way that detracted from the story for me. And because a myth retelling prescribes certain plot points, I felt that elements of surprise and emotional connection were lost in the confusion of stumbling between obscured and known.
The youngest author ever nominated to the Booker shortlist. Younger than me... There goes my shot at the big time I guess.
My girlfriend LOVED Everything Under, read it in like a day, and insisted that I read it. I can see what there is to love about it but it wasn't for me. Daisy Johnson has boat-loads of potential though. Everything Under is very different to anything I've read before except possibly specific chapters from Philip Pullman starring his Gyptian characters. Flitting between past and present, centred on liveaboards (boat people) living on Great Britain's lock system, Everything Under has its very own sort of is-this-meant-to-be-real-or-psychological magic realism that definitely leaves the reader wondering right to the end.
The strongest aspect of the story is its language. Daisy Johnson is one of those scary writers who seems to have swallowed the dictionary to the extent that she can define, dismantle, and distort words and their meanings effortlessly which, when combined with a large number of invented words, allows her to build a world entirely her own despite it supposedly being the same one we all live in. She also has a strong sense of the sinister and has the ability to give the reader a powerful feeling of unease seemingly at will.
Everything Under was probably too good, and too original, for three stars right up to its grand finale. Without giving anything away, the book waits right until the very end to resolve all that it's been building towards since the beginning and that resolution just left me frustrated. Many writers struggle in this regard, Stephen King is famously bad at writing endings and this is nowhere near as bad as some of his attempts at resolution... The more complicated your path to the end of your narrative is the more you're left with to resolve and Everything Under's resolution just left me grinding my teeth. It wasn't wrong or bad in any objective way. I just felt frustrated by it. It's definitely a book worth trying. You may love it; I didn't.
My girlfriend LOVED Everything Under, read it in like a day, and insisted that I read it. I can see what there is to love about it but it wasn't for me. Daisy Johnson has boat-loads of potential though. Everything Under is very different to anything I've read before except possibly specific chapters from Philip Pullman starring his Gyptian characters. Flitting between past and present, centred on liveaboards (boat people) living on Great Britain's lock system, Everything Under has its very own sort of is-this-meant-to-be-real-or-psychological magic realism that definitely leaves the reader wondering right to the end.
The strongest aspect of the story is its language. Daisy Johnson is one of those scary writers who seems to have swallowed the dictionary to the extent that she can define, dismantle, and distort words and their meanings effortlessly which, when combined with a large number of invented words, allows her to build a world entirely her own despite it supposedly being the same one we all live in. She also has a strong sense of the sinister and has the ability to give the reader a powerful feeling of unease seemingly at will.
Everything Under was probably too good, and too original, for three stars right up to its grand finale. Without giving anything away, the book waits right until the very end to resolve all that it's been building towards since the beginning and that resolution just left me frustrated. Many writers struggle in this regard, Stephen King is famously bad at writing endings and this is nowhere near as bad as some of his attempts at resolution... The more complicated your path to the end of your narrative is the more you're left with to resolve and Everything Under's resolution just left me grinding my teeth. It wasn't wrong or bad in any objective way. I just felt frustrated by it. It's definitely a book worth trying. You may love it; I didn't.