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3.57 AVERAGE
3.57 AVERAGE
I know that this is supposed to be an admired novel but was never enjoyable for me. Perhaps if I could have just sat down and read it straight through then I might have enjoyed it a bit more. However, it was just an unpleasant slog. I was often confused on which character was the focus of a chapter. I often got lost within paragraphs and didn't know of whom the author was speaking. Therefore, I constantly had to stop and reread. This makes me really dislike a book. One back up and reread is ok but not repeatedly. I also felt that the book had WAY too much extra stuff and events that didn't do anything to enhance the story or characters. The only significant plot detail was based on Oedipus Rex so that was hardly revealing although I felt as if Johnson was trying to make the reader guess the terrible fate or Marcus/Margot. Why not just get this plot device out in the open in the first place and focus on the story about the characters instead? It felt overly contrived. I am very excited to move on to another book as I wasted too much time on it hoping for more from this one. I must follow George Higgins's rule - give it 40 pages and then quit it.
I tried to like this book, but it's Boring. I thought this would be I horror story, or at least a supernatural thriller. The only interesting moments is the dysfunctional relationship between Gretal and her unstable mother. I gave up around page 73, so maybe the book will get better. This is when the author starts introduing a new character out of nowhere, but at this point I stopped caring about the protagonist
This book is so different from anything I’ve ever read before. I found it completely riveting, spellbinding even. Utterly readable, desperately dark, beautifully written, it has this incredible feeling of trapping you in a whirlpool- you know that you're being sucked round and round to an inevitably awful conclusion but you can’t quite see what that is and have to keep reading. And the water analogy is deliberate since water is everywhere and essential to this story. The character building is so good and plot twists left me gasping. Read it.
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.