Reviews

Keynotes by Mary Bright

jastato's review

2.0

I genuinely feel so bad for rating this so low because it honestly was not bad. It had great messages and themes, and there were lines here and there that really did hit. But I think I’m just generally not a fan of this modernist style of writing. I can see why people would compare this to Woolf; the writing is indeed very stream-of-conscious, and, in my opinion, very tedious and long-winded. It’s full of long paragraphs with, again, in my opinion, very repetitive and unimportant descriptions. As I was reading, all I was wondering was ‘Why? Why? I do not see the point?’ I felt like the writing really detracted from the whole message, but it could just be that I do not understand modernist literature. I was really going to give this the benefit of the doubt, but I got to the last part and was at a point where I flipped to the next page to see how much longer this would go and when I realised it was more and more of that tedious descriptive writing, I legitimately grunted and found myself very annoyed. Is it dramatic to say I was on the verge of tears? But I basically skimmed through it all after that. Overall, the stories didn’t really have the cohesion I like to see in more contemporary works but I’ll blame that on the times. The first and fourth stories were probably my favourites (and by that I feel only neutral about them, perhaps a little thoughtfulness, only a little), but otherwise my net feelings for the collection were negative. If you like modern literature, akin to Woolf, you may like this(?) but it’s not for the likes of folks like me.