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A review by bhnmt61
The Swimmers by Julie Otsuka
3.0
This short novel is unusual enough to be an interesting read, but ultimately the innovative voice wasn’t enough to overcome my reservations. The Swimmers starts by describing in detail the experience of a group of people who are regular swimmers at an indoor pool. It’s told in first person plural, meaning that the group of swimmers is telling the story (We do this, we do that, we like it when….).
At the moment, I can only remember one other novel I’ve read that uses this technique (The Mothers by Brit Bennett), and in both cases it sort of works. It’s unusual enough that it catches my attention and raises my hopes that what is coming is something truly innovative—which isn’t exactly the case.
In this novel, I found it engaging and absorbing at first as Otsuka uses the group voice to describe all the reasons people might swim, what you can know about them from the way they swim, how they interact with each other, what happens when they meet outside the pool, and so on. Several times I found myself thinking, wow, how did she think of all this?
But it soon fell into an unvarying rhythm of piling up of specific details that seems to be my pet peeve in reading right now. You could read the first few sentences of a new section to find out what the topic was, and then skip to the next section, without really missing anything (although I didn’t, I read the whole thing).
If you like a plot, this is definitely not the book for you. Not much happens. It is sometimes endearing and even hilarious, but it is also sometimes tedious, and at some point the tedious bits start to outweigh the interest of the innovative voice.
The last third changes into the story of one of the swimmers who is experiencing dementia. I thought it might get better then, but once again the story is told by piling up details, paragraphs of them, and I just wasn’t interested. Also I am sixty, and dementia is a very present terror for me, so there’s that.
If you’re interested in seeing what a talented author can do with an unusual technique, this is a good book, and it’s short. But it didn’t really work for me. Proceed at your own risk.
At the moment, I can only remember one other novel I’ve read that uses this technique (The Mothers by Brit Bennett), and in both cases it sort of works. It’s unusual enough that it catches my attention and raises my hopes that what is coming is something truly innovative—which isn’t exactly the case.
In this novel, I found it engaging and absorbing at first as Otsuka uses the group voice to describe all the reasons people might swim, what you can know about them from the way they swim, how they interact with each other, what happens when they meet outside the pool, and so on. Several times I found myself thinking, wow, how did she think of all this?
But it soon fell into an unvarying rhythm of piling up of specific details that seems to be my pet peeve in reading right now. You could read the first few sentences of a new section to find out what the topic was, and then skip to the next section, without really missing anything (although I didn’t, I read the whole thing).
If you like a plot, this is definitely not the book for you. Not much happens. It is sometimes endearing and even hilarious, but it is also sometimes tedious, and at some point the tedious bits start to outweigh the interest of the innovative voice.
The last third changes into the story of one of the swimmers who is experiencing dementia. I thought it might get better then, but once again the story is told by piling up details, paragraphs of them, and I just wasn’t interested. Also I am sixty, and dementia is a very present terror for me, so there’s that.
If you’re interested in seeing what a talented author can do with an unusual technique, this is a good book, and it’s short. But it didn’t really work for me. Proceed at your own risk.