noaregine 's review for:

Red Clocks by Leni Zumas

5.0

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This is The Single Best Book I've Read This Year. Except maybe Poor Things. I've read a lot of reviews saying it was pretentious. I don't agree. But maybe that only means I'm a little pretentious too (but does that really surprise anyone?). I think that's because of the style, but the style is one of the things I loved about it. The jumpy thoughts, the lyricalness, the far-removed-from, the very-realistic-still, the ommission. Mostly the ommission. The characters ommited their own names, only thought of themselves as the one part of them they knew the best, they were ommitted grammatically as subject of their own sentences, ommited from public opinion, politics, history. This book was terrifying. It's speculative, but you forget that. It's terrifying to realise that just like in real life, bystanders tend to forget to care about laws and changes that affect others directly and the society and history as a whole. It's a confronting reminder to care and it's a confronting read in general, about autonomy, authority over your own body, and how history repeats itself. Please read this for its raw honesties, please don't think it's pretentious.