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emotional
reflective
sad
slow-paced
It feels terrible to rate a book poorly. It feels even worse to rate a memoir poorly. It feels perhaps the worst to poorly rate a memoir about a tragic personal event that most of us cannot fathom. However, we must consider what distinguishes a memoir from a diary. I've concluded that a diary is a means to work through one's feelings, while a memoir is a recollection of an event or events in one's life to establish a specific narrative. This book does not resemble a memoir in structure at all, in my opinion; it reads more like a private project assigned in therapy to work through grief.
I can respect that grief, perhaps, never has a conclusion; if the writer was better at making that point, I think I would rate this much higher. Instead, what the author presents is a list of memories, but the memories she shares do not draw us closer to a point, nor is the writing conscious enough to be making a "grief has no point" statement. The writing is clunky at best, with very little natural flow. It staggers and repeats itself; the author staggers and repeats herself, too, which makes much more sense, and I wouldn't discredit that. However, that doesn't mean that the writing also has to.
Even if the way she recalls her memories was done in a more intentional way -- a section dedicated to home, a section dedicated to Sri Lanka, a section devoted to abroad, for example -- I would have enjoyed this much more. Instead, the author organizes her chapters in the years following the wave. It seems intuitive, but it isn't. Instead, the reader jumps around as the author recalls her rich childhood, her days at Cambridge, and her days in Yala (which she talks about several times at several different ends of the book). It feels like very little effort was put into structuring the book.
I feel positive about a few points. The initial description of the wave's aftermath is harrowing. The early actions by the author that she describes could have led to a point about how grief makes us bad people -- she does some pretty awful things -- but the book drops that thread as soon as it starts unraveling. The concluding chapter has a beautiful passage about whales, but the final paragraphs fall flat and hardly like an ending.
But on the whole, it was difficult to get through this and to convince myself to read it, and not due to the sorrowful subject mater. I deeply feel for the author, but I wish I hadn't spent my time on this.
I can respect that grief, perhaps, never has a conclusion; if the writer was better at making that point, I think I would rate this much higher. Instead, what the author presents is a list of memories, but the memories she shares do not draw us closer to a point, nor is the writing conscious enough to be making a "grief has no point" statement. The writing is clunky at best, with very little natural flow. It staggers and repeats itself; the author staggers and repeats herself, too, which makes much more sense, and I wouldn't discredit that. However, that doesn't mean that the writing also has to.
Even if the way she recalls her memories was done in a more intentional way -- a section dedicated to home, a section dedicated to Sri Lanka, a section devoted to abroad, for example -- I would have enjoyed this much more. Instead, the author organizes her chapters in the years following the wave. It seems intuitive, but it isn't. Instead, the reader jumps around as the author recalls her rich childhood, her days at Cambridge, and her days in Yala (which she talks about several times at several different ends of the book). It feels like very little effort was put into structuring the book.
I feel positive about a few points. The initial description of the wave's aftermath is harrowing. The early actions by the author that she describes could have led to a point about how grief makes us bad people -- she does some pretty awful things -- but the book drops that thread as soon as it starts unraveling. The concluding chapter has a beautiful passage about whales, but the final paragraphs fall flat and hardly like an ending.
But on the whole, it was difficult to get through this and to convince myself to read it, and not due to the sorrowful subject mater. I deeply feel for the author, but I wish I hadn't spent my time on this.