Scan barcode
A review by xjuliaaaaaax
Elsewhere by Alexis Schaitkin
dark
emotional
reflective
medium-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? A mix
- Strong character development? Yes
5.0
This book had me crying when I finished it. If you enjoyed the Memory Police by Yoko Ogawa, i think you’d like this (and vice versa).
For me this book was about the way parents and children never seem to understand one another, and the bittersweet love that is still strong between them.
The narrative has a circularity to it, which I enjoyed.
<spoilers>
I like that the clouds and the disappearances are never fully explained. It’s not clear if all the women who vanish truly fake their dissolution and just left, or if some really do vanish. And how the clouds seem to be a metaphor for the toxicity of motherhood, how everyone including mothers is constantly monitoring their behavior, and looking for signs. The mothers always find a reason for a vanishing, if they didn’t, it been mean there is no reason and it would be too frightening. But since they create reasons, there’s theoretically some way to avoid the dissolution, which only a good mother is capable of. The pressure of this toxicity leads our main character to leave her child before she disappears so she can at least exist in the same world with her. Only after doing so and returning does she see her life with new eyes. The town she thought was so beautiful, the food so good, was only like that because she’d known nothing else, and she now knows mothers don’t have to disappear, but choose to because they’re afraid of being bad mothers. They’d rather be absent than bad. The town however loves its martyrs, reveres them even as it forgets them entirely. And the town has to forget, because it would be too painful for them to acknowledge the abandonment and their part in it.
In our protagonist we see the full cycle, her joyful and naive childhood; seeking understanding from the stranger-her mother; rejecting her mother who she cannot understand and therefore cannot possibly understand her/them; becoming a mother herself and experiencing both love and fear of this status; leaving the child out of that love-fear; returning and deeply understanding the child but being rejected for the knowledge she has that the child cannot imagine; wondering if her own child will learn the truth as she becomes a mother.
It’s truly heartbreaking, the physical distance representing the emotional distance that can occur even between a mother and child living together in the same house. </spoilers>
For me this book was about the way parents and children never seem to understand one another, and the bittersweet love that is still strong between them.
The narrative has a circularity to it, which I enjoyed.
<spoilers>
I like that the clouds and the disappearances are never fully explained. It’s not clear if all the women who vanish truly fake their dissolution and just left, or if some really do vanish. And how the clouds seem to be a metaphor for the toxicity of motherhood, how everyone including mothers is constantly monitoring their behavior, and looking for signs. The mothers always find a reason for a vanishing, if they didn’t, it been mean there is no reason and it would be too frightening. But since they create reasons, there’s theoretically some way to avoid the dissolution, which only a good mother is capable of. The pressure of this toxicity leads our main character to leave her child before she disappears so she can at least exist in the same world with her. Only after doing so and returning does she see her life with new eyes. The town she thought was so beautiful, the food so good, was only like that because she’d known nothing else, and she now knows mothers don’t have to disappear, but choose to because they’re afraid of being bad mothers. They’d rather be absent than bad. The town however loves its martyrs, reveres them even as it forgets them entirely. And the town has to forget, because it would be too painful for them to acknowledge the abandonment and their part in it.
In our protagonist we see the full cycle, her joyful and naive childhood; seeking understanding from the stranger-her mother; rejecting her mother who she cannot understand and therefore cannot possibly understand her/them; becoming a mother herself and experiencing both love and fear of this status; leaving the child out of that love-fear; returning and deeply understanding the child but being rejected for the knowledge she has that the child cannot imagine; wondering if her own child will learn the truth as she becomes a mother.
It’s truly heartbreaking, the physical distance representing the emotional distance that can occur even between a mother and child living together in the same house. </spoilers>
Content Warnings
Moderate: Sexual assault