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A review by novabird
The Book of Dahlia by Elisa Albert
4.0
This is a veiled argument with the theme of, “Who deserves life.” An enraged Dahlia almost completely full of invectives is shown with a strong anti-optimistic outlook. This is a hard to read book of ‘reckoning,’ focused on an unsympathetic character struck by a terminal brain tumor. Dahlia is traumatically wounded by paper cuts of slightly adverse childhood experiences. She is nihilistic without the philosophical grounding. She is via negative without much range. She is consciously narcissistic and developmentally arrested naïve. Basically, she is not a very likeable person.
Albert provides Dahlia’s ‘reckoning,’ replete throughout with her bright, cynical, perspective, that rejects what the majority think of what is acceptable behaviour. Yet, she also gives us the barest threads of Dahlia’s connected humanity to bead the necklace of Dahlia’s life meaning together:
“And in light of recent developments, Dahlia wanted just this: to be treated with gruff benevolence by paper hatted old men who had valiantly held out against corporate, money-shilling mall makers, whose operation in the shadow of said huge mall was unchanging and could be counted on indefinitely. It was a small victory, a righteous mainstay in a world overtaken, block by block, inevitably, by malls.”
“She loved the thought of being a capable professional, of talking someone out of a heroin relapse, of being the only person who not flinch at the deepest, darkest reaches of others.”
“She’s had a nice run of things … genuine laughter.”
“She had nothing to do for a whole month but take a big, deep cosmic breath.”
“Pain held meaning.”
“Grief is the price we pay for love, it seems, and we’re all some mysterious payment plan.”
“Hanging out in the ether, brutally, deeply aware.”
“The Book of Dahlia,” almost stands in for an argument against the death penalty, if one were to extend the argument about who deserves life.
This hurt to read, more so than graphic violence or direct appeals to my empathic core, because it made me think about ‘values,’ and at first it put me in a down mood. Because of its power to get under my skin and question my biases, this almost gets a five. Not because, this was an uplifting work, but because it was an enlightening one.
Albert provides Dahlia’s ‘reckoning,’ replete throughout with her bright, cynical, perspective, that rejects what the majority think of what is acceptable behaviour. Yet, she also gives us the barest threads of Dahlia’s connected humanity to bead the necklace of Dahlia’s life meaning together:
“And in light of recent developments, Dahlia wanted just this: to be treated with gruff benevolence by paper hatted old men who had valiantly held out against corporate, money-shilling mall makers, whose operation in the shadow of said huge mall was unchanging and could be counted on indefinitely. It was a small victory, a righteous mainstay in a world overtaken, block by block, inevitably, by malls.”
“She loved the thought of being a capable professional, of talking someone out of a heroin relapse, of being the only person who not flinch at the deepest, darkest reaches of others.”
“She’s had a nice run of things … genuine laughter.”
“She had nothing to do for a whole month but take a big, deep cosmic breath.”
“Pain held meaning.”
“Grief is the price we pay for love, it seems, and we’re all some mysterious payment plan.”
“Hanging out in the ether, brutally, deeply aware.”
“The Book of Dahlia,” almost stands in for an argument against the death penalty, if one were to extend the argument about who deserves life.
“It doesn’t matter how vile or messy, or lazy or spoiled or fucked-up she was. Life is still Life. And either that’s meaningful all the time or it’s meaningful none of the time, schmuck; no qualifying. No picking, no choosing. It either matters or it doesn’t. Life has value or life does not have value: one or the other.
This hurt to read, more so than graphic violence or direct appeals to my empathic core, because it made me think about ‘values,’ and at first it put me in a down mood. Because of its power to get under my skin and question my biases, this almost gets a five. Not because, this was an uplifting work, but because it was an enlightening one.