A review by tyras_bookshelf
How High We Go in the Dark by Sequoia Nagamatsu

adventurous challenging dark emotional hopeful inspiring mysterious sad tense slow-paced
  • Plot- or character-driven? Plot
  • Strong character development? No
  • Loveable characters? Yes
  • Diverse cast of characters? Yes
  • Flaws of characters a main focus? No

3.5

Themes: grief, death, illness, love, existentialism , pandemic/plague 

My score of this book feels really complicated because I don’t think a 3.5 conveys how touched I was by the stories, even if I didn’t really like the book. Enjoying a book isn’t the basis of it being good by any means but I hesitate to rank something highly if I didn’t like it much. 

Focusing on two stories in particular-Through the Garden of Memory and The Scope of Possibility- these were incredibly creative and emotional. I give these separate stories each a 4 because I would recommend and reread them as short stories. That said, I didn’t like the others enough to warrant a 4 for the whole book. 

Many of the stories felt disjointed. They were all written as short stories since 2013 that were combined so that underscores my point. I’m glad Nagamatsu wove them together with characters that crossed over into each story unlike other books I’ve read with this similarly approach but I felt they lacked true cohesion as one book. 

That said, I have so many thoughts so the following is me basically live tweeting the book as I read it. Skip to the end if you don’t wanna read my brain dump. 

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Interesting how Clara spins being away from her daughter; her negligence seems fueled by this idea of grandeur and importance in her work (now that I’ve finished the book, this makes a lot of sense). 

I wonder if we’ll get into Yumi’s origin, Clara likely didn’t want to be a mom (how wrong I was). 

Really big philosophical questions  about global community; Clara at a young age is already consumed by the ills of the world and her responsibility to bear witness to tragedy. 

I think the chapter with the darkness and the bubble memories is my favorite (Through the Garden of Memory). I really really like how he conceptualized memory and death and this sort of limbo of the afterlife. I also love/hate how vague and ambiguous the ending of that chapter was because that feels encompassing of my understanding of death. I thought it was really interesting too how Nagamatsu illustrates all of those people that have died the same way, and have ended up in the same sort of ether, a place/non-place, because it feels symbolic of connection through tragedy. I can imagine like people having died of a mass tragedy all at once ending up in the same place together still so tied to each other.

Pig son is freaky, and perverse and kind of precious because this pig is essentially a child. And also kind of makes me think that the baby from the ether/memory garden ended up in a pig body or something. (The audio section of this part of the book also made me nauseous. The voice actor was great but the pig man sounded absolutely retched) 

Interesting how money is still so prevalent in this post-disease society. The whole book is freaky and sci-fy heavy which feels at times too close to impossibility to be realistic (not that it has to be because this is fiction after-all) but then Nagamatsu connects some element of culture or humanness or capitalism that grounds the story in realness again. 

Similar to The Candy house and Cloud Cuckoo Land which I also had complicated feelings about. 

Really kind of bored around the space travel chapter. It was just talking about the grandmother and the daughter and I didn’t find much to be challenging/interesting in that chapter as it played out. Although I was really happy to see that a cure was created, and that the world is rebuilding itself (this felt needed and hopeful). 

I think the biggest unbelievable aspect of that storyline, though, and maybe this is my own cynicism, is that corporations would be focused at all on healing the planet is laughable. It’s lovely that Nagamatsu could picture a world where humanity and our survival was more important than profits, but even in his story currency still exists, and there were still the messages of classism throughout the book. 

6,000 years!? But what’s time really without a connection to the sun? How do you watch the years pass in your own body without something to tether it to? 

Meloncholy Nights in a Tokyo Cyber Cafe seemed like a regression in the line of the story but also maybe symbolic of peoples complacency, and a striving to “ return to normalcy” in the face of the world literally ending. Not unlike how we treated Covid, which made it very uncomfortable social commentary.
I did think it was a weird choice for that story to be in third person and I’m still working through the symbols there, but it felt odd and took me out of the story.

Then, also, Akira’s naivety and the sheer amount of ego it takes to think that you can convince someone not to end their life because you’re suddenly in love with them is baffling. He met this woman in Su**ide pact virtual arena and is surprised that she actually wants to unalive herself and not stick around for a romance that was one-sided. 

The story dragged for a while near the middle. 

Claire was an alien/space being/deity(?) the whole time?! That makes a lot of sense as to why she was so distant and so focused on saving the planet. There was also an element of guilt there that we didn’t know about. That’s a really cool twist. 
——

Again, now that I know the ending, Clara’s behavior is so clear. I guess that was foreshadowing. I liked being surprised by the ending but I also think the story would have been so much better to follow Clara as the thread of each story and understand her motivation more. 

I could have read an entire book alone about the red planet with the killer insects and I think that would’ve been a really cool story. I think all the stories are sort of interesting, but that honestly, Nagamatsu was just doing too much with this whole thing. 
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