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A review by mariya_g8
Crudo by Olivia Laing
fast-paced
2.5
My favourite quote: "I mean words, they're like paint, they're like Degas's apple-green ground. You take what you find, it's all material, I mean what is art if it's not plagiarising the world?"
The beginning of the story grabbed me all at once, the ending intrigued me, but I have no cle what happened in-between. I liked the time jumps, the shifts of perspectives, the punctuationally-unmarked dialogues as it felt like pieces of puzzle which places I had to find. There were numerous literary references as well as historical and political, which is a good way to place the story in a particular time period without telling. However, i believe that was something that didn't work for me as I didn't have the knowledge to decipher the references.
On a first glance, the story seems a pure chaos, but that chaos of thoughts happens in the head of the main character which underlines her attention span being very short and constantly jumping from one thought to another without warning. The punctuation at places is disrupted, which implies the idea of rushed writing without proofreading, again underlining a lack of attention or rawnes.
The narrator seems to be Kathy herself, switching between talking from 1st person perspective to observing herself. However, sometimes, it seems as if the narrator gets into the head of the people around Kathy and expose their thoughts (again because of the lack of quotation marks to signify direct speech)
Overall, I see the idea and it's an interesting one. The constant jumps kept my attention, which is like Kathy's (very short and always roaming). Despite that, I feel nothing got into my head, which lead to confusion at the end. I believe I missed a significant portion of information as I couldn't understand why she would never come back to England. I may be completely wrong, but having the information from the previous pages that she used to have cancer alongside feeling unwell in the last dozen of pages, I guess she died in America and she was expecting this outcome as she gathered all of her stuff before her flight.
Maybe if I had more knowledge about Kathy Acker and her works, or about Olivia Liang's works and life, I might have enjoyed the book much more, but reading it without any of the aforementioned knowledge I was purely lost.
The beginning of the story grabbed me all at once, the ending intrigued me, but I have no cle what happened in-between. I liked the time jumps, the shifts of perspectives, the punctuationally-unmarked dialogues as it felt like pieces of puzzle which places I had to find. There were numerous literary references as well as historical and political, which is a good way to place the story in a particular time period without telling. However, i believe that was something that didn't work for me as I didn't have the knowledge to decipher the references.
On a first glance, the story seems a pure chaos, but that chaos of thoughts happens in the head of the main character which underlines her attention span being very short and constantly jumping from one thought to another without warning. The punctuation at places is disrupted, which implies the idea of rushed writing without proofreading, again underlining a lack of attention or rawnes.
The narrator seems to be Kathy herself, switching between talking from 1st person perspective to observing herself. However, sometimes, it seems as if the narrator gets into the head of the people around Kathy and expose their thoughts (again because of the lack of quotation marks to signify direct speech)
Overall, I see the idea and it's an interesting one. The constant jumps kept my attention, which is like Kathy's (very short and always roaming). Despite that, I feel nothing got into my head, which lead to confusion at the end.
Maybe if I had more knowledge about Kathy Acker and her works, or about Olivia Liang's works and life, I might have enjoyed the book much more, but reading it without any of the aforementioned knowledge I was purely lost.