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A review by deea_bks
Ducks, Newburyport by Lucy Ellmann
5.0
4.5*
If you were to present the world of today (more specifically than that, America of today) to a person who has no idea about it, how would you do it?
Lucy Ellmann would say that you would definitely mention the Trumps and other ex presidents, environmental issues, the endangerment of animal species, some historical facts, you would repeat some things more than twice or three times as, remember, you are not talking to a connoisseur, you would mention guns and probably mass killings and you would intersperse media headlines between your trains of thoughts as, aren’t they interrupting us and influencing us all the time no matter what we do or wherever we look?
If you were also trying to convey the spirit of the present and not only a fairly objective idea of what an American is dealing with daily, how would you do it? How would you best convey the ever-present anxiety and today’s cacophony of information overload that would be able to make the person you are presenting this to understand the realities you are talking about as if he/she were experiencing them first-hand?
Well, Lucy Ellmann would say that you would present things in such a way so as to seem unfiltered by any norms or moral filters, exactly as they are running incessantly through your head, in a stream of consciousness that seems to go nowhere and everywhere at the same time. And since you are a human being and all human beings have mundane worries to deal with all the time and also traumas, you would also add them to the concoction.
You would mix everything in a hotchpotch of facts and ideas brought up by using “the fact that” and either continued or abandoned whenever the next “the fact that” is used again and then brought up again and again and… again by the same “the fact that” in other forms or contexts. This seems tiring like hell, I know, and at the beginning I was put off a bit by this (and by the length of this book!!!) as well and I became quite impatient with reading “the fact that” like thirty times per page or so. I got used to it rather fast though or simply began to ignore the damned “the fact that” as we often stop paying attention to anything that is “so present” and managed to really enjoy the book. And from that point on, it didn’t seem long at all anymore.
I will for sure miss “hearing” the main character’s voice talking on and on and on about what’s wrong with the world today (issues that are frequently running through my head as well) and seeing how she randomly connects one fact with another or one headline with one of her worries in a really amusing way. I’ll also miss “hearing” about Babar (I thought no one else had ever seen this cartoon but me, so thank you Lucy Ellman for having proved me wrong!), about how she thinks “12 Angry Men” is rather corny but she still likes it in spite of that, about how she thinks that her best friend is actually a Prepper and tries to understand the concept and about how she calls her behind “my sit-me-down upon” over and over and over again.
This is not really written like a novel (it is a 1022 pages long stream of consciousness with only one full stop (at the end), disregarding the short fragments about the lioness), but it is fresh, the ideas are interesting and it reads like an enormous (jigsaw?!) puzzle - the main character is a bit obsessed with jigsaw puzzles. The ending failed a bit to convince me as I found it a bit too sentimental (this is why the 4.5* and not 5*), but this was quite a good read alright.
If you were to present the world of today (more specifically than that, America of today) to a person who has no idea about it, how would you do it?
Lucy Ellmann would say that you would definitely mention the Trumps and other ex presidents, environmental issues, the endangerment of animal species, some historical facts, you would repeat some things more than twice or three times as, remember, you are not talking to a connoisseur, you would mention guns and probably mass killings and you would intersperse media headlines between your trains of thoughts as, aren’t they interrupting us and influencing us all the time no matter what we do or wherever we look?
If you were also trying to convey the spirit of the present and not only a fairly objective idea of what an American is dealing with daily, how would you do it? How would you best convey the ever-present anxiety and today’s cacophony of information overload that would be able to make the person you are presenting this to understand the realities you are talking about as if he/she were experiencing them first-hand?
Well, Lucy Ellmann would say that you would present things in such a way so as to seem unfiltered by any norms or moral filters, exactly as they are running incessantly through your head, in a stream of consciousness that seems to go nowhere and everywhere at the same time. And since you are a human being and all human beings have mundane worries to deal with all the time and also traumas, you would also add them to the concoction.
You would mix everything in a hotchpotch of facts and ideas brought up by using “the fact that” and either continued or abandoned whenever the next “the fact that” is used again and then brought up again and again and… again by the same “the fact that” in other forms or contexts. This seems tiring like hell, I know, and at the beginning I was put off a bit by this (and by the length of this book!!!) as well and I became quite impatient with reading “the fact that” like thirty times per page or so. I got used to it rather fast though or simply began to ignore the damned “the fact that” as we often stop paying attention to anything that is “so present” and managed to really enjoy the book. And from that point on, it didn’t seem long at all anymore.
I will for sure miss “hearing” the main character’s voice talking on and on and on about what’s wrong with the world today (issues that are frequently running through my head as well) and seeing how she randomly connects one fact with another or one headline with one of her worries in a really amusing way. I’ll also miss “hearing” about Babar (I thought no one else had ever seen this cartoon but me, so thank you Lucy Ellman for having proved me wrong!), about how she thinks “12 Angry Men” is rather corny but she still likes it in spite of that, about how she thinks that her best friend is actually a Prepper and tries to understand the concept and about how she calls her behind “my sit-me-down upon” over and over and over again.
This is not really written like a novel (it is a 1022 pages long stream of consciousness with only one full stop (at the end), disregarding the short fragments about the lioness), but it is fresh, the ideas are interesting and it reads like an enormous (jigsaw?!) puzzle - the main character is a bit obsessed with jigsaw puzzles. The ending failed a bit to convince me as I found it a bit too sentimental (this is why the 4.5* and not 5*), but this was quite a good read alright.