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A review by rencordings
Bitter in the Mouth by Monique Truong
3.0
I appreciate this book, but I don't love it. That is, I recognize the ambiguities that it leaves as potential sites for diverse interpretations and reconsideration of master narratives about family and Vietnamese adoptees (among many others - but these are the two that stand out to me). At the same time, I don't think the narrator lives up to the climax she promises, and rather than thirsting for more, I feel betrayed/disappointed.
In addition to the first-person narrative, Linda's lexical-gustatory synesthesia dominates, or rather, dictates, the way the story is told. So in addition to being a stream of consciousness, the narrative also reads like a postmodern fever stream of consciousness. Linda tells many stories, recounts endless significant events in her life, remembers the most insignificant of details of the people around her, but I don't feel any personality coming out from her at all. If her detachment is due to her fixation on retelling her world through her synesthesia and her fear of being misunderstood or outright rejected should she reveal her condition, then the more I am disappointed about the closure she gets regarding her synesthesia. I'm still not sure how big of a role it plays in her life; it seems that she reacts very strongly to being misunderstood as well as to the discovery of people with similar synesthesias, and at the same time, she also seems to live with her condition well enough. Except for her emotional development - which I also think is lackluster. She seems like a precocious kid, and when she talks about her past self, the hindsight remarks weaved in the narrative makes it even more as if she is born Yale-smart. Throughout the book she doesn't change at all. Still the same Murakami-esque prose and sensibility, the same represison, the same "I don't say what I want to say" level of maturity. The biggest revelation was probably her backstory, and even that doesn't have anything to do with her condition, her reconciliation with DeAnne, or her self-image. It's as if the entire novel is packed with red herrings that end up nowhere, with the ending randomly tying two threads together for that postmodern effect.
To be clear, I love the premise. I love every story thread in this book. I love the narrative voice, and the writing style. I just don't love the way they go together and unroll away from each other. Linda is too complicated, too smart, too self-aware for such an ambivalent ending.
In addition to the first-person narrative, Linda's lexical-gustatory synesthesia dominates, or rather, dictates, the way the story is told. So in addition to being a stream of consciousness, the narrative also reads like a postmodern fever stream of consciousness. Linda tells many stories, recounts endless significant events in her life, remembers the most insignificant of details of the people around her, but I don't feel any personality coming out from her at all. If her detachment is due to her fixation on retelling her world through her synesthesia and her fear of being misunderstood or outright rejected should she reveal her condition, then the more I am disappointed about the closure she gets regarding her synesthesia. I'm still not sure how big of a role it plays in her life; it seems that she reacts very strongly to being misunderstood as well as to the discovery of people with similar synesthesias, and at the same time, she also seems to live with her condition well enough. Except for her emotional development - which I also think is lackluster. She seems like a precocious kid, and when she talks about her past self, the hindsight remarks weaved in the narrative makes it even more as if she is born Yale-smart. Throughout the book she doesn't change at all. Still the same Murakami-esque prose and sensibility, the same represison, the same "I don't say what I want to say" level of maturity. The biggest revelation was probably her backstory, and even that doesn't have anything to do with her condition, her reconciliation with DeAnne, or her self-image. It's as if the entire novel is packed with red herrings that end up nowhere, with the ending randomly tying two threads together for that postmodern effect.
To be clear, I love the premise. I love every story thread in this book. I love the narrative voice, and the writing style. I just don't love the way they go together and unroll away from each other. Linda is too complicated, too smart, too self-aware for such an ambivalent ending.