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nghia 's review for:
Swallowing Mercury
by Wioletta Greg
I admit that I have a probably irrational dislike of "memoirs of the author's childhood in a unique time & place that no longer exist" style of books. Even setting that aside, I found this hard to connect with because of its fragmented and somewhat repetitive approach.
This is a lightly fictionalized memoir of growing up in a poor, rural village in communist Poland in the late 1970s to early 1980s. It is told in 23 short vignettes that span a decade of the young girl's life (approximately age 6-16, I think). The vignettes have no connection to one another. You could read them out of order and it wouldn't affect your understanding of context or theme or anything. You can even skip half of them and it wouldn't matter. This highly fragmented nature is the main reason for my low rating.
This isn't a book of high drama and the vignettes never have very high stakes. They are more like the stories that families tell themselves over the dinner table. "Remember that one time Gienek got drunk and fell in the ditch? Yeah, good times." Or "remember that one time I went to catch May Flies but then came down with chicken pox? Childhood, am I right?"
I can actually dig that kind of small slice-of-life storytelling and Greg does give us a window into a different world -- small-town communist Poland is probably pretty different from where most of us grew up! But each of the vignettes -- few of them more than 2-3 pages long -- feels more like a prose poem, making the book feel almost like a poetry collection than a work of fiction.
In an of itself that isn't a bad thing and clearly some reviewers loved that approach. But there's a certain stylistic repetitiveness to them that wore me down. Individual characters appear in a single vignette and then are never mentioned again. Worse: virtually all of the vignettes end abruptly without closure or really going anywhere. Example: In "The Dressmaker's Secret" her mom has come into possession of some fancy fabric so she has to go to the village dressmaker several times for fittings. One time she goes on the wrong day, on a Tuesday instead of a Wednesday, finds the front door ajar and enters without knocking. And stumbles onto an unexpected scene. The final words of the chapter:
I think I wouldn't have minded it so much if there were some variation but when every one of the vignettes ends abruptly like this, on a kind of unresolved cliff-hangery "and then what happened?!" thing it came across as just too forced for me.
In the final accounting my 1-star rating looks something like: 3-stars because I just found the disconnected style of the vignettes unsatisfying. Minus 1-star because of the absence of any real characters other than the narrator. Minus 1-star because of my irrational dislike of childhood memoirs.
This is a lightly fictionalized memoir of growing up in a poor, rural village in communist Poland in the late 1970s to early 1980s. It is told in 23 short vignettes that span a decade of the young girl's life (approximately age 6-16, I think). The vignettes have no connection to one another. You could read them out of order and it wouldn't affect your understanding of context or theme or anything. You can even skip half of them and it wouldn't matter. This highly fragmented nature is the main reason for my low rating.
This isn't a book of high drama and the vignettes never have very high stakes. They are more like the stories that families tell themselves over the dinner table. "Remember that one time Gienek got drunk and fell in the ditch? Yeah, good times." Or "remember that one time I went to catch May Flies but then came down with chicken pox? Childhood, am I right?"
I can actually dig that kind of small slice-of-life storytelling and Greg does give us a window into a different world -- small-town communist Poland is probably pretty different from where most of us grew up! But each of the vignettes -- few of them more than 2-3 pages long -- feels more like a prose poem, making the book feel almost like a poetry collection than a work of fiction.
In an of itself that isn't a bad thing and clearly some reviewers loved that approach. But there's a certain stylistic repetitiveness to them that wore me down. Individual characters appear in a single vignette and then are never mentioned again. Worse: virtually all of the vignettes end abruptly without closure or really going anywhere. Example: In "The Dressmaker's Secret" her mom has come into possession of some fancy fabric so she has to go to the village dressmaker several times for fittings. One time she goes on the wrong day, on a Tuesday instead of a Wednesday, finds the front door ajar and enters without knocking. And stumbles onto an unexpected scene. The final words of the chapter:
The dressmaker was sitting on the bed, half-naked, rocking rhythmically on top of a rag-filled dummy dressed in a man’s suit.
I think I wouldn't have minded it so much if there were some variation but when every one of the vignettes ends abruptly like this, on a kind of unresolved cliff-hangery "and then what happened?!" thing it came across as just too forced for me.
In the final accounting my 1-star rating looks something like: 3-stars because I just found the disconnected style of the vignettes unsatisfying. Minus 1-star because of the absence of any real characters other than the narrator. Minus 1-star because of my irrational dislike of childhood memoirs.