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“I began to perceive your colors in many things around me, and I started to feel that there might be some way out.”
I love Yashimoto's airiness in her work. In N.P It feels hazey, the way air changes around heat, magical and hallucinatory but still intensely human and mundane, like sitting around a fire watching it warp the air. Yoshimoto's novels always feel like a delicate balancing act, with a perfect mix of uncanniness and reality, strange and the sublime, and best of her work is able to handle all of these without ever tipping too much into either.
I enjoyed this novel, and it is well-balanced, but it wasn't perfect to me - I don't really understand Yashimoto's way of exploring incest in her novels, but this one dealt much more interestingly with the experiences of taboo relationships as well as depression and suicide, and also my ebook was messed up so I think it was less immersive (but that's my fault). Also I loved the idea of the translation acting as a curse, leading people to commit suicide, and that plot thread was dropped pretty quickly, so I would have enjoyed more exploration of that.
I love Yashimoto's airiness in her work. In N.P It feels hazey, the way air changes around heat, magical and hallucinatory but still intensely human and mundane, like sitting around a fire watching it warp the air. Yoshimoto's novels always feel like a delicate balancing act, with a perfect mix of uncanniness and reality, strange and the sublime, and best of her work is able to handle all of these without ever tipping too much into either.
I enjoyed this novel, and it is well-balanced, but it wasn't perfect to me - I don't really understand Yashimoto's way of exploring incest in her novels, but this one dealt much more interestingly with the experiences of taboo relationships as well as depression and suicide, and also my ebook was messed up so I think it was less immersive (but that's my fault). Also I loved the idea of the translation acting as a curse, leading people to commit suicide, and that plot thread was dropped pretty quickly, so I would have enjoyed more exploration of that.